Axe the Draxosaurus – On Wedesday twentieth April 2016 environmental activists protested exterior the AGM of Drax Plc at Grocer’s Corridor subsequent to the Financial institution of England within the coronary heart of the Metropolis of London. Drax energy station close to Selby in Yorkshire was the UK’s largest coal-fired energy station, however since 2012 has develop into the world’s largest wood-burning plant, and the corporate Drax Plc has develop into the second largest producer of wooden pellets on this planet
Drax energy station now emits extra CO2 than some other plant within the UK, and it does so with the help of an enormous subsidy from our UK electrical energy payments, nearly £1 billion in 2021.
It get subsidised by the UK Authorities as a part of the plan to decarbonise electrical energy technology regardless of the proof from scientists world wide that the burning of forest wooden for vitality will increase carbon emissions and is incompatible with the try to restrict international warming to 1.5°C.
The subsidies that Drax receives enhance our electrical energy payments and ought to be going to develop really renewable vitality sources akin to wind, wave and photo voltaic vitality. As a substitute they’re paying Drax to pollute and pay out massive dividends to their shareholders.
Sourcing the wooden to burn at Drax – and for them to promote to different wood-burning crops can be a social and environmental catastrophe. A lot of the wooden comes from Drax’s pellet mills utilizing massive mmonoculture pine plantations in Southeastern USA, massive sterile forest areas with little or no wildlife which have been expanded drastically in space, partially by the overall clearance of areas of historical forest.
Additionally within the USA, Drax buys pellets from Enviva, the world’s largest pellet producer which has come below criticism for its clearcut felling of US coastal hardwood forests.
Drax has additionally been criticised by environmentalists for its clear chopping of historical forests in Canada, and its Portuguese provider of pellets has been discovered to have sourced bushes from nature reserves. And logging for wooden pellets for Drax can be destroying historical forests in Estonia and Latvia.
The quantity of wooden burned at Drax is big – 6.4 million tonnes in 2022 – and may have concerned the chopping down of twice that mass of bushes. It’s greater than all the UK wooden manufacturing – however solely provides lower than one hundredth of our vitality wants.
Drax is now trying to say additional subsidies for its BECCS (Bioenergy With Carbon Seize And Storage) undertaking which appears not possible to have the ability to seize any vital quantity of its big annual CO2 output. It might clearly be much better merely to cease burning wooden and switch to really renewable energy sources.
The protest in 2016 was organised by Biofuelwatch on whose website you will discover extra an in depth briefing about Drax and why it’s vital to finish the subsidies for its polluting and environmentally damaging actions.
Yow will discover data on the Axe Drax web page concerning the trial of the #DRAX2 arrested after paint was sprayed on the federal government division supporting the subisdies to Drax – it begins at Southwark Crown Courtroom on April twenty second 2024. And on August 8-Thirteenth 2024 Reclaim the Energy is holding a mass protest camp for local weather justice “concentrating on Drax – the largest emitter within the UK, the world’s largest burner of bushes and a key driver of environmental racism.”
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