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I think the implication is that it's not necessarily better than coal because burning forests is only carbon neutral on a very long time scale. Eventually the

I think the implication is that it's not necessarily better than coal because burning forests is only carbon neutral on a very long time scale. Eventually the cycle of harvesting trees, burning the wood, and planting more trees is carbon-neutral (minus any carbon from logging and transportation). But, if the process starts with logging existing forests, this releases carbon (more than coal). It would be "better" to burn coal and plant new trees than to burn wood and plant new trees. This would result in more land being forested - but that's the point.

KptMarchewa 5y ago
> This would result in more land being forested Why? This is an additional variable. You can add additional area in both cases. Why would burning coal add some land that you can plant new forests, and burning wood not?
- pjc50 5y ago
  Bear in mind that in Europe "plant new forest" means "change land use from agriculture" or "change non-forest ecosystem such as moorland to forest". There's isn't a lot of land that's just spare.
  - KptMarchewa 5y ago
    I know, that's why I disagree with premise that we can burn coal and magically find new land for forests.
- i_am_proteus 5y ago
  It's a hypothetical to make the comparison apples-to-apples. But also: for biomass to be carbon neutral compared to some baseline, there would need to be no net change in living biomass. While there's a net negative in living biomass, the cycle is not carbon neutral. The time scales are long enough that it makes a difference. In extremis, coal is not considered renewable or carbon-neutral even though, in s very technically-correct-is-the-worst-kind-of-correct sense, it is.
  - KptMarchewa 5y ago
    > It's a hypothetical to make the comparison apples-to-apples. It's not apples to apples when you magically find some new land that does not exist in the other scenario.Biomass is not carbon neutral very short term, but coal never is. There are some species that grow very fast - replenishment is not a very long term perspective: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_rotation_coppice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_rotation_coppice
    - nuerow 5y ago
      > Biomass is not carbon neutral very short term (...) Well, mankind has been outputting industrial emissions for the last, say, two centuries. It's very safe to assume that most managed forests around have been capturing anthropogenic CO2 emissions for the last century or so.
    - agent327 5y ago
      I take offense at that. Yes, you might be achieving the holy grail of storing carbon, but a collection of identical, equidistant trees with barely any other form of life between them is not a forest, it's a soul-crushing horror show.
      - uuidgen 5y ago
        Compare that to a strip mine and it is way smaller horror. It can create place to live for animals, it can reduce particulates in the air. It's not a normal long-living forest that is grown for wood for 80-100+ years but it's still way better than burning coal.
      - KptMarchewa 5y ago
        It's not a forest. It's a field, the same as wheat or corn, just that the product is different.
nuerow 5y ago
> I think the implication is that it's not necessarily better than coal because burning forests is only carbon neutral on a very long time scale. I find this assertion to be very hard to believe. Biomass is the epitome of a renewable energy source. You gather dead vegetation or chop down trees, you burn them to generate power, you plant them again and wait for it to grow. Rinse and repeat. Coal is the exact opposite. Moreover, biomass implies recovering carbon from the atmosphere, while coal implies digging it out of the ground and dumping it into the atmosphere. Care to present any evidence or rationale that supports your claim and lends it any credibility? I suspect that what makes your claim utterly unbelievable is making the mistake of succumbing to a kind of "slippery slope" argument, where you feel the need to go a all-or-nothing route and extrapolate what it would take to scale biomass to provide the totality of Al energy needs. In reality, biomass is scaled the other way around: project how much biomass can be realistically provided by a managed forrest, and adjust the biomass plant to meet it's needs.
- dcolkitt 5y ago
  Renewable is a misnomer that goes back to the early environmentalist movement. In those days the concern was about running out of energy resources, not climate change. Today we’re drowning in energy, but have a surfeit of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. We should Chuck the “renewable” nomenclature from the discourse as fast as possible. We don’t care about renewable we care about carbon neutral. Nuclear is non-renewable but carbon neutral, which makes it far superior to wood which is renewable but carbon spewing.
  - someguydave 5y ago
    Nuclear fission actually is somewhat renewable in the sense that you can recycle most spent fuel through a breeder reactor and reuse it.
  - nuerow 5y ago
    > Renewable is a misnomer that goes back to the early environmentalist movement. In those days the concern was about running out of energy resources, not climate change. Today we’re drowning in energy, but have a surfeit of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. I'm sorry but your post reads like a non-sequitur on semantics, and I fail to see how it adds anything to the discussion. Biomass is renewable in any of the senses you discussed: in the sense of replenishing energy sources, and in the sense of not contributing to emissions as it's role in the carbon cycle is closed.
Retric 5y ago
EU population growth rate is sub 0.2% per year, combined with increasing agricultural output and there is actually quite a bit of land available for reforestation. As to burning forests, fast growth wood can be harvested in decades not centuries. The goal is burning for energy not high density wood for construction. Plus burning wood releases energy from both hydrogen bonds and carbon bonds which means you get more energy per lb of CO2. Managed forests are actually a very reasonable use for available land economically vs traditional farming as they don’t need anything close to the same kinds of subsides. In terms of energy you can hit up to the equivalent of ~60,000 tons of coal per year per square mile, that adds up fast. There are definitely ways to capture more energy, but wood is cheap and scales.
- SiempreViernes 5y ago
  > As to burning forests, fast growth wood can be harvested in decades not centuries. Yes, but the main problem being pointed to here is the logging of old forests (they are nature preserves), this isn't about the fast industrial tree plantations of marginal ecological value.
- philipkglass 5y ago
  Where can you grow 60,000 tons of coal equivalent per square mile per year? In the US, the absolute upper end for forestry biomass is more like 6000 and that's in a tiny fraction of land areas. A "good" but unexceptional location would yield closer to 400. Biomass is nice because you can turn it into chemicals and stored fuel, but the areal power output is very low.
  - Retric 5y ago
    60,000 is kind of the extreme outlier. Melia dubia for example is 44m3 of wood per acre above ground biomass in the right conditions. That’s 28,000m3 per year per square mile, but a few methods which aren’t currently cost effective like extracting the root ball can apparently boost it further.
wongarsu 5y ago
> It would be "better" to burn coal and plant new trees than to burn wood and plant new trees. From a purely CO2 perspective, trees are just stores of carbon, just like coal. I don't get how one is better to burn than the other? If anything that should come out in favor of burning trees, because wood contains more hydrogen bonds (that oxidize to H2O instead of CO2) and because newly planted trees grow much better in logged forests than they do in coal mines.
- dvdkhlng 5y ago
  The difference is that coal contains carbon that has been locked inside the earth's surface for at least a few million years (if not longer). Trees on the other hand contain carbon that those trees extracted from atmospheric CO2 while growing. Burning those trees merely returns CO2 to the atmosphere that was taken from it a few decades ago. If you do that in a balanced way (growing the same amount of trees that you burn at any point of time), you may create a cycle that does not affect long-term atmospheric CO2 concentration.
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
My rule of thumb is, if a story vaguely implies that something is worse than coal/oil/anything made by a big pocketed corporation, but they dont come out and directly state that it is, ideally with sources, but just continually insinuate, then it's not worse, and the story is corporate propaganda to make alternatives seem futile.

KptMarchewa 5y ago

> This would result in more land being forested Why? This is an additional variable. You can add additional area in both cases. Why would burning coal add some land that you can plant new forests, and burning wood not?

pjc50 5y ago
Bear in mind that in Europe "plant new forest" means "change land use from agriculture" or "change non-forest ecosystem such as moorland to forest". There's isn't a lot of land that's just spare.
- KptMarchewa 5y ago
  I know, that's why I disagree with premise that we can burn coal and magically find new land for forests.
i_am_proteus 5y ago
It's a hypothetical to make the comparison apples-to-apples. But also: for biomass to be carbon neutral compared to some baseline, there would need to be no net change in living biomass. While there's a net negative in living biomass, the cycle is not carbon neutral. The time scales are long enough that it makes a difference. In extremis, coal is not considered renewable or carbon-neutral even though, in s very technically-correct-is-the-worst-kind-of-correct sense, it is.
- KptMarchewa 5y ago
  > It's a hypothetical to make the comparison apples-to-apples. It's not apples to apples when you magically find some new land that does not exist in the other scenario.Biomass is not carbon neutral very short term, but coal never is. There are some species that grow very fast - replenishment is not a very long term perspective: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_rotation_coppice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_rotation_coppice
  - nuerow 5y ago
    > Biomass is not carbon neutral very short term (...) Well, mankind has been outputting industrial emissions for the last, say, two centuries. It's very safe to assume that most managed forests around have been capturing anthropogenic CO2 emissions for the last century or so.
  - agent327 5y ago
    I take offense at that. Yes, you might be achieving the holy grail of storing carbon, but a collection of identical, equidistant trees with barely any other form of life between them is not a forest, it's a soul-crushing horror show.
    - uuidgen 5y ago
      Compare that to a strip mine and it is way smaller horror. It can create place to live for animals, it can reduce particulates in the air. It's not a normal long-living forest that is grown for wood for 80-100+ years but it's still way better than burning coal.
    - KptMarchewa 5y ago
      It's not a forest. It's a field, the same as wheat or corn, just that the product is different.

nuerow 5y ago

> I think the implication is that it's not necessarily better than coal because burning forests is only carbon neutral on a very long time scale. I find this assertion to be very hard to believe. Biomass is the epitome of a renewable energy source. You gather dead vegetation or chop down trees, you burn them to generate power, you plant them again and wait for it to grow. Rinse and repeat. Coal is the exact opposite. Moreover, biomass implies recovering carbon from the atmosphere, while coal implies digging it out of the ground and dumping it into the atmosphere. Care to present any evidence or rationale that supports your claim and lends it any credibility? I suspect that what makes your claim utterly unbelievable is making the mistake of succumbing to a kind of "slippery slope" argument, where you feel the need to go a all-or-nothing route and extrapolate what it would take to scale biomass to provide the totality of Al energy needs. In reality, biomass is scaled the other way around: project how much biomass can be realistically provided by a managed forrest, and adjust the biomass plant to meet it's needs.

dcolkitt 5y ago
Renewable is a misnomer that goes back to the early environmentalist movement. In those days the concern was about running out of energy resources, not climate change. Today we’re drowning in energy, but have a surfeit of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. We should Chuck the “renewable” nomenclature from the discourse as fast as possible. We don’t care about renewable we care about carbon neutral. Nuclear is non-renewable but carbon neutral, which makes it far superior to wood which is renewable but carbon spewing.
- someguydave 5y ago
  Nuclear fission actually is somewhat renewable in the sense that you can recycle most spent fuel through a breeder reactor and reuse it.
- nuerow 5y ago
  > Renewable is a misnomer that goes back to the early environmentalist movement. In those days the concern was about running out of energy resources, not climate change. Today we’re drowning in energy, but have a surfeit of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. I'm sorry but your post reads like a non-sequitur on semantics, and I fail to see how it adds anything to the discussion. Biomass is renewable in any of the senses you discussed: in the sense of replenishing energy sources, and in the sense of not contributing to emissions as it's role in the carbon cycle is closed.

Retric 5y ago

EU population growth rate is sub 0.2% per year, combined with increasing agricultural output and there is actually quite a bit of land available for reforestation. As to burning forests, fast growth wood can be harvested in decades not centuries. The goal is burning for energy not high density wood for construction. Plus burning wood releases energy from both hydrogen bonds and carbon bonds which means you get more energy per lb of CO2. Managed forests are actually a very reasonable use for available land economically vs traditional farming as they don’t need anything close to the same kinds of subsides. In terms of energy you can hit up to the equivalent of ~60,000 tons of coal per year per square mile, that adds up fast. There are definitely ways to capture more energy, but wood is cheap and scales.

SiempreViernes 5y ago
> As to burning forests, fast growth wood can be harvested in decades not centuries. Yes, but the main problem being pointed to here is the logging of old forests (they are nature preserves), this isn't about the fast industrial tree plantations of marginal ecological value.
philipkglass 5y ago
Where can you grow 60,000 tons of coal equivalent per square mile per year? In the US, the absolute upper end for forestry biomass is more like 6000 and that's in a tiny fraction of land areas. A "good" but unexceptional location would yield closer to 400. Biomass is nice because you can turn it into chemicals and stored fuel, but the areal power output is very low.
- Retric 5y ago
  60,000 is kind of the extreme outlier. Melia dubia for example is 44m3 of wood per acre above ground biomass in the right conditions. That’s 28,000m3 per year per square mile, but a few methods which aren’t currently cost effective like extracting the root ball can apparently boost it further.

wongarsu 5y ago

> It would be "better" to burn coal and plant new trees than to burn wood and plant new trees. From a purely CO2 perspective, trees are just stores of carbon, just like coal. I don't get how one is better to burn than the other? If anything that should come out in favor of burning trees, because wood contains more hydrogen bonds (that oxidize to H2O instead of CO2) and because newly planted trees grow much better in logged forests than they do in coal mines.

dvdkhlng 5y ago
The difference is that coal contains carbon that has been locked inside the earth's surface for at least a few million years (if not longer). Trees on the other hand contain carbon that those trees extracted from atmospheric CO2 while growing. Burning those trees merely returns CO2 to the atmosphere that was taken from it a few decades ago. If you do that in a balanced way (growing the same amount of trees that you burn at any point of time), you may create a cycle that does not affect long-term atmospheric CO2 concentration.

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

My rule of thumb is, if a story vaguely implies that something is worse than coal/oil/anything made by a big pocketed corporation, but they dont come out and directly state that it is, ideally with sources, but just continually insinuate, then it's not worse, and the story is corporate propaganda to make alternatives seem futile.