When you think of Ireland, you think of one thing: leprechauns. Bono. The color green. Ok, three things.
Northern Ireland has attempted to associate their lush, emerald paradise with a vigorous, environmentally friendly, aka “green” agenda. To get people excited about being good stewards of the earth, the government created “Northern Ireland’s renewable heat incentive.” The idea is to encourage individuals and businesses to use biomass fuels.
Well, at least that sounds like some mysterious cool new enviro-friendly way to power your country, right? Well, no. Biomass fuels just mean things like wood pellets. Pellets made out of wood. For every 100 pounds spent on wood pellets, they would receive 160 pounds. It sounds like a great way to save the planet and make a few extra bucks.
The “renewable heat incentive” sounded so good that people started buying wood pellets left and right. In fact, people started buying biomass boilers and wood pellets just for the money. Some true geniuses were able to make this government subsidy into a personal passive income stream!
For example, one farmer expected to make a million pounds heating an empty shed and another was on track to make a million and a half heating a couple empty factories. This is the way these things always seem to turn out. The government designs a system to force people to help the environment. It winds up costing a fortune and making the environment worse. Classic #GreenFail story.
The misuse of this environmental program is now estimated to cost taxpayers upwards of 660 million pounds. And the real kicker is that environmentalists wasted all this cash convincing people that literally lighting trees on fire was somehow environmentally friendly. It’s not. It’s a tree holocaust. And for what? It’s not even good for the environment.
In the European Union’s effort to produce 30 percent of its electricity from renewable resources by 2020, regulators decided to label wood as a carbon-neutral fuel for the purposes of emissions accounting. Which is, at the very best, an “alternative fact.”
Wood is absolutely not carbon-neutral. For example, the DRAX power station uses more than a million metric tons of wood pellets from the US every year. The result? The power station produces more than three percent more carbon dioxide than coal and twice as much as natural gas. And you also have to take into account the additional carbon emissions of just getting the wood pellets across the pond from America.
Environmentally friendly leprechauns don’t make wood pellets just magically appear. And to answer your question, yes, leprechauns are carbon neutral. While some entrepreneurs may have found their pot of gold in the “Northern Ireland’s renewable heat incentive,” it has largely been a colossal disaster on par with the movie Leprechaun in the Hood. It’s that bad. And you don’t even get the rapping leprechaun. Tragic. And that is why this green subsidy is yet another massive #GreenFail!
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