Where are Sweden, which does not have any coal plants and is a net exporter of energy replace nuclear with coal?

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...

That claim is simply plain misinformation.

For the import vs export of energy you find that here:

http://media.matochklimat.nu/2021/02/image1.jpg

Sweden import much more coal energy when Barsebäck and Ringhals was up and running.

Source for graph: http://matochklimat.nu/analys-svensk-el-fortsatter-att-trang...

Sweden imports energy from countries which use coal plants.

The Swedish ethos is “we are green. It was the other guys!”

Can you show me a source for your claim that it has increased? Here's another graph for the energy mix over time, with coal not changing at all. This time from the government energy agency. See page 5.

http://energimyndigheten.a-w2m.se/FolderContents.mvc/Downloa...

Unfortunately the Swedish authority wants to look good so their promotional materials show domestic and only pay lip service to imports.

If you follow the flow from: https://www.svk.se/en/national-grid/the-control-room/ you see that most of those countries primarily generate electricity using Oil, Gas and especially coal. (Latvia, Lithuania and to a lesser extent: Estonia)

Page 12, same document. Import, export and net for the year 2019 to all those countries. This isn't some kind of conspiracy.

Some import from Denmark and Norway. Negligible from Poland, Germany, Lithuania. Net is export to all, which means Swedish clean power is actually displacing dirtier sources, except in Norway which is full on hydro.

I haven't read that we can't just recapture the carbon by re-planting a bazzilion trees. I'll do some googling now.

The problem with trees-as-carbon capture is:

1. They are only a net store of carbon while they're alive.

2. Because of that, you need to dedicate land to carbon-capture forest, indefinitely.

3. Burning fossil fuels for energy releases more and more carbon into the atmosphere.

Like, you get N tons of carbon captured out of a given land area. It's constant per area. So you would need to continually grow the amount of forested land just to follow the amount of carbon released by burning fossil fuels.

But: land is finite. The actual worldwide trend has been to deforest land, either for lumber, or slash-and-burn for subsistence farming in poor countries, or just to allow for population growth, or the large land area needed for wind and solar farms. We don't have a huge surplus of not-yet-forest land — can't grow trees in deserts.

> They are only a net store of carbon while they're alive.

Is wood not a carbon store?

When or a tree dies, or burns, during the decomposition process it releases the carbon back to atmosphere. Maybe you could bury them somewhere where decomposition it's slower or more difficult but hard to imagine doing it at scale.

Surely lumber, treated cellulose, contains a high % of the original carbon content (minus water)?

Lumber isn't a permanent removal from the carbon cycle. Wooden structures have a shelf life, and eventually the wood decomposes and re-enters the carbon cycle. The only way to sequester carbon via lumber would be to bury it in a way that prevents decomposition. I don't think this is an especially efficient method of carbon capture.

By the same measure, CO2 is not a permanent state either, but it's an issue because of the imbalance in dynamic processes - The carbon stored by lumber is the amount of lumber in the world minus decaying lumber.

36 billion tons of CO2 came from industry and fossil fuel combustion in 2019. [1] CO2 is about 27% carbon by mass. Cellulose is about 44% carbon by mass [2]. That means about 22 billion tons of cellulose needed to offset one year's worth of CO2 emissions.

In 2014, use of wood products in all notable categories combined was about 1.25 billion tons [3]. Including just sawnwood and wood paneling, it was 0.827 billion tons. Since there's no plausible way to use 2500% as much lumber for structural purposes as we do now, and just harvesting wood and leaving it outdoors will lead to decomposition on short (decades) time scales, people consider charring it and/or burying it underground. Just building more structures out of wood is barely going to put a dent in the problem.

Likewise, dynamically shifting the equilibrium toward wood from CO2 doesn't help much if the wood persists for only decades. The time scale for CO2 to naturally return to its pre-industrial equilibrium is more like 100,000 years [4]. We need sequestration measures that prevent CO2 from returning to the atmosphere over longer time periods than wood takes to decay naturally.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/276629/global-co2-emissi...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellulose

[3] https://www.forest2market.com/blog/fao-report-highlights-res...

[4] https://www.amazon.com/Long-Thaw-Changing-Climate-Princeton/...

True, but this proves that wood alone isn't a total solution. Along with reduction in FF dependency and other forms of carbon capture, it could be. "only decades" is enough time to come up with better solutions, including bio masses with a better per $ rate of carbon capture.

Only until it decomposes, which is usually relatively quickly after it dies.