People don't appreciate the quantity of non carboniferous and long-chain carbon molecules exist in wood. Even if you burn it fast, have them in pellets in the most efficient burner that exists and have your filter, you are still emitting generating the most polluted air you can legally breath in Europe. This air is highly implicated in all manner of lung diseases including cancer.
So yeah, I appreciate there are multiple concerns at play, but there are extremely good reasons for decarbonisation, your and your neighbours health being a pretty big one.
Dispersion is a thing. Do you understand the rationale for chimneys, beyond avoiding carbon monoxide poisoning?
> During the cooler winter months, more than one-third of particulate pollution comes from wood smoke. On some days, in certain areas, wood smoke can account for up to 90 percent of particulate pollution.
> On cold, calm days, wood smoke can become trapped close to the ground by an inversion layer, typically formed when a layer of warm air acts as a lid over a layer of cooler air. Inversions prevent the air below from rising, which causes pollutants to build up.
Also, frequency and volume counter dispersion pretty well. That's why cities are smoggy: all the pollution from cars and cooking (lots of tailpipes, vents, or "chimneys") adds up. These cities are far worse environments for people specifically because of the air quality, which leads to higher rates of asthma, general respiratory disease, cardiovascular disease, developmental issues in children, and cognitive impairment.
There's a lot of defense of wood-burning stoves in this thread, from "get a catalytic stove" to "it's natural", but there's been a lot of research on this. It's bad, it's always been bad. I get the appeal: you can buy a piece of property, get off the grid, heat your home totally self-sufficiently. I've watched a lot of off-the-grid YouTube, I'm into it haha.
But heat's a really inconvenient problem if you face the fact that burning wood is very unhealthy, and very bad for society/climate change at scale. Maybe you can do geothermal, but not everywhere--plus you can't DIY, and getting a crew to come out isn't 100%.
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Overall I agree with the sentiment that nuclear should have been the solution. I buy into the indictment of the greens; they got most things right, but it really does seem that they've succeeded in categorizing nuclear as a dirty fuel, and that will cost us significantly in the short term as we experience the dip between titrating off of fossil/nuclear fuels and ramping up our wind/solar/geo/tidal power.
That seems wild to me. I know alternate histories are hard, maybe we avoided a nuclear apocalypse by not converting all of our power generation to nuclear and I'm Monday-morning-quarterbacking the whole thing from an alternate timeline where humanity still exists to the degree where we still have things like internet forums. But a lot of things would be a lot better if we'd done that--and not blown up Earth.
[0]: https://cfpub.epa.gov/oarweb/woodstove/index.cfm?fuseaction=...
This is unlikely to matter much for carbon (modern ocean shipping is ridiculousy efficient, assuming the goods have a long shelf life). However, you need to do this to avoid spreading tree diseases and invasive insects.
> Burn the wood quickly at a high temperature to minimize particle emissions. This is quite effective.
For about $2000 you can get a 80% efficient wood stove with minimal emissions. It will have a catalytic, and can cleanly burn wood extremely slowly. It takes me about 36-48 hours to really get ours going in an efficient smoke free way. (It dumps smoke at startup, then you need to establish a solid coal bed.)
These are mandated by California, at least. Example model:
https://www.woodstovesguide.com/blaze-king-wood-stove-pricin...
https://www.blazeking.com/products/wood-stoves/princess-clas...
There's lots of local manufacturers with a long history, e.g. Jøtul. Their stoves are generally >80% efficient. E.g. https://www.jotul.no/produkter/ved
Newly-constructed city apartments are generally heated by centrally installed air-to-air or water electric heat pump, but single family homes are usually built with a modern wood stove for flexibility, atmosphere and redundancy. Older homes and apartments also very commonly (>50%) have a wood-fired heat source, and government mandates ensure that they have practically always been upgraded to modern specs.
https://www.contura.eu/ (yeah, I know, that tld...)
Strong doubt on this one. "Modern" ocean shipping is really bad when it comes to emissions.
Moving something via cargo ship emits 10-40g of co2 per km * ton. I'll assume 10, since fire wood would be extremely low priority.
Assume you buy a 20lb bundle of foreign wood from a store 10 miles away, and transport it in the back of a Prius. (This seems optimistic for a rural area where wood heating makes sense.)
The prius gets about 50 mpg. Round trip, it drives 20 miles, so it uses 0.4 gallons of gas, or 8 lbs of CO2, which is 3.6 kg.
The earth's circumference is 40,000KM. Assume the wood traveled 20,000KM by sea.
20 lbs is 0.01 ton. 10g is 0.01 kg. 0.01kg * 0.01 ton * 20,000km is 2kg of CO2 emissions.
Even ignoring the emissions from harvesting and shipping the wood from the forest to the packaging plant, seasoning (drying) it, and the last mile delivery for the store, the overseas shipping is only 33% of the emissions.
This should still be the biggest source of emissions. It's apparently his neighbor that gives him the wood, so I tried to find out some details regarding fuel use to quantify the emissions of his so called CO2 neutral wood but no dice.
That's part of what he's rallying against. It's not because it requires a large energy input to produce wood or wood pellets suitable for burning.
(Unless, of course, the pellets take more energy to produce than they produce themselves after burning and conversion... but that just makes them inefficient under any energy market mix, not CO2-producing under any mix.)
The reasoning about non-neutrality is that a tree has captured some carbon (its growth), then we burn it and release that carbon back into the atmosphere (1:1 equality).
However, anything on top of that (production of pellets, transportation, retailing) takes significant carbon, too.
Solar panels don’t take carbon from the air, and we don’t burn solar panels. We do manufacture, transport and retail them, though. So yeah, solar capture is non-neutral.
The merits of one are independent of the other. Neither of which are carbon neutral. Last point, some might argue that solar panels reduce the carbon needed to combust; it’s hard to see that as carbon neutrality, that’s a broken argument. But, I’m not sure who’s making that point.
Wood is the fuel, so to power a wood stove you need to constantly be moving it to its ultimate destination.
I really should upgrade to a motorized/automated burner that can eat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_briquette though. There is a plant that makes those about 30 km away.
Yes, it's not zero, but when comparing the extra co2 cost these machines add compared to the fossil fuel alternatives, it might as well be. In a few years they'll probably start to be battery powered, charged via clean nuclear and water power.
I'm sure the machines are more efficient compared to older machines and maybe your neighbour knows approximately how much fuel he has to put in to get a a certain number of cubic meters of wood. It would be sort of interesting to know, you can find some data online but it's very situation specific so it's probably not representative. What happens to all the waste? Does most just turn into mulch?
I don't think we'll see battery powered forestry machines any time soon, the batteries would have to be enormous but most importantly there would be no way to charge them.
I.e. be a pragmatic, not a fundamentalist.
Also: If you feel like you don't really understand a particular context: please do feel free to stay quiet until you have aquired an understanding of said context.
Both to purchase and maintain. Some operators depreciate ~usd70/hour.
> they'll probably start to be battery powered
Expensive machines are typically worked hard (long hours) when they are working. They need to keep working to make them pay. They typically work in forests not near the iTesla charging point by Starbucks.
When working, fellers are ferocious. The cabs are basically bulletproof.
And perhaps in 10 years with new battery tech and more remote charging infrastructure they'll actually be mostly fossil-free.
My understanding is it causes the air quality to go down and some people are affected. I like the smell of burning wood, but I can see how it can lead to an ashy experience.
Modern wood stoves are dramatically more efficient than the typical fireplace you'd remember from youth.
If anything, the issue would be high radiant heating on indoor surfaces causing evaporation and out-gassing. I have heard people complain about this, but it would generally be more of a freshly-installed or newly-built issue. Or perhaps if the home in question is built for passive heating, meaning that it's practically hermetically sealed and hence would require active ventilation.
As for air quality, a rocket mass heater will get hot enough to put out zero CO, and most or all of the particulate will be broken down as well, but sadly there's only one device I know of that is UL-certified. They are very much a niche concept; most stoves and masonry heaters will be putting out some, and in a city there'll be enough that it'll have an effect on health.
Where I live, in the San Francisco Bay Area, the air quality regulator says that wood smoke is the main source of air pollution. It's not ships or trains or trucks or cars or refineries. It's fireplaces and pizza ovens.
I also do not think it is absurd to burn wood for energy. The things you need to do:
- Burn wood that is sourced somewhat locally (for me, typically 1-2 km, but I think even hundreds of km would make sense)
- Dry the wood well (like for a year) after logging. Not doing this will lead to higher particle emissions, because you can't reach high burning temperatures.
- Burn the wood quickly at a high temperature to minimize particle emissions. This is quite effective.
CO2-wise: It's ~neutral. We've been doing it in this way/scale in a responsible way (replanting) for much longer than the time it takes to grow the trees.