Do you have a reliable source for this?
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/europ...
(biased source, but nobody seems to disagree with their wood source claims)
The UK does not have enough woodland for all these tax payer subsidized 'green' energy plants so they are physically shipping wood pellets from US and Canada to these bio-mass plants. Trees are cut, shredded, put on a truck, put on a boat, then burned in furnaces, to generate steam, to produce 'green' energy.
Sweden exports a lot of wood pellets. Plenty of woodlands there. Plenty more to grow, if the Union will let them.
Wood pellets are "green" because the source material is replantable, albeit not that much locally for you. Seems like nothing is ever "green enough" though, besides a complete stop in consumption..
The distance from Sweden/Scandinavia/Continental europe is a lot less than from North America.
The concept of burning bunker fuel on ships to keep these plants at break even is ludacrious. The fact that the pellets come from Finland or Malaysia is irrelevant.
I have nothing against Bio mass energy generation from gasing garbage or agriculture waste. But these wood furnace burner plants are a borderline racket.
> something very close to forty percent of all the shipping on earth is just devoted to getting oil and coal and gas (and now some wood pellets) back and forth across the ocean.
Wood pellets are not fossil fuels though...
> That’s a remarkable snapshot: almost half of what we move around the seas is not finished products (cars) nor even the raw materials to make them (steel), but simply the stuff that we burn to power those transformations, and to keep ourselves warmed, cooled, and lit.
Oil is also a raw material, e.g. to make plastic. Not sure about what percentage is used as raw material vs. how much is used for fuel...