It’s awfully hard to tell whether this is parody or not, but yes, media are “allowed” in. In fact, far as I can see on the various vids, anyone can just walk in
There are no armed guards. Some nut jobs did go there with guns but they didn't do anything. The current state of it...think of it like kids hanging out at the mall - skateboarding, socializing, eating and then they go home at night.
The reason wood is considered neutral is, that most of the wood is used for construction and other stuff. If you burn it and happen to burn fossil fuel as well, nothing is neutral.
No, it's considered neutral because you plant more of it to replace the trees you cut down (not because you are trying to save the world, just because you have some land that's suitable for growing a sustainable commercial forest).
Over the life cycle of the tree from planting to burning, it's carbon neutral, though the shape of it for any given tree is 20 years of carbon sequestration followed by 20 minutes of carbon release.
1. Not nearly enough trees are being planted to offset the ones being cut down.
2. Neutral on a scale of 30 years doesn't much matter when we have to reduce the degree to which we're accelerating a highly non-linear climate change process right now.
But also perfect is the enemy of good. If wood pellets stop us burning coal in the short term while we transition to a carbon-neutral future, then that's surely a good thing.
That is the point where someone bring up photos from almost 100 years ago and make comparison photo of today and notice the obvious: there is a lot more trees in the old photos.
Not 100 years ago, maybe in urban areas that got converted to buildings, but overall, forest acreage in the U.S. has been flat for the past 100 years. If you go back to early 1800s, that would have been a time when acreage was about 25% higher: https://www.fia.fs.fed.us/library/brochures/docs/2012/Forest...
Obviously I don't mean perfectly flat, when we're talking an organic, dynamic system. The trend is flat. See page 7 of the document I linked from the USDA. Even the page you link shows: 766,000,000 acres (3,100,000 km2) in 2012 and 721,000,000 acres (2,920,000 km2) around 1920. Note: "The majority of deforestation took place prior to 1910"
What kind of vehicles do you use to move the lumber from the farm to market, how are the pellet factories powered, and what kind of vehicles are used to move the bulk pellets from US to UK ports?
Growing a tree removes carbon from the air. That's carbon-negative. Cutting it down and using it in construction is still net-negative for the wood itself. (Though probably not when you take other energy usage into account.) In the very long run, the building might be torn down and the wood might rot or burn bringing things back to zero again.
Growing a tree, cutting it down, and burning the wood is carbon-neutral. But it's very dirty when it comes to other pollutants. A catalytic converter can help.
You are right about it being carbon neutral but only from a small frame of reference.
How is the wood cut?
How is the wood transported?
How is the wood processed?
Every one of these steps add carbon to the cycle. Some steps are minimal, others are huge; it all depends on scope.
I've heat my home with a wood-burning stove for 20-odd years. I have my own acreage and friends/family/farmers all contribute. Cutting down a tree, bringing it home, chopping it size so it fits in the stove are VERY energy intensive operations.
> Growing a tree, cutting it down, and burning the wood is carbon-neutral
It isn’t though. A lot of energy is used planting then maintaining a forest for 30 years, cutting it down, processing it then shipping it.
When timber is used in the building industry it’s a bit better but it is still notoriously wasteful. A lot of material goes to site and is binned - offcuts, wastage, over order and material in the wrong place.
The difference is ff's were captured over many millions of years, and natural forces controlled the total amount of co2 in the atmosphere.
What is happening today is the ff's captured co2 is being released a thousand times faster than it was captured, and that is overwhelming natural forces and causing co2 levels to skyrocket. Wood pellets are one of the ways to counter this.
I could be wrong, but my guess is that you already knew all this and were only pretending to be ill-informed because you are a member of the fossil fuels forever club. If I wrong, then please let us know your views on global climate change.
Main difference is releasing co2 from fossil fuels introduces carbon that wood pellets don’t. Imagine we burn 100% of fossil fuels and then start burning wood pellets, versus going straight to wood pellets. The former releases a lot more carbon than the latter.
1. 'Waste wood pellet' power plants are a con job.
2. There is not nearly enough wood waste from construction sites/etc to operate them.
3. They have to be supplemented with wood cut down from forests.
4. There aren't nearly enough forests in the UK to operate these plants sustainably.
5. So, the wood they burn comes from cutting down Canadian forests, trucking them down logging roads, loading them onto barges, and shipping them across the Atlantic ocean to the UK.
By the time you're done with all that, the carbon footprint of your wood pellet plant is greater than that of a coal plant.
Most of your points are verifiable _facts_, so there is no discussion to be had there. However, the _why_ is an important point that you didn't mention.
If these 'bio-mass' operations are so obviously illogical and unstainable why are they pushed so hard?
The large portion of these operations are old coal plants and incinerators. These are effectively wood chip burning furnaces that managed to reposition themselves through lobbying and marketing in order to ride the 'green' wave and be labelled as 'renewable' on paper, enabling them to collect massive amounts of tax payer "green" funding to pay for operational costs that could never be profitable otherwise.
This is a case where you have old polluting businesses trying to avoid bankruptcy by grabbing "green" funding.
PS:
Things I've read in the past from astroturfers on this topic:
- It's "renewable" because we plant trees that capture carbon (not at the rate that you need to burn it to break even).
- It's reclaimed wood (marginal volume compared to forest wood).
- We also burn organic waste (doesn't burn as hot as wood chips).
- It's wood from responsibly sourced forestry (which you transported across oceans from Canada, Malaysia and Brazil).
- It's not sustainable now because we haven't started replacing local forest with fast growing trees (this would absolutely kill local woodland bio-diversity).
Seeing as coal is just as energy intensive to mine and transport, yeah... But I guess his point was that wood burning should be stopped along with coal, because it's nearly as bad.
to make matters worse, all the shipping involves wet wood, which makes the whole process more intensive, as you move a lot of water around, and then ultimately the water contributes negatively to the energy output when processed and burned.
I don't have a source that's likely to satisfy you - for two reasons.
1. Nobody has actually done a through, scientific carbon audit of the supply chain for these plants. You have napkin arguments in film, or on the internet, that you can trivially search for, that conclude this one way, or another, depending on their politics.
2. The carbon cost of running them is incredibly dependent on local conditions of the precise bits of wood that were sourced.
I can expand on the latter.
The hardest part about logging is getting your equipment to the logging site, building the roads to it, and then using those roads to get the logs out. I guess those are the three hardest parts about logging.
If you can cut down your logs, truck them only a few miles, toss them in a river, and then pick them up a hundred miles downstream, to load onto a barge, your carbon footprint is minimal.
If, on the other hand, you have to truck them 15 miles down logging roads, and then 90 miles down a freeway, your footprint greatly expands. (And has to include factors like building the logging roads to begin with.)
Unlike with mining, building logging roads is much harder than building roads to a mine - because you have to cover a lot more ground, to get an industrially useful amount of wood - compared to something like a pit mine. You have to use heavy equipment to drag logs over incredibly difficult, unroaded terrain, so that they can be loaded onto trucks that will go down the roads.
