Tree Huggers

Holy shit, you're right! He literally thinks "renewable" and "green" energy are synonymous. That's middle school life science level knowledge. That's really embarrassing for him

Burning trees planted two years ago doesn't actually release any carbon that wasn't already in the atmosphere two years ago.

I agree with you, but it's worth mentioning that a lot of goverments (such as the UK) are classing burning wood pellets as 0 carbon energy. The argument being that burning wood releases recently absorbed carbon (from the last 20 years or so) so doesn't increase overall levels of carbon in the same way as coal.

I kinda see the argument, but it does sound like a dangerous path towards "eco-accounting" like we've seen with offsetting, where calculations for carbon release are out of wack with the scientific reality.

Edit: I get that the writer is conflating two seperate terms btw, but think there's a version of this argument that makes sense.

Agreed.

Coal is not renewable. Oil is not renewable. Trees grow back and are thus renewable.

That was basically the impression that I got. Depending on the wheres and hows, growing wood as fuel can degrade the ecosystem and make it more difficult to continue to grow it there, but that's more a question of "sustainability" of a particular practice than the renewability of the resource itself. The problems with burning wood for fuel are many:

• Air pollution from wood smoke increases the incidence of respiratory issues...
• Continually cutting young trees for wood reduces the total carbon storage of the forest...
• Large-scale cutting of wild trees for their wood disturbs potentially fragile ecosystems and can accelerate local/regional climate change...
• Monoculture farming of trees for wood risks incubating pathogens (Dutch elm disease comes to mind), locally extirpating symbiotic plants/fungi/microbes and displacing animals that depend on other species of trees...
• As @[email protected] mentioned, using wood combustion to meet present energy requirements would likely not be feasible due to the rate of consumption relative to the rate of renewal, not to mention the amount of land required...

Whatever the problem, "we can just cut down more trees" is not the solution. There is enough deforested land in the world, and letting native forests grow back is one of the simplest and most effective ways to stabilise the climate. Forests are worth so much more than their wood.

I agree, the points in this article are about clean energy, not the ability to continuously refresh a resource as you deplete it, however, to play devil's advocate:

Wood, specifically, is not likely renewable at a sufficient rate. i.e. it is impossible to grow enough wood to meet any significant energy requirements. While it is technically renewable, if we treat it as such, we will deplete resources faster than we can replace them.

This is a silly argument I am making, and requires a narrow definition ignoring other bio-fuels which, while unproven at scale, would potentially remove CO2 from the atmosphere.

It's locally released though right, and removed from the air when you grow the tree up "again". I mean not perfect but it's not like burning oil.

It literally grows on trees !

If we are looking at just the carbon though, that carbon is collected by the 2 year old trees, right? So it's net carbon-neutral in that sense.

Not just carbon, but a lot of other combustion byproducts that people shouldn’t breathe.

It’s a dirty fuel with no way to clean up the emissions and causes massive health problems. But it’s definitely renewable