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I kept waiting for how coppicing would fit into modern lumber and energy production, it never showed up in the article. I guess they could use the sticks to pro

I kept waiting for how coppicing would fit into modern lumber and energy production, it never showed up in the article. I guess they could use the sticks to produce bamboo like plywood? Maybe chipboard - except that's typically produced from waste products already (I think)? This is probably the key take-away: "Coppicing cannot compete in an economic system that fosters the replacement of human labour with machines powered by fossil fuels" Then the kicker is the last paragraph: "These numbers confirm that it is not biomass energy that’s unsustainable. If the whole of humanity would live as the 40% that still burns biomass regularly, climate change would not be an issue. What is really unsustainable is a high energy lifestyle. We can obviously not sustain a high-tech industrial society on coppice forests and line plantings alone. But the same is true for any other energy source, including uranium and fossil fuels." So, we ramp down our energy use by a couple of orders of magnitude. That's not going to happen.

philipkglass 6y ago
The article has some interesting history but it also misleads by omission. Europe's forests were denuded by hand-tool harvesting of wood well before power tools were invented. The earliest use of coal in European iron making was motivated by charcoal supplies running short due to extensive deforestation. When the article says "two-thirds of the wood that is harvested in developing societies is harvested sustainably" it's also saying "one third of the wood that is harvested in developing societies is harvested unsustainably." Even the very low energy consumption per capita of biomass-reliant populations is not sustainable at modern population densities. Biomass is a very low efficiency method of converting sunlight to energy useful to humans. That's why mainstream scientific and environmental organizations are more interested in solar photovoltaic technology; PV can provide 50 times more useful energy per hectare than biomass. The "high tech" approach is not just fashion-driven technology for technology's sake. https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Biomass_and_Solar_Energy_Yields https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Biomas... https://www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/2018/biomass-and-land-use/ https://www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/2018/biomass-and-land-use/ https://ucanr.edu/sites/WoodyBiomass/files/78993.pdf https://ucanr.edu/sites/WoodyBiomass/files/78993.pdf
- hinkley 6y ago
  You have to factor in the embodied energy into the equation of power per hectare, including replacement and maintenance, and once you’ve done that, ask if the other services provided by agroforestry are ever worth more than the energy from the PV farm that can only be used during the day (or stored, in which case include the embodied and maintenance energy of the storage system, too). We need to stop looking for One Weird Fix. It’s not out there, and /or we keep breaking it by changing the conditions. You will be looking for hedges, and some of those hedges will have stacking functions.
  - philipkglass 6y ago
    We need to stop looking for One Weird Fix. It’s not out there, and/or we keep breaking it by changing the conditions. I'd agree with that. Low Tech Magazine keeps promoting One Weird Fix of "use less complicated technology." In early issues it highlighted a few simple old technologies that were plausibly equal or superior to modern complicated technologies. But it rapidly exhausted plausible candidates. Recent Low Tech Magazine articles are good branching off points for exploring historical technologies but poor at conceiving solutions to the energy and environmental problems we face in the 21st century. They keep highlighting ideas that barely touch on today's largest energy demands or that require far too much land per person. I have a bunch of energy crisis books from the 1970s and they also frequently dreamt of a more rural existence than is now possible for Earth's billions of people. They kept invoking past lifestyles, ignoring how many fewer people there were in the past. The mismatch is even more severe in 2020 than it was in 1974.
    - hinkley 6y ago
      It's a complex problem. They're all complex problems when you have to solve them for 8 billion instead of 80,000 The more we automate the creation of food, water, clothing, and shelter, the fewer people we need to keep the rest of us from starving or freezing to death. What do the rest of us do for a living? Why do we keep going? A very careful dose of pastoralism can address part of that problem. Locally produced goods also tend to have a smaller carbon footprint, so there's something there as well. There are people who think we can fix all of our problems that way, and so far I've carefully avoided having to tell any of them they're wrong. Related to pastoralism is a bigger category: Stewardship. We could keep a lot of people in meaningful work by doing all of the deferred maintenance we're neglecting as we industrialize. Every time we find a new way to Go Fast and Break Things, we should be fixing what we break. Looking at sustainability and lifecycle costs. There's a PR problem with becoming a glorified gardener. It's a janitor with a better class of filth but a higher risk of injury. The hype you see is, fundamentally, trying to raise the 'station' of a whole raft of professions and hobbies. Romanticizing them.
boo_boo 6y ago
> So, we ramp down our energy use by a couple of orders of magnitude. > That's not going to happen. It'll need to happen in order for the escalating effects of climate change to be curbed to any meaningful extent. The focus on renewables and other abstractions away from fossil fuels is a distraction from this fact.
- ben_w 6y ago
  PV can supply in the order of one thousand times current worldwide all-source power consumption, even when the panels are limited to 20% efficiency. Storage and transmission still have room for improvement, but generation by PV is already so cheap that all we have to do to “win” that part of the race is continue the last 30 years of trends in PV deployment for roughly 12 more years.
  - skyfaller 6y ago
    We definitely need to move to solar power. That said, there are some serious issues with the transition. One of them is that constructing and deploying solar panels inevitably produces greenhouse gases, and there is a limit to how much solar power we can produce per year while remaining within our carbon budget (since we are starting the transition so late): https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/04/how-sustainable-is-pv-solar-power.html https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/04/how-sustainable-is-p... As a result, switching to renewables needs to be combined with reducing our energy use, so that renewables can meet our needs without causing the emissions that we are seeking to eliminate on a very short timescale. Reducing energy use, as you might imagine, is a very complex subject. One difficulty is the Jevons Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox If you rely too heavily on the technological solution of energy efficiency, people just use the technology more and energy usage isn't actually reduced. Low-Tech Mag mentions the example of more efficient LED lights leading to the popularization of digital billboards, which use more energy than a regular billboard (but less energy than a digital billboard would have used before LEDs). https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/01/bedazzled-by-energy-efficiency.html https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/01/bedazzled-by-energy-...
Animats 6y ago
"Coppicing cannot compete in an economic system that fosters the replacement of human labour with machines powered by fossil fuels" Do they want to bring back slavery, or serfdom? "How Ya Gonna Keep 'em Down on the Farm After They've Seen Paree?" (1919)
markvdb 6y ago
The article text doesn't refer to it a lot, but it does mention some interesting resources. [0] [0] 10.1016/j.biombioe.2014.11.019

philipkglass 6y ago

The article has some interesting history but it also misleads by omission. Europe's forests were denuded by hand-tool harvesting of wood well before power tools were invented. The earliest use of coal in European iron making was motivated by charcoal supplies running short due to extensive deforestation. When the article says "two-thirds of the wood that is harvested in developing societies is harvested sustainably" it's also saying "one third of the wood that is harvested in developing societies is harvested unsustainably." Even the very low energy consumption per capita of biomass-reliant populations is not sustainable at modern population densities. Biomass is a very low efficiency method of converting sunlight to energy useful to humans. That's why mainstream scientific and environmental organizations are more interested in solar photovoltaic technology; PV can provide 50 times more useful energy per hectare than biomass. The "high tech" approach is not just fashion-driven technology for technology's sake. https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Biomass_and_Solar_Energy_Yields https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Biomas... https://www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/2018/biomass-and-land-use/ https://www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/2018/biomass-and-land-use/ https://ucanr.edu/sites/WoodyBiomass/files/78993.pdf https://ucanr.edu/sites/WoodyBiomass/files/78993.pdf

hinkley 6y ago
You have to factor in the embodied energy into the equation of power per hectare, including replacement and maintenance, and once you’ve done that, ask if the other services provided by agroforestry are ever worth more than the energy from the PV farm that can only be used during the day (or stored, in which case include the embodied and maintenance energy of the storage system, too). We need to stop looking for One Weird Fix. It’s not out there, and /or we keep breaking it by changing the conditions. You will be looking for hedges, and some of those hedges will have stacking functions.
- philipkglass 6y ago
  We need to stop looking for One Weird Fix. It’s not out there, and/or we keep breaking it by changing the conditions. I'd agree with that. Low Tech Magazine keeps promoting One Weird Fix of "use less complicated technology." In early issues it highlighted a few simple old technologies that were plausibly equal or superior to modern complicated technologies. But it rapidly exhausted plausible candidates. Recent Low Tech Magazine articles are good branching off points for exploring historical technologies but poor at conceiving solutions to the energy and environmental problems we face in the 21st century. They keep highlighting ideas that barely touch on today's largest energy demands or that require far too much land per person. I have a bunch of energy crisis books from the 1970s and they also frequently dreamt of a more rural existence than is now possible for Earth's billions of people. They kept invoking past lifestyles, ignoring how many fewer people there were in the past. The mismatch is even more severe in 2020 than it was in 1974.
  - hinkley 6y ago
    It's a complex problem. They're all complex problems when you have to solve them for 8 billion instead of 80,000 The more we automate the creation of food, water, clothing, and shelter, the fewer people we need to keep the rest of us from starving or freezing to death. What do the rest of us do for a living? Why do we keep going? A very careful dose of pastoralism can address part of that problem. Locally produced goods also tend to have a smaller carbon footprint, so there's something there as well. There are people who think we can fix all of our problems that way, and so far I've carefully avoided having to tell any of them they're wrong. Related to pastoralism is a bigger category: Stewardship. We could keep a lot of people in meaningful work by doing all of the deferred maintenance we're neglecting as we industrialize. Every time we find a new way to Go Fast and Break Things, we should be fixing what we break. Looking at sustainability and lifecycle costs. There's a PR problem with becoming a glorified gardener. It's a janitor with a better class of filth but a higher risk of injury. The hype you see is, fundamentally, trying to raise the 'station' of a whole raft of professions and hobbies. Romanticizing them.

boo_boo 6y ago

> So, we ramp down our energy use by a couple of orders of magnitude. > That's not going to happen. It'll need to happen in order for the escalating effects of climate change to be curbed to any meaningful extent. The focus on renewables and other abstractions away from fossil fuels is a distraction from this fact.

ben_w 6y ago
PV can supply in the order of one thousand times current worldwide all-source power consumption, even when the panels are limited to 20% efficiency. Storage and transmission still have room for improvement, but generation by PV is already so cheap that all we have to do to “win” that part of the race is continue the last 30 years of trends in PV deployment for roughly 12 more years.
- skyfaller 6y ago
  We definitely need to move to solar power. That said, there are some serious issues with the transition. One of them is that constructing and deploying solar panels inevitably produces greenhouse gases, and there is a limit to how much solar power we can produce per year while remaining within our carbon budget (since we are starting the transition so late): https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/04/how-sustainable-is-pv-solar-power.html https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/04/how-sustainable-is-p... As a result, switching to renewables needs to be combined with reducing our energy use, so that renewables can meet our needs without causing the emissions that we are seeking to eliminate on a very short timescale. Reducing energy use, as you might imagine, is a very complex subject. One difficulty is the Jevons Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox If you rely too heavily on the technological solution of energy efficiency, people just use the technology more and energy usage isn't actually reduced. Low-Tech Mag mentions the example of more efficient LED lights leading to the popularization of digital billboards, which use more energy than a regular billboard (but less energy than a digital billboard would have used before LEDs). https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/01/bedazzled-by-energy-efficiency.html https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/01/bedazzled-by-energy-...

Animats 6y ago

"Coppicing cannot compete in an economic system that fosters the replacement of human labour with machines powered by fossil fuels" Do they want to bring back slavery, or serfdom? "How Ya Gonna Keep 'em Down on the Farm After They've Seen Paree?" (1919)

markvdb 6y ago

The article text doesn't refer to it a lot, but it does mention some interesting resources. [0] [0] 10.1016/j.biombioe.2014.11.019