How green is this? We pay billions of pounds to cut down ancient forests in the US and Canada, ship the wood across the Atlantic in diesel tankers, then burn it in a Yorkshire-based power station.
Welcome to the scandal of Drax, where Britain’s biggest polluter gets to play climate hero. The reality is that billions in public subsidies has enabled Drax to generate electricity by burning 300m trees. Now the government is trying to force through an extension that would grant Drax an estimated £1.8bn in public subsidies on top of the £11bn it has already pocketed, keeping this circus going until at least 2031.
This isn’t green energy. The mathematics alone should horrify anyone who cares about value for money or the environment. Burning wood creates 18% more CO2 emissions than coal. Even if you replant every tree Drax destroys, it takes up to a century for new growth to reabsorb the carbon released. We’re supposed to reach net zero by 2050, not 2125.
Yet through circus-trick accounting, all of Drax’s massive emissions magically disappear from Britain’s climate ledger. They’ve simply been wished away – counted as “zero”, while the company becomes our largest single contributor to climate breakdown.
Extraordinarily, this scandal unites opposition across the political spectrum. From the Greens to Reform, from the Morning Star to the Daily Telegraph, there’s rare consensus that Drax represents everything wrong with our approach to climate policy.
The Labour-dominated public accounts committee condemned Drax as a “white elephant” that’s been allowed to “mark its own homework” while claiming “billions upon billions” in subsidies. A Lords committee agreed, saying parliament needs to see key documents before approving any more funding.
I don’t agree with Ed Miliband on everything – we clearly have different views on nuclear power. I respect the energy secretary’s commitment to tackling climate crisis, and it is worth noting that the further subsidies are half of what was previously on offer for Drax. But that’s exactly why continuing to subsidise Drax at all is so disappointing.
When Miliband announced his plans to “ramp up” biomass burning back in 2009, he was genuinely trying to find alternatives to fossil fuels. But 16 years on, this policy has gone badly astray. What was meant to be a bridge to renewable energy is actually making emissions worse.
If, on Monday, the House of Lords votes to extend this unabated wood burning for another four years, what is to stop these subsidies being extended again and again? And why should the government deal with a firm as untrustworthy as Drax? Perhaps most damning is what Drax refuses to reveal. After the BBC’s devastating Panorama investigation into the company’s destruction of Canadian primary forests, Drax asked auditor KPMG to investigate, hoping for a clean bill of health. However, the evidence was so damning that the reports are still being hidden from the public.
If Drax has nothing to hide, why not publish these reports? A former top Treasury official turned whistleblower accused it of deliberately concealing unsustainable practices to secure subsidies. The case, now settled, raises questions of dishonesty that should disqualify any company from public funding.
The extra billions Drax is seeking could help build enough wind and solar capacity to power millions of homes. It could create permanent jobs in genuine renewable industries, not temporary employment destroying irreplaceable ecosystems. Every pound spent subsidising tree burning is a pound not invested in technologies that could actually deliver net zero. While other countries race ahead with wind, solar and battery storage, we’re burning money on the most primitive fuel known to humanity.
There’s a huge loophole in the government’s pledge to stop Drax burning trees from primary forest. Their restrictions on Drax only apply to subsidised electricity supplied to the grid. Drax wants to power private data centres but there is no plan that prevents it from destroying ancient forests to power 21st-century AI searches.
That means Drax could be cutting down even more primary forests than it does today. MPs have lost trust in the government’s ability to hold Drax to account – the criticism from parliamentary committees has been brutal.
The environmental movement didn’t fight to establish renewable energy so politicians could facilitate the burning of ancient forests that took millennia to grow. Real climate action means making hard choices, not hiding behind accounting tricks that make our emissions disappear on paper while making them worse in reality.
It is time for Labour MPs to speak up; the fight for net zero is hard enough. More subsidies for Drax’s wood burning in the name of sustainability is just more fuel on that fire.
Dale Vince is a green energy industrialist and campaigner
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