NY Times: Romania’s Secular Forests Sacrificed for EU’s Green Energy

The American publication New York Times shows that the secular forest from Romania is sacrificed to make pellets, then exported to many European countries.

The American journal uses the headline “Europe is sacrificing its centuries-old forests for energy” to illustrate how incorrect it is to designate burned wood as “green energy.”

To investigate the illegal exports of fire pellets, The New York Times dispatched a team to the Cheile Bicazului, a northeastern region in Romania, “in one of the oldest forests on the continent.” The company Ameco from Harghita county of Romania, which the American journal claims have documentation of the fact that it feeds its grinders from the protected forests of Romania.

The forests of Romania, which make up two-thirds of the EU’s virgin forests, were hiked through over four days by a reporter and a photographer. They observed clearcutting there and followed trucks from woods with delicate ecosystems. Romania’s environmental ministry did not respond to the NY Times journalist’s questions about these shipments, the proposed law change and the pellet industry in general.

Meantime, after the NY Times article was published, the Romanian Minister of the Environment accused The New York Times publication of fake news.

The Romanian Minister of the Environment states the alleged journalistic investigation of an environmental crime. This says that the loss of forest cover in the Cheile Bicazului-Hasmas National Park area in Romania is due to an extreme meteorological phenomenon, a storm, which affected the forests all over Romania, which only in the Cheile Bicazului, 87,000 cubic meters of trees were blown down by the wind, on approximately 1,200 hectares of forest.

We find it bizarre that the authors of this article completely excluded such accessible (but essential) information. Moreover, the questions that were sent to our Communications Department on September 5, near the end of the working day, did not address this specific case but only presented a general approach to the subject.

Romanian Ministry of the Environment

According to statistics from the Environmental Investigation Agency, most of Romania’s most extensive pellet plans have been supplied with whole logs from forests under protection. According to their estimation, nearly a third of the wood supplies to these enterprises came from protected regions.

Once you cut down these old trees, you degrade ecosystems that took centuries to form with little human intervention.

Dan-Catalin Turiga, a forest engineer who accompanied Times reporters

In Europe’s protected forests, logging is not prohibited, but governments must carry out environmental assessments to guarantee the area is being preserved. However, specialists claim that these analyses are uncommon. Last year, the European Court of Auditors raised the alarm on these supposedly protected forests, finding many of them in “bad or poor conservation status.”

The NY Times also outlines the pellet export routes from Romania, Poland, and Slovakia to various EU nations, particularly Italy, where burning wood is regarded as not affecting global warming because trees collect carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and release it back into the atmosphere.

If the European Union no longer considers energy from burnt wood to be carbon-neutral, it would immediately throw many countries off track to hit renewable-energy targets. That would have major consequences for countries like Italy, the continent’s largest consumer of wood pellets. More than a third of its renewable energy comes from burning plant material. For years, the Italian government has offered tax deductions to encourage buying pellet stoves.

New York Times

The problem of illegal deforestation in Romania remains one of the most controversial topics. The government does nothing to combat illegal wood cutting. More and more foreign companies take wood from centuries-old Romanian forests and export it to various EU countries, Italy for pellets, Sweden for furniture, etc. Romania will wake up without forests, with a barren and lifeless wild environment. While other countries have untouched forests, Romania sacrifices its protected forests. For what? For UE’s ”green energy”? With the energy crisis at its highest point, this problem will get even worse.