This point needs to be emphasized. Wood burning is renewable compared to coal.

Europe is the second smallest continent in the world. It has roughly the area of the United States. Despite that, Europe has the highest forest coverage of all the continents.

> Europe is the second smallest continent in the world. It has roughly the area of the United States. Despite that, Europe has the highest forest coverage of all the continents.

I don't believe that is correct. Unless you are counting all of Russia. https://ourworldindata.org/forest-area

Ah, you are correct and I was wrong. I had looked it up, but didn't realize that the multiple different sources I looked at all seemed to count the entirety of Russia.

In hindsight, it should've been obvious that Europe (~10 million sqkm) couldn't have 1 billion hectares of forest coverage.

That source does show that Europe has the highest forest coverage, although the weird remark about Russia does imply that Asian Russia is counted. Moreover, North America, which I believe is quite forested, is totally absent from the chart.

Biofuel is the most striking example of why "renewable" is not always equivalent to "desirable". While you can indeed re-grow wood, combusting it at scale maintains an equilibrium level of CO₂ in the atmosphere (which causes climate change), and also releases a equilibrium level of particulate matter, which causes large numbers of deaths from lung and heart diseases.

> While you can indeed re-grow wood, combusting it at scale maintains an equilibrium level of CO₂ in the atmosphere (which causes climate change.

True but meaningless.

Sitting in my deck chair also maintains an equilibrium level of CO2, but it doesn't provide any heat or benefit to anyone.

We can't look unfavorably on energy approaches just because they fail to actually reduce CO2. That's some kind of unrealistic purity test.

It's not meaningless. CO₂ in the atmosphere causes the greehouse effect, which allows the sun to heat the earth more. To avoid greenhouse effect you can't have things that require CO₂ to constantly remain in the atmosphere. You need non-carbon sources like wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, geothermal, etc.

> To avoid greenhouse effect you can't have things that require CO₂ to constantly remain in the atmosphere.

But we don’t want to fully avoid the greenhouse effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect:

“Earth's natural greenhouse effect keeps the planet from having the below freezing temperature that it would have if there were no greenhouse gases”

He's talking about the excess unnatural greenhouse effect.

I don’t see how one can read that from “To avoid greenhouse effect you can't have things that require CO₂ to constantly remain in the atmosphere.”

The natural greenhouse effect has CO₂ constantly (I think at least since there’s any carbohydrate burning on earth) remaining in the atmosphere.

It's all implied. Maybe he doesn't know about some of those things, but it is incredibly common to talk about it in those terms without spelling out that you mean excess / problem-causing amounts of the effect, etc. When he says can't have things he's talking about human energy use. He says right after you need to use wind, solar, etc.

You're right about the particulates, but I believe that burning wood can't really cause climate change.

Wood is already in the biosphere. Even if we don't burn it, it will decompose and release all its CO2 that way, or burn in a forest fire. The CO2 of that wood is already circulating.

It doesn't actually increase CO2 levels the way that digging up long-buried fossil fuels does.

If you cut down and burn trees that take 50 years to grow in 3 seconds, you've increased the amount of CO₂ in the air. Sure it will eventually go away, but the thing that causes climate change is the CO₂ being in air at elevated levels, even if it's in a cycle.

Biofuel is almost as bad as fossil at 230 gCO₂-eq/kWh. [1]. Compare to solar pv at 40 and nuclear at 12.

[1] https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5...

The footnote on those numbers says:

> Direct emissions from biomass combustion at the power plant are positive and significant, but should be seen in connection with the CO2 absorbed by growing plants. They can be derived from the chemical carbon content of biomass and the power plant efficiency. For a comprehensive discussion see Chapter 11, Section 11.13

https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5...

> have led to strong forest Carbon sinks in many OECD regions (Pan et al., 2011; Loudermilk et al., 2013; Nabuurs et al., 2013; Erb et al., 2013). However, the capacity of these sinks is being reduced as forests approach saturation (Smith, 2005; Körner, 2006; Guldea et al., 2008; Nabuurs et al., 2013; Sections 11.2.3, 11.3.2). Active forest management, including management for bioenergy, is therefore important for sustaining the strength of the forest carbon sink well into the future (Nabuurs et al., 2007, 2013; Canadell and Raupach, 2008; Ciais et al., 2008), although countries should realize that for some old forest areas, conserving carbon stocks may be preferential, and that the actively managed forests may for some time (decades) act as sources.

But burning fossil fuel does _not_ maintain an equilibrium level of CO₂ in the atmosphere (which is the main reason why we have climate change in the first place)

But as doomberg is pointing out the actual alternative we should be comparing to isn't coal but uranium.

We'd need a time machine to start building reactors a few decades ago. And why, just to build more of the most expensive energy source ever conceived with the potential to make large portions of Europe uninhabitable?

Nuclear is expensive, it's unsafe, there's the proliferation risk, and only very few countries figured out how to store spent fuel. Promises of safe and cheap tech to solve these problems are common but still unfulfilled.

Solar and wind energy on the other hand is so cheap to build up and don't need decade long mega projects. We can have a better, cheaper energy source right now. Nuclear has nothing to offer.

Because people want heat and electricity when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing enough (or at all) which happens pretty regularly

If you haven't won the geographic lottery then...

You can burn coal like there is no tomorrow (see Poland)

Or gas (see Germany, and most of Europe for heating), and enable Russia and other undesirables

Or nuclear and have energy security without directly and indirectly causing death and suffering for millions

Except - I guess - CO2 free energy when it's dark and windless. Like in a typical November night <hen you like having your home heated to acceptable levels.

Doesn't need to be November

Germany is dark and windless plenty of the time during summer: ~8 hours a day

I frequently saw our solar and wind usage below even 5% of their respective capacities

>Nuclear is expensive, it's unsafe

Both are true because "spent" fuel isn't reprocessed because mumble mumble nonproliferation, yes?

In the mean time, obscene amounts are being spent on fusion, which will never even compete with fission on any metric.

Solar and wind have been the future for my whole life. Now we have an energy crisis. An artificial one for sure - we could open the pipes to Russia and they'd sell probably sell gas again - but a crisis nonetheless. The claim renewables are better was never true and the price of not stopping that deception is that now we face darkness.

As for nuclear, step one is certainly to stop listening to arguments like "it's too late, it would take too long to build":

https://twitter.com/mlanetrain/status/1556381583585804291

"This is some grim real life dramatic irony: Nick Clegg opposing nuclear power in 2010 because it would only come on-stream by 2021 or 2022."

anything that means people living near a thousand open or semi-open fires is vastly more unsafe.

wood in particular is the worst offender.

plus logging and transportation both are very unsafe industries.

spent fuel storage is a complete non-issue. even bringing it up shows the ridiculousness of the anti-nuclear lobby.

the only real risk is proliferation. which fortunately is again a non-issue in Europe, because the counties in question already have nuclear capabilities.

Distributing uranium pellets for domestic heating might prove problematic, likewise trying to burn uranium pellets in existing coal power plants to facilitate the transition to other sources would be problematic.

Europe isn't really a continent though.

More like a subcontinent of Asia, like India.

It is called eurasia.

It's not even that simple. Burning wood is only carbon-neutral on a multi-decade timescale. Trouble is, the next couple decades are critical. We're at risk of pushing the climate over tipping points, after which warming will go further even if we take our own emissions to zero.

So it's important that we reduce emissions in the short term. Burning wood increases short-term emissions. By the time it all balances out, it'll be too late for it to matter.

And even that assumes that the forests grow back enough to balance out. Those tipping points include drought and forest fires, so that's not a given.

>Coal (/oil/gas) burning releases CO2 that was previously safely stored in the ground and didn't affect the Earth atmosphere

This sounds crazy to me. The whole issue with climate change and CO2 is there is too much on a global scale. So it's all fungible. Yet people continually talk as though the CO2 molecules have labels on them to determine if they're sinful or not.

I don't know how the infrastructure works for biomass, but open pit coal mines in the US are extraordinarily efficient when management isn't fucking them up. We're talking electric conveyor systems that span from pit to plant, diesel-electric haul trucks, and a rail loop that drives right under the plant for loading onto a train that will net about 15-17k tons and ship "directly" to the generator. A coal seam can last a real long time depending on demand. And the infrastructure is already there and has been for ~50 years with various optimizations added along the way - at least in my locale.

I'm under the impression that logging is far less efficient due to the nature and complications of the work, but that is, I admit, simple conjecture: You're constantly moving, maybe with some gravity assist, to transport and load the raw material, I imagine for packing efficiency they're chipping straight into a 53' trailer, which will then port a relatively small sum, about 21-22.5 tons, compared with a haul truck, which range from 153-410 tons for back-and-forth movement. If we consider this holistically, BTU/man, BTU/manhour should both be accounted for as well, since those are real inputs which at scale (I imagine) represent a pretty substantial expense in terms of CO2.

Coal is also "processed" on site, with pretty minimal input: being crushing, drying, and sometimes spraying. There aren't secondary and tertiary processes.

Energy from PRB coal, at the minimum of my data is about 7,420 BTU/lb. Some dry wood can "compete" at this level, apparently, when dry in fact one data point indicates 9033 BTU/lb (Colorado Pinyon). Maximum mean BTU for coal in the PRB is 11k (compared to 8.2 kBTU/lb pellet). I say compete because from what I've heard, generator designs aren't indiscriminate and require certain energy densities to hit efficiency - which may be a benefit of biomass because there's a lot more control, I'd imagine, in pelletizing wood vs. coal, which is a simple mix-batch. At scale it might actually be a pretty considerable boon for biomass.

To me this reads that biomass is going to require more input to extract the same amount of energy. The processing to get biomass to similar energy density is going to require more energy input. But even the primary input, knocking trees over, chipping them, porting them, is going to be less efficient and less centralized, and even once it does culminate in some logistical knot... You said it yourself, it sucks. But also, deforestation sucks. So does human sprawl.

My point here is that I do think the idea that burning wood is "carbon neutral" is spurious, because there are a lot of points which fossil fuels are used, and used less efficiently, and that the process at least by my imagination is ultimately less efficient, and those losses will also inevitably contribute to increases in the CO2 chain which I think is largely ignored. Maybe it's more like slightly-less carbon - cause the whole "if it's wood and we burn it now and let it grow back later while we keep cutting more and more down to satisfy the constantly increasing energy demands..." reads like we're displacing consequences into the future.

But! This is with the caveat that I'm not particularly familiar with the processes of biomass fuel production chain, and that my calculations are based on US information and doesn't necessarily pertain to industries in the EU.

Trees also store CO2. Actually, burning trees means less CO2 will be extracted from the air. More CO2 in the world means plants and trees can grow quicker.

If one believe CO2 is an issue (personally I don’t buy it), then burning trees is not a great way to fix the issue.

Once trees die they will release all that CO2 back into the atmosphere anyway. And trees will naturally die. Then another tree will grow in its place over time.

It's not a permanent storage of CO2 unless we cut it down and bury it or build something long-lasting with it.

I don't think that's true, how does "all the CO2" get released back into the atmosphere? During the decomposition of wood there are a lot of bacteria, fungi, worms, etc. that feed on the carcass of a dead tree. It doesn't just "evaporate" into the atmosphere...

The bacteria, fungi etc. emit CO2 as part of their metabolic process, just like you and I do.

There's also carbon sequestered in the soil. Decomposition doesn't end up with the entire tree evaporating.

It's great that 95%+ of the people we consider experts in these fields don't matter because CO2 is something plants breathe? Famously you can never have too much of a good thing. Impossible to overdose on water as we all know.