(CN) — It's the rave in Europe: Instead of burning coal and fossil fuels to generate heat and electricity, wood chips and pellets are being fed into Europe's boilers. In what critics consider a dangerous sleight-of-hand and act of political greenwashing, an updated set of European Union rules encourage the burning of wood in power plants and claim it's “carbon neutral” — meaning it won't add to the planet's warming — under the assumption that trees grow back.
This strategy plays a big part in the EU's plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The rules allow European governments to subsidize power plants to convert from burning coal and fossil fuels to burning wood. Across Europe, governments are under pressure to close coal-fired plants.
So-called “biomass energy” is also becoming more popular in Japan and Korea, and some in the United States are pushing for greater reliance on wood-burning.
But many scientists and environmentalists say this is backward thinking that will accelerate the disastrous felling of forests and loss of biodiversity.
Power plants in Europe are increasing the burning of wood pellets from the United States, Canada and Eastern Europe. Environmentalists warn that old forests in those places are being chopped up and left to regrow, or in some cases replaced by forest plantations.
But it's not only the loss of old forests that worries scientists. Studies have shown that wood-burning power plants emit more carbon dioxide per megawatt hour of electricity produced than plants burning fossil fuels.
Even taking forest regrowth into account, scientists warn that over decades and centuries burning wood adds more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than producing energy the old-fashioned way by burning coal and fossil fuels does.
The EU's wood-burning policy is the subject of a legal challenge filed by environmental groups and individuals in Europe and the United States seeking to end the EU's support for wood burning.
“We're not saying nobody should burn wood again; what we're saying is that we should not give billions of dollars in subsidies to power plants to burn wood,” said Mary Booth, the director of U.S.-based nonprofit Partnership for Policy Integrity and a scientific adviser for the plaintiffs. “It's a false solution.”
The lawsuit was brought by groups and individuals in Romania, Ireland, Slovakia, France, Estonia and the United States who say their homelands are threatened and being damaged by heavy logging, and in the case of a plaintiff in Ireland, furthering the loss of peat in bogs.
The suit was filed in March at the European General Court in Luxembourg, which handles cases involving EU institutions. Named as defendants are the European Commission, the EU's executive and lawmaking power, and the European Council, which is made up of the EU's heads of state.
Under the court's rules, the details of the lawsuit are not publicly available until the court decides whether it will take up the case. If it does, it would be the first time the court considers a case brought by nongovernmental organizations, the plaintiffs said.
So, besides striking out against the EU's notion that burning wood is a good replacement for coal, the case challenges the European court's strict approach to “standing,” the legal term to describe who has a right to bring a case.
Since a 1963 ruling involving the importation of clementines, a hybrid orange, EU courts have refused to accept cases unless plaintiffs can prove they are “‘directly and individually’ concerned by the decision they seek to challenge,” according to Leigh Day, a London-based law firm handling the suit.
The law firm said this position has been “the subject of controversy for decades” and considered a violation of the Aarhus Convention, an international accord that sets standards for environmental rights such as access to information, public participation and environmental justice.