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However, while carbon neutral from trees would have been great in the past and hopefully will be again in the future, right now it’s not our saviour because it

However, while carbon neutral from trees would have been great in the past and hopefully will be again in the future, right now it’s not our saviour because it takes decades to rebind the carbon in a new tree and we don’t have decades anymore. So it’s like natural gas, a marginally better thing than coal and oil but still not great. Same with carbon offsets from planting trees, it might be fine to require planting trees for every flight or something but it really should not be used to “offset” the emissions because it won’t.

TameAntelope 5y ago
That's not true though, because it's not 1:1 -- we don't burn one tree, pause, plant a new tree, we burn millions of trees while many more millions of other trees are simultaneously being grown and are at various stages of maturity, only a handful of which (relatively) will be burned for fuel like this. The carbon from the tree burned can be absorbed by all the other, currently growing, trees.
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
If the sawdust and twigs was just going to be dumped to rot, then it would give off methane, so similar to food composting, burning that output can be GHG negative. Its not going to be a primary source of power, because solar and wind are so ridiculously cheap and scalable, but every little bit helps in the short term. Once fossil fuels are elimanted it'll make sense to do other things with them, rather than burn them.