> you can rent land, scrub it clean, then return it bare without the owner minding

That's the idea, he's renting it for firewood. So we might rent it for 3 years during which time we'll have wood for 3 winters then return it to him cleared.

We use a tractor, which of course burns diesel but that's only a few liters. The wood is maybe 2 to 5 kms away. It still makes sense compared to using fossil fuels or (local gas based) electricity.

Ok, so "renting" is more a term for "buying the harvest, but we have to do the harvesting ourselves".

Perfectly makes sense in an environment where that's a regular occurrence, but here in isolation it sounds a bit like "I live in hotel rooms: it's not actually that expensive, if you put the furniture on eBay at the end of your stay the room almost pays for itself". Thanks for the clarification!

>> Immediately stops making sense when you try to scale it to anything beyond what would be possible sourcing from basically walkable distances.

More than walkable distances, I think the problem is the population density. It escales until the population is so high that you must reuse the same spot before the tree grow back. How many years you must wait to reuse the same spot? Does the owner plant new trees or they grow naturally? Are you burning the leftovers?

I think that similar arrangements were usual, but the idea was to cultivate some crops for a few years after removing the trees. Are you skipping the cultivation phase? Is the land bad for crops?

I'm just getting into wood burning as an adult, but the rule of thumb I've heard is that you need about one acre to sustainably produce one cord per year. So if it takes 4-5 cords per winter to heat your home with a newer gasification-type burner, then you'd need to be in an area with an average lot size of 5 acres to consider that sustainable. That's decidedly rural, but practical for many, especially with even better insulation. Save the higher density, cleaner burning energy sources for places with denser populations and shared walls. Although unfortunately with nonsensical zoning policies, city buildings tend to be older and poorer insulated.

Obviously we'd be better off with heat pumps run by renewable electricity supplying most heat. But lack of storage seems to be the missing piece right now - peak solar production and peak heating load are on opposite sides of the day, unlike air conditioning. Nuclear would be capable of generating electricity at the right time, but it's presently stalled for many reasons. But even if we had widespread nuclear, that wouldn't help from the individual perspective of still needing a heat source during a power outage.

Solar+heat pump is cheaper than a tractor

Drilled water heat pumps cost far more than you save to install. Air exchange heat pumps don't work in cold weather (that is, cold where I live, ymmv).

They work well enough up to -20C or so. Thats the climate we get here (and occasionally worse) and gov subsidises replacement of pellet stoves (which cost similarly to heat pumps anyway) with heat pumps. You just have to be ok to either rough it out or turn on expensive resistive heating few days per year.