Green Party 'condems' Government for giving go-ahead for Biofuels Plant at Avonmouth

Sadly it was announced last Friday (11th February) that Eric Pickles, the Coalition Government's Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, has allowed the appeal by the company W4B who want to build a biofuels plant at Avonmouth.

This is despite it having been refused planning permission by Bristol City Council a year ago after a sustained lobbying campaign against it by the Green Party and others.

However, despite the company being given the go-ahead for the plant, Eric Pickles has said it was reasonable for the protestors to object and for the city council to refuse planning permission, and as a consequence the company does not get its legal costs from the city council. Planning law had always said that local planning authorities had to take the natural environment into account, but  the 'natural environment' had always been interpreted very narrowly as meaning the immediate local environment of the site of any planning application. However, Mr Pickles has ruled that the 'words 'natural environment' in planning law can mean the global environment for the purposes of climate change as the local Green Party and others had argued - which is a huge change, and could have profound implications for any future biofuel plant applications in Britain, and possibly other types of environmentally unfriendly applications. Although allowing the appeal, Mr Pickles also ruled that any fuel for the plant had to come from 'sustainable sources' - and therefore not from virgin rainforest; this is a very good ruling, but we are sceptical as to how it can be policed.  

Geoff Collard, who was the Green Party's candidate for Avonmouth in the city council elections last year said: "I was one of the people who spoke against this application in the council chamber in front of the councillors on the planning committee last year. Objectors like myself persuaded the councillors to refuse planning consent for this biofuels plant in Avonmouth. This decision by Eric Pickles, the Secretary of State, highlights what is wrong with our planning laws. Time and again local planning applications refused by local councils all over the country are overturned by the Government on appeal to them by the companies and developers concerned. It has happened for example with decisions on using green spaces for supermarkets. The ability of the Secretary of State to be able to do this makes a mockery of local 'democracy'. The Green Party will hope to seek a change in this planning legislation in the future."

The Green Party (and others) opposed it because the fuel to be used in this biofuel energy plant will be from burning 90,000 tonnes of palm oil per year from Indonesia and Malaysia and afterwards from jatropha from India or Africa. We think this is a regressive damaging policy which will wreck rainforests due to clearance for palm tree plantations and consequently add to greenhouse gas emissions.

Alex Dunn, who was the Green Party candidate for Bristol North West in last year's general election said: ‘This decision is bad for Bristol, bad for Britain, bad for Europe and bad for the world.  Bristol has world leading hi-tech industries that we should be investing in to help businesses develop renewable technology.  We will not become a world leader in hi-tech renewables by massively subsidising the importing of unsustainable natural resources from the third world.'

There is nothing intrinsically wrong in burning local waste organic matter to produce energy provided that it is burnt as cleanly as possible and emissions from the burning are captured and redirected where possible back into the process. The key here is that such organic matter must be only produced locally and it must be waste - not grown for the purpose. It is iniquitous in a planet which is already suffering food shortages to use land to grow crops for fuel, and especially where that land is virgin land such as rainforests. Much better however is to use biodigesters in which organic matter is broken down naturally by bacteria, such as composting. When you compost material, energy is released in the form of heat.