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U.S. EPA says it will define wood as a 'carbon-neutral' fuel, reigniting debate
Weighing in on a fierce, long-standing climate debate, the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in Washington, D.C., said yesterday the agency will now define wood as a "carbon-neutral" fuel for many regulatory purposes.
The "announcement grants America's foresters much-needed certainty and clarity with respect to the carbon neutrality of forest biomass," EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt said at an event in Cochran, Georgia, The Washington Post reports. But many environmental groups and energy experts decried the move, arguing the science is far from settled on whether wood is a climate-friendly fuel.
As Science contributing correspondent Warren Cornwall reported last year, the forest products industry has long been pushing for the carbon neutral definition in a bid to make wood an attractive fuel for generating electricity in nations trying to move away from fossil fuels. The idea is "attractively simple," Cornwall reported:
The carbon released when trees are cut down and burned is taken up again when new trees grow in their place, limiting its impact on climate. ...
Yet moves by governments around the world to designate wood as a carbon-neutral fuel—making it eligible for beneficial treatment under tax, trade, and environmental regulations—have spurred fierce debate. Critics argue that accounting for carbon recycling is far more complex than it seems. They say favoring wood could actually boost carbon emissions, not curb them, for many decades, and that wind and solar energy—emissions-free from the start—are a better bet for the climate. Some scientists also worry that policies promoting wood fuels could unleash a global logging boom that trashes forest biodiversity in the name of climate protection.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 26 2018, @06:33AM (19 children)
"Deforestation is clearing Earth's forests on a massive scale, often resulting in damage to the quality of the land. Forests still cover about 30 percent of the world’s land area, but swaths half the size of England are lost each year." Link [nationalgeographic.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bradley13 on Thursday April 26 2018, @08:41AM (18 children)
Deforestation varies hugely, according to where you are. Tropical rainforests are being demolished by a combination of overpopulation, poverty, and clueless agricultural practices. However, temperate forests are increasing.
Deforestation is an effect, not a cause. The ultimate problem is overpopulation. How, exactly, you stop population growth in 2nd and 3rd world countries? There's no easy answer. IMHO the long-term answer is for the West to GTFO: leave the countries alone, and let them sort out their own problems. This includes no more food aid, which would limit population to what can be locally supported.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 26 2018, @09:07AM
You are right, but where does the West get their monies from than? Lots of monies are made from exploiting these people and their lands and keeping them poor, so money can be raised in the West to "help" these people.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Thursday April 26 2018, @02:03PM (13 children)
Stop all that idiot foreign aid. Stop all those doctors working so hard to keep those shithole residents healthy, long enough to breed. Let them rely on their superstitions, their witch doctors, their socialist and other crap governments. It's the fault of the West that there are so many shithole residents. Send them no food that they don't pay for. Send them no medicines, that they don't pay for. Send them no weapons, that they don't pay for. And, stop loaning them money. Let them sink or swim, all on their own.
But, no, we can't do that. The corporates demand that we exploit whatever resources they might have, and the social/lib/progressive crowd wants to force further over population.
We just need to mind our own business, and let them tend to their own business.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 26 2018, @04:03PM (12 children)
Way too much evidence that the best way to reduce birth rate is to increase the chance the first 2 kids will become adults. You're actually advocating to make the overpopulation problem worse.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday April 26 2018, @04:57PM (10 children)
Yet, mankind never numbered even half a billion, until recent history. I guess some people had thirty kids, and buried most of them in infancy, some more in early childhood, and some more managed to get themselves killed off in adolescence.
What happened in the 1800's to change all of that? Medical research, and the beginnings of disease control is what happened. Medicine - primarily western medicine - keeps all those babies alive to reach breeding age.
Note that I'm not claiming that western medicine is necessarily better than all other culture's medical knowledge. The west is different in that we export everything to dinky little third world hell holes that others, like China had never bothered with. Greece had brain surgery thousands of years ago, but they didn't export doctors all over the world to save everyone with a head injury.
As cold and heartless as my "solution" sounds - it is even colder and more heartless to enable those uneducated peoples in backwater swamps to raise up small armies of children that they can't afford to feed, or to educate, or much of anything else.
Those uneducted people who are invading Europe and North America today are doing so because they don't have the resources at home. They drop babies they can't support, then expect the West to support those babies.
Gotta respect China in that regard. They got their burgeoning population under control, without asking US/Europe for help.
(Score: 2) by NewNic on Thursday April 26 2018, @05:14PM (9 children)
Complete and utter bullshit.
Modern plumbing has saved more lives than medicine ever did. Modern plumbing is what makes disease control possible.
One thing that appears to be repeated in modern civilizations: when they reach a level of maturity and wealth that children are not required to support he adults in their old age, population growth drops off, and in many cases becomes negative.
Remove the financial need to have many children, provide education on and access to birth control and population growth stops. We know this.
lib·er·tar·i·an·ism ˌlibərˈterēənizəm/ noun: Magical thinking that useful idiots mistake for serious political theory
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday April 26 2018, @05:39PM (7 children)
India is the second most populous nation in the world - and they didn't get that way due to indoor plumbing. Your suggestion implies that if/when they stop shitting in the fields and in the streets, their population will skyrocket? On the contrary, their population rose in proportion to other nations, such as Chine, over the past 200 years or so.
(Score: 2) by NewNic on Thursday April 26 2018, @06:18PM (6 children)
Are you asserting that the people in India that don't have access to indoor plumbing have access to modern medicine?
lib·er·tar·i·an·ism ˌlibərˈterēənizəm/ noun: Magical thinking that useful idiots mistake for serious political theory
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday April 26 2018, @06:22PM (4 children)
No, Ma href=https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-05-12/india-access-toilets-remains-huge-problem-worst-all-women-and-girls>only 70% DON'T have access to indoor plumbing.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday April 26 2018, @06:22PM
Damn: https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-05-12/india-access-toilets-remains-huge-problem-worst-all-women-and-girls [pri.org]
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by NewNic on Thursday April 26 2018, @06:45PM (2 children)
Go back and read my post again. I did not assert that lack of toilets was not an issue in India.
Oh, WTF, it's pointless trying to correct the idiots here.
lib·er·tar·i·an·ism ˌlibərˈterēənizəm/ noun: Magical thinking that useful idiots mistake for serious political theory
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 26 2018, @07:40PM (1 child)
Just let them hate on "third world savages" who have no "personal responsibility" and just breed like rabbits. These haters can't even stomach the idea of providing support to their fellow citizens, doubly so for the people outside their tribe.
(Score: 1) by Captival on Thursday April 26 2018, @10:05PM
Give me all your money so I can distribute it to my friends however I see fit. You have no choice, shut up and do it.
That's what many people object to.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday April 27 2018, @01:26AM
Yes, many of them do. There are drives in India to get children vaccinated, to get prenatal and natal care to women of child bearing age, and more. Most of that is readily accepted by the population. At the same time, the drive to provide modern plumbing is actively resisted. It's not just rural people, either.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-27775327 [bbc.co.uk]
"Just building toilets is not going to solve the problem, because open defecation is a practice acquired from the time you learn how to walk. When you grow up in an environment where everyone does it, even if later in life you have access to proper sanitation, you will revert back to it," says Sue Coates, chief of Wash (water, sanitation and hygiene) at Unicef.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday April 26 2018, @06:27PM
Above you assured us that just getting the first two kids to adulthood would reduce population.
Now you say just getting the parents mature and wealthy will do it.
Stop throwing ideas against the wall, and state an actual case.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday April 26 2018, @06:19PM
Citation needed.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Thursday April 26 2018, @02:13PM (2 children)
Actually, there is an easy answer. You need to raise their standard of living and economic output enough to support a basic level of universal medical coverage that includes access to safe, effective birth control. When that becomes available, unplanned pregnancies drop off and cultures gradually move towards a neutral or even negative population growth.
But maybe by "easy" you mean "easy to implement". It's true that this approach has its difficulties, including:
Regardless of these difficulties and whether I personally advocate for this, I find it interesting to view the actions of global organizations in light of this strategy. Do the WTO's actions to boost global economies work toward curbing overpopulation? Is that what the WTO wants, or is it a side effect? Is this a common effect of globalization? Also, how many NGOs are working towards exactly this goal, as advertised or surreptitiously?
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday April 26 2018, @05:01PM (1 child)
Birth control is also a hard sell in some parts of the world. The US government subsidized forced sterilization of women who sought any kind of medical treatment in much of Africa. She comes to the clinic to have an infected cut on her arm treated, and she goes home sterile. Even the least educated people can figure that out after awhile. Maybe if the US hadn't been so sneaky and underhanded in decades past, we could convince people that two kids are enough. Instead, we shot ourselves in the foot.
(Score: 2) by NewNic on Thursday April 26 2018, @06:22PM
It's a hard sell because those people have an economic interest in having many children. That's the primary factor that needs to change.
Yes, the USA has f*cked this up mightily. Not just the forced sterilizations, but also the CIA using vaccinations as cover for spying and probably other examples.
lib·er·tar·i·an·ism ˌlibərˈterēənizəm/ noun: Magical thinking that useful idiots mistake for serious political theory
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 26 2018, @07:35AM (19 children)
wood is only carbon neutral if you burn as much as you grow (let's say on average over a year, since there are seasonal variations). and I don't think this is happening.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by qzm on Thursday April 26 2018, @07:56AM (13 children)
So.. You admit you have no clue and as are just guessing?
Thank you for your useful contribution.
For what it is worth, in Western countries certainly total areas planted in forestry trees is actually increasing, often due to carbon credit plantings.
The trees however have a limited lifespan, and if you let them fall and rot you get more methane, which is much worse.
But dont let facts get in the way..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 26 2018, @08:38AM (3 children)
Most trees have a lifespan of more than 100 years, I doubt these planted trees get that old. Most trees are cut down after 40-50 years because they are getting too expensive to keep around. Every cut down tree can be tracked back to some economic cause.
Methane is often produced in anaerobic conditions, which I doubt is the case with rotting tree logs in a forest. Research has also found that "rotting trees" consume nitrogen from the soil. Nitrogen-deposition is getting a big problem to many ecosystems and biodiversity lately. This nitrogen-deposition comes from nitrogenous oxides and ammonium, which are greenhouse gasses as well (and compensates for the possible release of methane).
A rotting tree also releases it's components over a longer time span, compared to if it gets burned. This extra time allows the ecosystem to absorb the components again.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Thursday April 26 2018, @02:12PM (2 children)
Pine plantations are a big thing around Arkansas. Many of them belong to Weyerhauser. Generally, the first cut is around 8 to 12 years. All the stunted trees are selectively cut, and chipped for paper, to make more room for their healthier siblings. Around 16 years, second cut to make more room for the healthiest specimens. Sometime around 20 to 22 years, the land is clearcut, and started all over again. These hybrid pines make really crappy wood, and they won't live anywhere near 100 years, even if they weren't cut down.
And, I'm pretty sure that these pine plantations account for a huge portion of our claim to be planting trees for the ecology.
IMO, they should be planting fruit trees, and nut trees, more than anything else. Not only does a walnut tree sequester carbon for many years, but it produces healthy food while doing so. Apple trees, depending on variety, are as good as a nut tree. Many other fruit trees have much shorter lifespans, but even so, free food!
Imagine city avenues lined with trees, dropping free food for the kids and/or the homeless for much of the summer and autumn. Why aren't we doing that?
(Score: 2) by Taibhsear on Thursday April 26 2018, @02:40PM (1 child)
FTFY
Some other reasons against it: https://land8.com/5-reasons-why-planting-fruit-trees-along-sidewalks-is-a-terrible-idea/ [land8.com]
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday April 26 2018, @03:17PM
That link is nothing more than 'food for thought'. Basically, they are saying that they are unwilling to make the effort, because they can only see down sides.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday April 26 2018, @08:45AM (2 children)
I'd be glad to hear the forestry guys were removing only the fallen trees and let the others grow.
I'm afraid that's not quite the way it happens - they are harvesting entire forests and then maybe plant others (without strong guarantees that it actually happens).
Even if/when the replanting occurs, older trees have been found to grow faster and absorb carbon dioxide more rapidly than younger, smaller trees [theconversation.com]. Which is only common-sensical when you think that larger trees have more leaves to absorb carbon dioxide and a larger biological mass to feed/grow.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Thursday April 26 2018, @02:34PM (1 child)
That's kind of like saying "These darned corn farmers! They are harvesting entire crops of corn. And then *maybe* they plant others--but there is no strong guarantee that it will actually happen!"
Of course, land cleared of trees may give way to "civilization" in the form of concrete and asphalt. So might land cleared of crops, but that's less likely in the case of the crops because they are much more likely to be growing on arable land by definition.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday April 26 2018, @10:19PM
That not quite equivalent. Compared with other agri sectors, forestry by plantations is not as common.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 26 2018, @01:17PM
no, I'm not clueless. "total area planted" has no direct connection to "total carbon sequestered".
see neighbouring posts regarding the fact that older trees eat more carbon.
if you burn 1km^2 of forest this year, and plant 1km^2 of forest this year, that means you need to keep doing the same thing for ~100 years, and only then you will be carbon neutral.
so you need to own a forest, and you may burn/replant ~1% of its total area every year, and only then you can claim you are being carbon neutral.
this percentage will vary depending on what type of trees you're growing, and you also need to add the resources needed to cut down the trees, and transport them to where they are burned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 26 2018, @03:43PM
Well, there are just so many climate experts on soylentnews. Along with the world's leading experts on politics and religion. It's like you guys could solve all the problems if you could just quit masturbating for a few minutes.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday April 26 2018, @06:53PM (1 child)
Actually rotting forests are not a significant source of methane. [wiley.com] You reached too far.
Nor is it worse than carbon emissions. It has a much shorter life span.
Plus you have a totally false Idea of how forests actually grow and change over their life time.
A tree dies, another one grows on top if its fallen trunk. Sequestering the carbon, and preventing methane release over and over again.
You want to worry about natural methane releases, drain the swamps and wetlands you are so fond of. They account for 78% of all natural emissions.
But the idea is to remove un-natural methane emissions so you can have afford to have natural emissions from forests, and wetlands and oceans.
Not to eliminate forests and wetlands. You've totally lost the plot here.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 27 2018, @12:03AM
"A tree dies, another one grows on top if its fallen trunk"
Actually no. Termites, carpenter ants, and other varieties of insects eat the tree and convert it to "dirt".
Any trip to a temperate forest will make this very apparent.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Thursday April 26 2018, @07:35PM (1 child)
AC wrote :
qzm replied :
AC's statement that it is only carbon neutral if you only burn as much as you grow, ie at the same rate, stands by itself. You don't need evidence, it is basic logic, equivalent to saying that the number of coins in your pocket will not increase if you spend them as fast as you receive them. If you do want evidence, I suggest comparing some old maps with modern ones here in the UK, or take a look at the Doomsday Book. Any very recent increases would be a temporary blip if there were to be a major move to wood fuel. That's in Europe anyway, otherwise visit Brazil or Malasia.
Trees dying naturally is irrelevent in this scenario because we are talking about harvesting them for fuel. No commercial forester is going to wait until a tree dies of old age before selling it for fuel.
qzm went on :
That is only while they are not widely used as fuel, but this new move is encouraging exactly that. I am in the UK where there are only small areas of forest remaining. Those areas would soon vanish entirely if they were harvested for fuel - the growth rate would fall far short of the potential burn rate. BTW, you said "areas planted" : but planted is a long way from being mature, 20-100 years in fact.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Thursday April 26 2018, @10:26PM
There is a large group of people who believe this, but I am not a member.
Equaling the "burning" and "growing" might release more carbon, might not, depends on many factors that that "evidence" would provide. There is not a magic rate number or ratio.
Reasons why not (result):
There is no "logical truism" involved in the maintenance and measurements of a complex, chaotic system and it's probably not helpful to suggest that there is. Assuming certain results without checking is already an enormous problem in this area, and I submit that more of it isn't a great thing.
I will say that if you plant trees to replace the ones you're setting on fire, then that makes equaling the "carbon storage" more likely, but only given that it takes it from "overwhelmingly unlikely" to "extremely unlikely, but probably not as far off as before".
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MostCynical on Thursday April 26 2018, @08:35AM (4 children)
Surely the issue is burning *anything*?
Coal: bad
Wood: also bad http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aaa512#artAbst [iop.org]
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-global-uranium-deposits-last/ [scientificamerican.com]
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 26 2018, @08:45AM
If you look at a economic perspective the problem is that the pollution isn't paid for. It's dumped into the environment for others to clean up. If polluters would be charged a (reasonable) payment for their dumping their greenhouse gasses it would stop very quickly. Governments have setup a system for this... and than started to give away pollution-waivers to polluters (because it would be too expensive for them to keep polluting).
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday April 26 2018, @08:55AM
Tell you what: burn that plastics the Chinese are refusing to import nowadays.
It's a good thing, think of the fish and birds, right? (only don't do it in my backyard, there's a crazy Queenslander who enjoys it... maybe a bit too much [youtu.be])
(grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Thursday April 26 2018, @02:57PM (1 child)
There are a couple problems here, as you point out, hiding behind huge and unfounded assumptions.
First, the assumption that fire is a fine control on climate. It isn't. Sure, many things affect climate, presumably including fire, but we don't know how to set up those chaos equations in order to predict that farmer bob burning wood to power his equipment will do a certain thing (good or bad) for overall climate. That's science fiction: it's just nuts, and we have no shortage of nuts weighing in on "climate", most not even able to define the word.
Second, the implied assumption that an overall net balance in carbon storage is all the same to the environment of any given area whether the trees are cut, burned, and replanted, or left alone. In terms of habitat, pollution, shade, many factors, those aren't the same at all.
Although you present an article on the topic of "Does replacing coal with wood lower CO2 emissions?", there are some fundamentals affecting that as well. Compare the geologic times involved:
Coal: Biomatter -> long, long, long time -> eventually becomes coal -> burned in a short, short, short time -> only regrow after everyone is long dead and forgotten -> large net increase in CO2 released
Wood: Seeds -> immediately -> become wood -> burned immediately -> regrow immediately -> approximate net balance in CO2 released
If our concern were simply "carbon is bad@!! for Climate!!!
Cooling!Al Gore says Boiling seas and oblivion! Nobel Prize!!!Unspecified Climate 'Change'!" then "carbon neutral" would be a good thing, or at least a not-bad thing.But the responsible concern is taking care of our environment and not polluting it, and not destroying its ecosystems. And that, unfortunately, has precious little overlap with the eco-nuts and carbon-obsessed. Carbon-neutrality or lack thereof doesn't affect it much.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday April 26 2018, @07:17PM
That's it in a nutshell.
Burning Fossil fuels, at the rate we have been doing, essentially dumps eons of carbon sequestration into the environment in a geologic nano-second.
Burning wood simply doesn't have a lasting effect.
Provided of course that you re-grow the wood, whether you need it or not.
(Britain has never done this. They are all chuffed about restoring 11% of the land [telegraph.co.uk] to forests. You look at UK scenery today and you just want to scream: Plant some Trees People! Way too much pasture land for the size of the population.)
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Thursday April 26 2018, @07:36AM (1 child)
My only objection to harvesting and replanting trees is doing this in national parks. One expects a national park to be a natural environment. Visiting one, and seeing a monoculture of fast-growing pines, planting in a regular grid - that's not nature, that's industry. Which is fine, as long as the industry does it on land that they own.
Industrial forestry has absolutely no place in national parks.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday April 26 2018, @07:22PM
I suspect you have conflated National Parks with National Forests.
Forests are crop lands in the US. Managed by the Department of Agriculture.
National Parks are not, and timber is never harvested there. Nor is there any grid replanting except where needed to recover from fires or blow-downs.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 26 2018, @08:46AM (7 children)
Wood cutting and processing consumes energy. But it´s better than carbon or oil and wood is a better fit for some uses than eolic or solar (like heating).
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday April 26 2018, @10:00AM (2 children)
Even more, it replaces more efficient individuals with less effective ones, so that it's not quite clear if burning older trees is better than burning oil. At least not on the time horizon of the next 50-100 years.
Older Trees Do It Better [time.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday April 26 2018, @07:40PM (1 child)
Hold on there...
The oil is carbon sequestered eons ago, dumped into the environment in an instant. You simply can't talk about 50-100 years. It makes no sense.
Young trees reach a size suitable for fuel very quickly. You can harvest these every 10 years, chip them and burn them without ever having to touch large old growth trees, which sequester carbon faster than young trees. You can have your sequestration AND your fuel trees. And you can leave the ancient carbon alone.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday April 26 2018, @10:11PM
Young trees reach a size suitable for fuel very quickly.
If the speed of growth would be the single aspect that matters in the equation, let me suggest you use grass - reaches maturity in only 30-60 days.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Virindi on Thursday April 26 2018, @11:39AM (2 children)
So does producing, shipping, and installing solar panels and wind turbines. However, the quotes above seem to ignore such inconvenient facts.
It would be perfectly fair to give a comparison of such values and say, everything included, this is more than that. But nope. This is a clue that the reporting in question is politically motivated...or thinks the reader is so stupid, they can't understand the concept of "X>Y" as opposed to "Y=0".
(Score: 2) by NewNic on Thursday April 26 2018, @06:34PM (1 child)
If you stop getting your ideas from the fossil fuel lobby for a moment, you will find that the amount of energy (and hence CO2) used in the manufacture and installation of renewable sources is much less than that produced by those renewable sources. Solar panels are now CO2 negative.
https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy04osti/35489.pdf [nrel.gov]
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/12/the-solar-industry-has-paid-off-its-carbon-debts/510308/ [theatlantic.com]
https://phys.org/news/2016-12-solar-panels-repay-energy-debt.html [phys.org]
lib·er·tar·i·an·ism ˌlibərˈterēənizəm/ noun: Magical thinking that useful idiots mistake for serious political theory
(Score: 2) by Virindi on Friday April 27 2018, @01:14AM
Did you read my comment at all?
Unless the panel factory, cargo ship, and delivery truck all run on solar power, it produces emissions to deliver you the panel. Calling it "carbon negative" can only be based on subtracting some other fuel you would have presumably burned later otherwise. That type of logic is disingenuous; but regardless, I was talking about what is ACTUALLY USED and not some hypothetical value based on assuming the status quo and measuring deviation from it.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday April 26 2018, @06:29PM
OK. And given the correct time horizon wood actually *is* carbon neutral. I.e., when you burn it you only release as much carbon as it accumulated when growing. That specifies the correct time horizon as the lifetime of the tree plus the time between when it died and when it was burned. This is complicated by a couple of things:
1) Trees are rarely burned all at one time. So the horizon needs to be staggered.
2) This is assuming that no carbon was released in acquiring the ground on which the tree grew.
This also ignores a few matters that aren't directly related to whether it's carbon neutral or not, such as fire danger from sparks, pollution from incomplete combustion, etc.
But I see nothing in principle wrong with calling wood a "carbon neutral fuel". That seems factually correct. It's not claiming that transport is carbon neutral. It's not claiming that it's non-polluting. Etc. If we stopped using fossil fuels, then we'd only need to deal with the excess carbon dioxide that's been released since we started using them, and that would make LOTS of carbon capture approaches reasonable. Without it, none of them seem plausible.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Funny) by realDonaldTrump on Thursday April 26 2018, @08:55AM
So that we can pursue all forms of energy. This includes renewable energies and the technologies of the future. It does include nuclear and wind and solar, but not to the exclusion of other forms of energy, and other forms of energy that right now are working much better.
France, .@FLOTUS [twitter.com] did a spectacular job hosting the President of France @EmmanuelMacron [twitter.com] and his wife Brigitte. And the British, as everybody knows, cut off the oil to France. The blockade. No oil, no gasoline, right? So the people of France did something very smart, they burned wood in their cars. They had a tank of wood instead of gasoline. But it wasn't nice. And they burned up so much of their beautiful lumber that way. Folks, I love our great lumber industry. It's been so amazing for our Country. But we'll have big problems if we burn up all our lumber.
We need coal -- it's very clean now, and you know maybe it's a little too clean, we need nuclear -- the coal & nuclear are very special for our national security. We need oil & gas. Solar, we need that too. I put a tariff on that one, China was going nuts with that. And wind if they ever perfect it. We need to do a lot more work on that one, folks. But all forms of energy, because our economy needs to grow. And it's been growing tremendously. Lowest unemployment, and lowest black unemployment, in many many years, in 17 years. We don't want a Jeb economy, we don't want a low energy economy.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 26 2018, @10:20AM (2 children)
If Scott Pruitt declared that a chicken was a bird, I'd check underneath it for udders.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 26 2018, @02:20PM (1 child)
Typical dude with his teat obsession.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 27 2018, @12:07AM
Thats udderly ridiculous.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Thursday April 26 2018, @12:41PM
Trees are carbon neutral. That part is true. However forestry practices make all the difference.
In Scandinavia they use selective cutting so they can keep harvesting from their acreage without overly disrupting wildlife, triggering soil erosion, etc. In the US and Canada, they favor clearcutting which essentially strip-mines the forest. They did it that way because they had so much forest to strip mine. But topsoil takes a long time to replenish after it's been eroded away, so it takes a long time for trees to come back.
Japan does it in a typically Japanese way, in that they clear-cut and immediately replant the harvest zone with lots of trees. That has a wonderful effect of being able to walk into any Japanese forest, spin on your heel, and see all they trees neatly resolve themselves into rows, because they plant everything exactly spaced in offsets.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 26 2018, @02:23PM (6 children)
Wood is a crappy fuel:
+ For the same heating value, wood takes up a lot more space than, for example, coal. So it takes more trucks/trains to move it around. And much more space to store on-site between deliveries.
+ It has to be bulk transported any distance (no possibility of efficient pipelines) with possible exceptions for short haul once the wood has been chipped or made into pellets.
+ Wood burning gives off a lot of other pollution and particulates, easy to smell and sometimes even see in the winter in rural areas where wood burning is common. While there are ways to reduce this (hotter burning, catalysts and probably others I'm not aware of) it will always be hard to police any regulations to control wood burning from many small sources.
+ Wood burning ruins the appliance -- leaves deposits that can cause chimney fires, rusts anything iron.
+ Wood is inconsistent, heating values (energy/mass) vary with species and water content.
As a fuel it can make sense for local use:
+ Heating an energy efficient house takes a few acres of woodlot, indefinitely.
+ Using waste wood (from lumber mill, paper factory or furniture factory) for industrial heating/drying.
That's my un-researched $0.02 -- corrections welcome.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by requerdanos on Thursday April 26 2018, @03:03PM (3 children)
Wood floats on water. Most bodies of water can be efficient natural pipelines for wood; an artificial pipeline would not be too hard to construct on the same principles. But it's not worth doing because wood isn't that great a fuel.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 26 2018, @03:23PM (2 children)
Good catch. Historically this was common -- my grandfather lived in small town Maine, on a river, with a paper mill (100+ years ago). Every spring the logs that were cut up-river were floated down-river. This was industrial scale, the river was nearly solid with floating logs for weeks. Once the logs were skidded onto the frozen river, the transport downriver in the spring was "free"...until they formed a log jam. These were very dangerous (and possibly expensive) to un-jam.
Also, the loggers came down river after camping out in the woods all winter--with their accumulated pay. First they got drunk, then the shop keepers would lock their doors after the shop was full of drunks with money to spend -- no way out, so the drunks would spend more money! I'm sure there was plenty of prostitution as well, but those stories weren't passed down...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 26 2018, @08:01PM (1 child)
Huh, don't think I'd really wanna lock up a bunch of drunk loggers. What did they do when one wanted out??
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 26 2018, @09:50PM
Don't know, but my guess is they were happy loggers at first. These are guys that haven't seen any kind of store since autumn and have a wad of cash. After taking a suitable amount of money off them I suppose the shop keepers opened the doors again...before they had a store full of unhappy loggers??
Also, there is a good chance that some were "company stores" (although that detail didn't come with the story either).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 26 2018, @09:32PM (1 child)
Look for hydrothermal upgrading, it's basically changing wood (and other wet organic materials) into crude oil.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 26 2018, @09:56PM
How is hydrothermal upgrading in terms of efficiency?
Is it better than ethanol from corn? This is reputed to be somewhere close to a wash, costs as much energy to grow/make as it releases when burned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 27 2018, @04:27AM (1 child)
just take a liiiiitle bit longer to settle the balance...
There is no good way to produce energy. Solar could be good in the future, now panels are still too weak and short lived and require maintenance. And if we perfected cold fusion people would literally tear this planet apart with the new surge of energy. For now conservation is the only good choice, electricity price should be 10 times higher and large industries which currently get cheaper power should instead pay more. That alone would pretty much solve all our problems.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 27 2018, @02:42PM
> There is no good way to produce energy.
How about every one of us uses the energy we can produce ourselves -- a hundred watts or so for an average person on a pedaled generator (Jocks can do more). While it's not much relative to the ~200 "energy slaves" that we routinely use in N. America, it's hard to argue that this isn't a "good way to produce energy". http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comic/energy-slaves/ [stuartmcmillen.com]
> electricity price should be 10 times higher
How old are you? If you're a kid then this may happen in your lifetime, and I don't think you are going to like that world (unless you are a very rich kid...)