Traitor Briefing Sheet

Confidential — for traitor students only

Traitor Briefing Sheet

CONFIDENTIAL — for traitor students only. Do not share with other students.

You have volunteered (or been recruited) to write a deliberately misleading policy briefing. Your goal: produce a briefing that is superficially credible, technically sourced, and actively misleading. Your faithful classmates will try to identify you during peer review.

The rules

  1. Every number must be real. You may not fabricate data. All the figures in the CSVs and exercise pages are fair game.
  2. Every source must be citable. You can cite the DUKES data, the DESNZ emission factors, the Forest Research import statistics — all of these are real. What you choose to include, omit, or emphasise is up to you.
  3. Don’t be cartoonish. If your briefing reads like propaganda, it will be spotted immediately. The best traitor briefings feel more professional than the faithful ones. Aim for plausible, not absurd.
  4. Your conclusion should be clear. Argue that UK biomass electricity is unambiguously carbon-neutral and a policy success — or, if you prefer, argue the opposite extreme (that it is a climate disaster worse than coal). Either direction works, as long as your argument relies on misleading techniques.

Your toolkit

Use at least three of the following techniques. The more you can weave together subtly, the better.

Cherry-picking

  • Pick favourable emission factors. Use the official figure (0 kg CO₂/MWh) and compare it to coal’s supply-chain figure (990 kg CO₂/MWh) — maximising the apparent advantage. Never mention that biomass combustion actually releases ~330 kg CO₂/MWh.
  • Select a flattering date range. Show bioenergy growth only from 2010–2020 (the steepest period) rather than the full 2000–2024 series. Or zoom in on 2020–2024 to claim “biomass is now stable and mature.”
  • Compare only to coal. If you frame biomass as “replacing coal,” it looks like an enormous carbon saving. Never mention wind (which is twice as large and genuinely low-carbon) or gas (which is what most generation actually comes from).

Invalid or misleading visualisation

  • Truncate the y-axis. Start a bioenergy growth chart at 30 TWh instead of 0. A modest fluctuation fills the entire plot and looks like explosive growth.
  • Use a pie chart for non-compositional data. Show biomass, coal, and gas emission factors as pie slices — implying they are parts of a total, when they are independent measurements.
  • Suppress the scale. Make a bar chart where biomass’s “zero” emission bar is prominent and labelled, while other fuels’ bars are described only in the caption.

Omission

  • Ignore supply chain emissions entirely. Present the official (zero) figure as the complete picture. Do not mention harvesting, processing, transport, or drying.
  • Never discuss payback periods. If a reader doesn’t know about the carbon debt from felling trees, they can’t evaluate the zero-carbon claim.
  • Skip the “Is that a big number?” test. Present 40 TWh without noting it’s only ~14% of UK electricity. Or present 14% without noting that wind generates twice as much.
  • Omit uncertainty. Present one scenario as if it were a measurement, not a modelling choice.

Framing and language

  • Use an assertive title. “Biomass: The UK’s Carbon-Neutral Success Story” is harder to argue with than “Is biomass carbon-neutral?”
  • Anchor to tangible comparisons. “Biomass saves enough CO₂ to take X million cars off the road” sounds compelling — even if the saving is calculated using the official (zero) figure.
  • Bury caveats. If you feel you must mention a limitation, put it in the last paragraph after the reader has already absorbed your headline message.

Cross-scale conflation

  • Mix timescales. Compare annual emissions (a flow) to cumulative savings (a stock). “Biomass has saved X Mt since 2010” sounds bigger than “biomass saves Y Mt per year.”
  • Mix geographies. Compare UK biomass electricity to global coal use to make biomass look trivially clean.

A worked example

“Under internationally agreed carbon accounting rules, UK biomass electricity produces zero CO₂ emissions — compared to 990 kg per MWh for coal including supply chain costs. Since 2010, biomass has grown to replace a significant share of the coal generation the UK has phased out, saving an estimated 37 Mt of CO₂ annually.”

This paragraph contains no false statements. But it:

  • Uses the official figure (0) for biomass and the supply-chain figure
    1. for coal — an asymmetric comparison
  • Says “internationally agreed” to lend authority to a policy choice
  • Says “replace a significant share of coal” without noting that gas and wind did most of the replacing
  • Calculates the 37 Mt saving assuming biomass emits zero, which is the very assumption under scrutiny
  • Never mentions that the CO₂ actually comes out of the chimney

After you submit

Your briefing will be peer-reviewed by a faithful student. They will judge whether they trust your briefing. During the reveal, you’ll explain which techniques you used and where. Be ready to discuss how you made your choices — the class will learn from your craft.

Remember: The goal is not to “win” by fooling everyone. The goal is to demonstrate that real data, presented selectively, can support almost any conclusion. That’s the lesson.