17-month row over challenging report

The European Commission’s energy and agriculture departments tried to suppress part of a report that challenged the green credentials of the EU’s biofuel policy, according to internal emails. 

The emails reveal how a routine piece of work sparked a 17-month row within the Commission that was settled only by quashing publication of the part of the report that was unfavourable towards biofuel policy.

This work, subsequently released to European Voice and others under freedom-of-information legislation, suggests that the EU’s biofuel policy between 2004 and 2006 may have at best yielded small greenhouse-gas savings and at worse caused a small increase in emissions.

Commission officials exchanged scores of emails over one study that had been commissioned by the environment department from a group of independent consultants led by AEA Consulting.

The AEA researchers had been asked to assess EU policy to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. When it came to biofuel, just one small part of the overall study, they looked at three scenarios. Under the worst-case scenario, they concluded that biofuel may have caused a small increase in EU emissions. But even under the best-case scenario, in 2004-06 the use of biofuel had yielded savings of 31%, which was short of the 35% minimum greenhouse-gas savings that had been included in the EU’s law on renewable energy passed at the end of 2008.

Unhappy officials

Officials from the Commission’s energy and agriculture department were unhappy with these conclusions and called for all values for indirect land-use change (ILUC) to be deleted from the report. “We insist that this study will not be published in its present form,” an energy official wrote in an email in March 2009. The energy and agriculture officials complained that the AEA researchers had made “misleading”, “incoherent” and “arbitrary” assumptions.

The energy department were displeased that the researchers were even investigating indirect land-use change. “The documents still make a distinction between ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ land-use change which is not relevant or necessary for policy analysis, ” an official wrote in October 2009 – ten months after the EU had passed its renewable energy law, which said the Commission should look at measures to counter indirect land-use change.

The environment department, which had commissioned the report, defended the analysis as “interesting”. But 13 months into the row, in November 2009, they proposed that the ILUC work could be moved into a separate annexe that would remain unpublished.

The energy and agriculture officials continued to insist that the ILUC work must be deleted entirely. “For us, it is inconceivable that a Commission service – at a time when [we] are in the midst of a highly sensitive internal debate on land-use change issues relating to biofuels – unilaterally goes ahead with any analysis of this particular matter using methodology which everybody (even those who invented it) admit is flawed.”

In later drafts of the report, the consultants’ language was made more cautious and couched with caveats. When the environment department did eventually publish the report in February, it included – at the insistence of the consultants – a disclaimer saying that it did not represent the views of the authors. The energy department objected to the inclusion of this disclaimer but was powerless to prevent it.

The annexe was not included in the published version, but emerged three months later because of freedom-of-information requests. The bungled attempt to quash this part of the report gave it arguably more attention than if it had been posted without fuss on the Commission’s website.