Drax is cutting down old-growth forests in Canada and shipping them to the UK to be burned for fuel. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-farce-of-burning-woo... This is compressing the release of hundreds of years of captured carbon into a lot less time, increasing atmospheric CO2 levels.

This "compression" also applies to fossil carbon, even if on a larger scale. So fossil carbon is still worse than biomass.

> Fossil carbon is the problem.

Greenhouse gases are merely one of the significant changes we cause to our environment.

The issue with biomass is the huge land surface it requires to produce the necessary fuel.

You are not disputing that biomass is carbon neutral?

Well, my point was that carbon neutrality is only one variable of the equation.

But if you want to focus specifically on biomass, I would say: "it depends". You can't answer that question easily. For instance, would you say a biomass plant producing electricity from wood pellets imported from Brazil is carbon-neutral? I think it isn't. When you're looking at biomass, you can't just look at the plant, you need to focus on how its fuel is sourced, what impacts this sourcing activity has, etc.

Because the fuel for the wood freighter is fossil carbon! This is an argument against fossil carbon, not against biomass.

> Because the fuel for the wood freighter is fossil carbon!

No; the reason is that this wood is a byproduct of land use change, which is a source of increased carbon emissions [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_use,_land-use_change,_and...

The fuel you burn is neutral in that it pulled as much carbon from the air while growing, as is released by burning it.

But the carbon cost to manage, process and transport that fuel is not neutral.

> But the carbon cost to manage, process and transport that fuel is not neutral.

Because gasoline for the trucks and coal for the electricity is fossil carbon. Which is not biomass. My point.

In some countries, peat is considered biomass. It’s probably worse than coal in terms of per unit damage, but generally it’s burned in far lower quantities.

Greenwashing. Peat is an early stage of coal.

Yeah, I've had these discussions with some scientists who are _really_ into peat, and got down a rabbit hole looking at the various EU states and how they deal with their peatlands from a policy point of view.

If it takes 50-100 years to grow back, then the CO2 is still in the air during this time plus you reduce a lot of habitat and create deserts.

If all the energy we consume today for heating, cars, electricity etc would come from biomass/trees then a huge part of our forests would have to be cut down in just a few years time, before they have a chance to grow back.

50-100 is a pretty short time-frame compared to coal and oil formation.

Yes, it’s releasing carbon now, to be recovered a hundred years down the road. That doesn’t really work with the timelines we are looking at.

That's not how it works with plants. If you or a cow can eat them, that means that they are already done capturing the carbon because that's what they are made out of.

They are done and we still got too much atmospheric CO2, now you burn them. Feel free to insist they captured it in the past hundred years but it’s really a distinction without a difference in this situation. You don’t get a free pass on the CO2 you are releasing now.

If you do not burn them, the plants will die and get composted into soil. Soil itself will decompose and release that carbon back into the atmosphere. In temperate climate, this happens in a decade or less.

The cycle keeps running with or without humans doing the emissions part.

So lets focus on the extra carbon that we dug out and inserted into the cycle.