We know, or at least the more active green wing aware people do.

http://www.biofuelwatch.org.uk

I thought it was going to be about trashing air quality.

Not so much science, it's a business decision. The folks running big dirty coal plants needed a way to shoehorn their product into the new shiny carbon-averse world.

To be fair, shutting them overnight would have been too disruptive and importing biomass is unlikely to be worse than just burning coal. The risk is that the interim solution then becomes "business as usual".

Posted By: tonyBut burning biomas sis much worse than burning coal! Other countries get a down side, we get more traffic on more roads, we get more airborne pollution. We have to pay for it all.

Tell me the good bit

All of the above applies to coal too, Tony, plus it's carbon taken out of geological sequestration, which is always worse than using carbon that's already in the cycle.

There have been lots of attempts at nailing down all the external impact of various fuel cycles, and they vary somewhat in the actual figures produced, but all agree that coal is the worst of the bunch.

I see the pollution as far worse for biomass than for coal and there is more and more of it being used.

I would much rather reduce our use

I once asked is all CO2 equal or is some more equal than others? still asking that one.

Posted By: tonyI see the pollution as far worse for biomass than for coal

I know you don't like biomass on principle, but you should do yourself a favour and look at the actual numbers. Even the sources linked to in the OP (such as this: https://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/9/2/024007/article) show carbon emissions at least 50% lower when burning biomass compared to coal.

There are some reasonable grounds to oppose large-scale burning of imported biomass in UK coal plants, but the relative GWP of biomass to coal isn't one of them.

yes you can!

dont waste it in the first place

reuse it

recycle it

then as a last resort if you must burn it dont do it upwind of me.

Posted By: TriassicA new power station near me has just come on line and will burn 480,000 tonnes of refuse, bin waste, from Manchester. What a great idea, and it reduces landfill, can't get greener than that!

Posted By: tonydont waste it in the first place

reuse it

recycle it

then as a last resort if you must burn it

Waste (which means largely plastic hydrocarbon) is a much too precious resource to be incinerated. It should be stockpiled aka landfill until such time as virgin feedstock becomes scarce/expensive/unreliable enough to make quarrying the stockpile economic.

Present-day 'recycling' means taking the well-degraded waste and making it into something even more thermally degraded - like dumb massive decking planks - a far cry from the high-spec engineering plastics made from virgin feedstock.

To be useful in future as all-purpose substitute feedstock as the virgin supply dwindles, large energy input will be needed one way or another to break the complexifying chemical bonds which have locked the stuff into exothermically-exhausted state, and to restore it to pure high grade raw material for re-use.

That energy input obviously can't come from power stations etc or even from renewable generation (or from burning waste!), when the parallel imperative is to reduce global energy demand by 80%. It must come direct from the sun, via direct biological processing of the waste i.e. outside of the energy-as-commodity system. Large scale capture/use of the negative entropy, whose importation is perhaps the most fundamental characteristic of Life, aka dumping out into the cosmos of the positive entropy that life's activities (and even a routine lifeless planet) create.

In future we'll be saving every scrap of the material that's already circulating in 'the system', separating it by techniques that are already well under development and in use (led by the Aus mining industry I understand) right down to little bits of rare-earth/elements, inputting the necessary energy by biological means, so that drilling, quarrying and mining of the earth's virgin stores can be much reduced. The latter not just because of growing scarcity, but because of the pollution and devastation it involves.

It'll soon become a life-or-death priority, a race, to assist the planet to clear up the mess we've made, and to absolutely stop making more mess. The planet can do it unaided on a timescale of 10k or 100k years; we as a human race (and other life on earth) need it to happen on a timescale of 100s and 1k years.

So every thing we do, from nano-things and handheld products, through houses and cities to mega-infrastructure projects, must be designed to actively assist the planet (nature) in the clear-up, not merely to shave a few %age points off the rate of continuing accumulating damage (which is what 'sustainabilituy' has been perverted to mean at present).