22 ms·

The absurdity of Europe burning wood for energy

• aaron695 4y ago
  Can anyone explain this - https://vt.tiktok.com/ZSRu9ejDM/ https://vt.tiktok.com/ZSRu9ejDM/ Are they seriously burning round bales that could be used for feed for heating? The comments flip flop a lot, some say it's useless for feed but it kinda looks ok. But even if it was used for something else, to change over to burning it is concerning.
  • cdot2 4y ago
    I don't see any reason that bail couldn't be used to feed animals.
    • cmrdporcupine 4y ago
      It can't be used to feed animals because it's literally inedible. It's straw.
    • benj111 4y ago
      Except it's straw. Hay is used for food. Straw is used for bedding.
    • petewailes 4y ago
      It's likely being used in place of a propane set up for heating something like chicken houses, or maybe lambing sheds if it's somewhere cold. Propane bills generally run about $30-60k for a decent sized operation, whereas if you burn bales (especially in something designed for it), it'll run you about 25-40% of that, depending on the year and price of straw. It's a cheap source of likely locally available fuel.
  • exar0815 4y ago
    This is straw, not hay or silage. Most straw is just used as ground cover in stables or re-tilled into the ground. What you are confusing it is round bales of hay packed to turn into fermented silage. So this is not feedstock, but just utility material.
  • formerly_proven 4y ago
    That’s not for feeding but straw for bedding. Hay is in very short demand these days. Straw is probably doing ok.
  • markvdb 4y ago
    Burning straw is a fairly common practice indeed. Don't confuse hay and straw. Straw can't be used for feeding animals. It's low nitrogen, high carbon/cellulose. Some houses are built out of straw, not hay for a reason...
  • johnchristopher 4y ago
    https://agriflame.com/#howitworks https://agriflame.com/#howitworks (hay) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9rZzgkq2OQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9rZzgkq2OQ (straw) https://www.wattagnet.com/articles/1876-growers-build-a-hay-burning-furnace https://www.wattagnet.com/articles/1876-growers-build-a-hay-... (hay) https://www.tractorbynet.com/forums/threads/burning-hay-for-fuel.236479/ https://www.tractorbynet.com/forums/threads/burning-hay-for-... (hay) Well. It's a thing. edit: ooooh, there's a difference between straw and hay !
  • xani_ 4y ago
    Well, it's pretty low density for heating, furnace that big isn't exactly practical for anything else but some industry building
  • cmrdporcupine 4y ago
    The comments do not flip flop. There is no ambiguity here. It's straw. You can tell because it is yellow. It's inedible. Hay = Preserved food for animals. Made from whole grasses and legumes. Hay is green/brown. Straw = not food. Made from the stalks (waste product) of wheat, barley, rice, etc. Use for livestock bedding, insulation, construction material, mulch. Or burned like wood. Usually yellow. Entirely different product. Only thing they have in common is that they both come in the form of bales.
• Proven 4y ago
  Yes and no. There is no better way to train sheeple - and in fact get their support - digital IDs, "personalized carbon allowance" and other components of EU's Big Leap Forward. 15 years ago Maoist policies and Soviet-style rationing in the EU seemed completely impossible. Now it's becoming a matter of necessity. WEF has some nice ideas in store for you guys!
  • redeeman 4y ago
    just for curiosity, who is the "you guys"? who is not included?
    • Proven 4y ago
    • jokethrowaway 4y ago
      Obviously people inside Europe
      • redeeman 4y ago
        so it doesnt cover the USA for example?
  • TheGigaChad 4y ago
• pas 4y ago
  Aaaand it's directly bad for our health too. Air quality in winter is absolutely shit around houses that burn wood. easily more people die - probably in every leg of this biomass face (logging and transportation are both notoriously accident prone industries, and neither of them are kind to the human body, and flying ash at the place of burning) every year than died due to the Chernobyl disaster.
  • formerly_proven 4y ago
    I keep telling people that and all I ever get in response is denial and „oh but the fireplace makes such a nice warmth“. People also don’t understand you can’t regulate the output of fireplaces short-term. „Oh it’s getting hot in here, I’m gonna close the air supply” - and boom you’ve turned subpar unclean combustion into oxygen-starved combustion. Good job! But wood is CO2 neutral /s
    • jeffparsons 4y ago
      You may enjoy this old piece by Sam Harris on what he calls The Fireplace Delusion: https://www.samharris.org/blog/the-fireplace-delusion https://www.samharris.org/blog/the-fireplace-delusion
    • exmadscientist 4y ago
      To be fair, wood-burning fireplaces are fine as long as they're used only for special occasions. (Think Christmas dinner and that sort of thing.) But any urban wood-burning fireplace or stove that's used regularly is a real problem in this day and age.
      • thrwyoilarticle 4y ago
        In that case I don't think anyone would bother to have it properly cleaned - a safety risk - and you just end up with the chimney acting as a source of heat and air loss when it's not being used.
        • 4y ago
• VoodooJuJu 4y ago
  I simply don't understand, why can't twitter people just make a proper blog post and then link to it from a twitter post?
  • nivenkos 4y ago
    Yeah, with Zola, Hyde, etc. and Github pages there's really no excuse. Makes it so hard to refer to in the future.
  • jacooper 4y ago
    In General, getting People to click on a link in Twitter is actually very hard. So threads are simple, easy, and are in the same app you know and love(use).
  • Georgelemental 4y ago
    The poster also has a paid Substack blog: https://doomberg.substack.com/ https://doomberg.substack.com/
• seydor 4y ago
  Does not trump the absurdity of heavily subsidizing an american EV company in order to buy their cars, then telling users not to charge them during the winter. As an EU-country citizen I am concerned by the dominance of political appearances in all the workings of EU since before the pandemic. Insisting in formerly-popular CO2 deadlines in the face of long-lasting ukraine war is absurd. Phasing out ICE cars too early is absurd. Subsidizing buying EVs throughout europe, even though many countries clearly can't support the future EV load is absurd. Fining power production through coal is absurd, as is not having a nuclear strategy. Keeping the marginal pricing of wholesale energy during war, is absurd. Begging the dictator of azerbaijan for oil at the same time that they are attacking their neighbor, while also sanctioning russia for doing the same thing, is absurd. Ursula VdL is a bad leader, and Charles Michel (president of the council) has recently publicly called her out for her bad leadership in energy. This EU that we see now is unrecognizable: inward-looking, woefully stuck in its own processes and populist obsessions, preoccupied with appearances (e.g. demanding gas and and even power cuts from countries that are NOT dependent on russia), and complete lack of vision. I am personally thankful to the US for taking initiative in nearly all fronts: arming ukraine, providing LNG to northern europe, coordinating sanctions and even Pelosi showing her support for democracy in the region.
  • spoiler 4y ago
  • smokel 4y ago
    You make it sound as if it is possible to simply toggle some checkboxes to change policy. A lot of people are invested in previous policies, and change is not always easy. The path forward is a very complex one, starting with the problem that not everyone agrees on the direction of forward. So, at the surface things may seem absurd, but if you try to untangle the underlying problems, it is probably more absurd to expect change so easily. And it is perhaps not reasonable to hold leaders accountable for the mess that they are trying to clean up.
    • koheripbal 4y ago
      They toggled off their nuclear program, and even today the heads of those remaining nuclear plants are saying they can remain open. ...yet German re-committed to turn them off this year. There is some significant stupidity happening in Europe's energy policy.
• jhoechtl 4y ago
  Who is this poster? And why is he/she amassing so many words of almost total blunder on a plattform totally inadequate to engage in any meaningful discussion? Actually its hard for me to start counterarguing as almost anything is wrong. For one the criticism that fuel wood is inadequate as it is not energy dense. Well that's right, coal, gas, petroleum are denser as is uranium. It's not about density but fit for purpose. The energy source of cars is also not uranium. And while we are at it, the density of EVs batteries is about a third of gas or diesel. Using wood as a source of fuel is sensible given that the rate it is burnt equals the rate of re-forrestation AND we are starting from a sensible equilibrium. Brasil's rainforest is maybe out of equilibrium. Forrest's throughout Europe are in a net plus since about 1920.
  • dudul 4y ago
    Unrelated to the main topic, but you may be onto something. I always wondered why people keep creating these 20+ tweet long threads, going on and on with fluff and useless words just to make a trivial point. After reading your comment, I now think that it may be to avoid counter arguments. The way Twitter displays threads and replies makes it very hard to rebute talking points in a cohesive and organized way.
    • VLM 4y ago
      For many, social media has become a form of prayer. Public ritualistic sayings and actions to create a better world, although no one is listening. Instead of 5 hail marys, post a 30 parter.
  • Naga 4y ago
    Doomberg is also on substack: https://doomberg.substack.com/ https://doomberg.substack.com/ If the only metrics on sensibility of fuel is the rate of re-forestation, sure burning wood makes sense, but that's not the only metric. It's heavy and hard to transport and its dirty, both in the micro environment (soot) and the macro (CO2). It's also way less convenient than other forms of heating. Remember: Europe is going through an energy crisis and is replacing mostly natural gas and electric heating with wood. Turning the furnace on with a switch isn't really the same thing as maintaining a wood stove.
• alkonaut 4y ago
  Burning wood should be done close to where it's grown, it should be burning only forests grown for the purpose and not important biotopes, and it should be burned in industrial burners with good efficiency and filtering, not in households. Pretty simple. I'm guessing e.g. Britain or France shouldn't be burning almost any wood for energy, but I can't see much problems with Finland doing so.
• benj111 4y ago
  I wouldn't say it's a definite bad thing as part of the energy mix. There's always going to be waste biomass, we have power stations capable of burning it, it's easily storable and dispatch able. I suppose the key is scale and where the material is coming from. Id also argue with the carbon neutrality position. Yes it may not be carbon neutral today. But that's because the other things haven't been made carbon neutral yet. It's like saying EVs aren't green because of the dirty grid. True, but as the grid greens so do the cars. We can't just switch everything over overnight, so inevitably there are going to be 'green' things today that rely on fossil fuels. I also don't get why it's backwards looking to rely on less dense energy. Wind is less dense, as is solar, as is hydro as is the energy input for heat pumps, as is the energy density of batteries. Are we going to replace these with uranium or wait for fusion? There's a reason we switched to energy dense fuels, yes. But there's a reason we're switching away too.
• ravenstine 4y ago
  > A single pellet of uranium fuel no bigger than your fingertip provides as much energy as a ton of coal (and certainly even more wood). How many trees will be clearcut before this boondoggle of absurdity is stopped? Nuclear energy is the best answer we have so far, but the problem with nuclear energy is it doesn't require human beings to sacrifice anything. Unlike vastly inferior technologies like solar and wind, nuclear does not limit civilization. Nuclear energy doesn't force you to cut back your usage. Many environmentalist causes and activism around climate change would be obsolete, and people don't like being obsolete, especially when their activism is their theology.
  • pluijzer 4y ago
    Are you stating that the environmental activists that are against nuclear energie are not so because of the possible dangerous but simply because it might be a solution and that would make them obsolete? I am sorry but that argument rings as absurd to me.
    • im3w1l 4y ago
      Without saying that that is what it is about, I want to point out that such a thing would not be unprecedented. Supposedly, "roughly 100 U.S. firefighters are convicted of arson each year." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefighter_arson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefighter_arson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factitious_disorder_imposed_on_another https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factitious_disorder_imposed_on... (Aka Munchhausen by Proxy)
    • ravenstine 4y ago
      Of course environmentalists believe in possible dangers. Whether those dangers are acceptable or even real is a different matter. But yeah, when people dedicate their lives to something, anything really, facts and logic have a poor track record at convincing people to change their minds. If that's news to you, then I'm really not sure what else to say other than that you might benefit from learning more about human psychology.
      • 4y ago
• tppiotrowski 4y ago
  I agree with the gist of this thread but just wanted to clarify that there is a significant difference between fireplaces, wood stoves and utility scale pellet combustion. A fireplace is only about 20% efficient where as a wood stove closer to 80%. The fireplace loses a lot of heat out the chimney while the wood stove is metal and radiates heat well. At utility scale efficiencies are even better. Not all wood burning results in the type of smoke you get from lighting a damp log in a fireplace. Edit: But yes, the post-justification of this as being green smells of appeasing a political class.
• _vbnz 4y ago
  It's crazy, we could have harnessed nuclear power and solved these issues. We should be throwing everything have at solving Nuclear Fusion too. Fossil fuels are a limited resource and the energy return on energy invested is only going to get worse. We need to use this short period of easy abundant energy to find newer sources of energy (i.e. nuclear fusion, modern nuclear fission (breeder reactors and thorium, etc.) and deployed photovoltaic cells, hydroelectric dams, geothermal plants, electric transport and industry, etc. We have the capability, and yet decades of neoliberalism have made governments and the public terrified of any medium to long-term investment. So we've chosen a new Dark Age instead.
  • diegoholiveira 4y ago
    > We have the capability, and yet decades of neoliberalism have made governments and the public terrified of any medium to long-term investment. So we've chosen a new Dark Age instead. IMO, democracy is the enemy of long-term investment. Why start something that will not directly benefit me or my party in the next election? The incentives to long-term investments are almost zero under the logic of elections.
    • jokethrowaway 4y ago
      That's true, western government have an incentive to keep their power and don't do anything.. I wouldn't swap my incompetent western government for China, but the Chinese dictatorship definitely has long term vision. I think eliminating the government and letting companies come up with initiatives (and be rewarded in cash) is the only valid alternative to a dictatorship.
• WA 4y ago
  Thing is, it‘s true in essence, but talking about this stuff without numbers is completely pointless. It is written in a sensationalist way. 1. Subsidies for wood pellets were a thing but are phased out in Germany. 2. The awareness of some stupid calculations of burning wood come up quite frequently in the German media (the Twitter thread is like 2-3 years late). 3. There are no numbers in the thread about the carbon emitted in the process of producing and shipping wood pellets. 4. Not all wood burned in Germany is wood from the US. 5. Not all stoves in Germany are utterly bad. The tech advanced in recent years. 6. The comparison with coal is kinda dumb, because we had different goals a hundred years ago. - I personally think burning wood in housing areas should be banned entirely for health reasons. - I think the general gist of the thread is true: burning wood is at least partially some kind of green washing scheme. - But the reality is more complex than this thread claims.
  • arghwhat 4y ago
    > I personally think burning wood in housing areas should be banned entirely for health reasons ... Well yes, the entire point is that it's incredibly polluting, even more so than all the other fuels we're trying to supplant. Especially silly when countries simultaneously are trying to shut down nuclear, going from as green as we can practically do (fewest deaths and fewest resources per TWh) to as bad as it can realistically get (by same metrics). The only worse source of energy I can think of would be people burning their own trash as-is.
    • Retric 4y ago
      Grid solar has both fewer deaths than Nuclear and uses fewer resources like water, thus the lower costs. Rooftop solar is dangerous because people are putting stuff on roofs and can fall off in the process, so rooftop solar probably shouldn’t be subsidized IMO.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      • WHATDOESIT 4y ago
• oreilles 4y ago
  The single argument in that tweet list is that wood not locally sourced requires transormation and transportation, making its use as a heat source not carbon neutral. Maybe this applies to the UK. But in France, 30% of our land are forests, and these covers 100% of our firewood supplies. In this context, yes, using wood for heat is viable, renewable and (very close to) carbon neutral. As always in this kind of misinformation posts, the author seems to forget that transformation and transportation is also needed for coal. Even at its peak production, France was still dependant on other countries for its supply. Not to mention the impact on both public health and the environment being the primary reason why we stopped mining it at all. Yes, particle pollution is a concern, but burning wood for heat is forbidden anyway in dense areas, and not once in our neighborhood where most houses have wood stove did it ever cause any problem - which it definely could have, since we actually moved to the countryside because of city pollution related health issues my sister were having.
• dredmorbius 4y ago
  Threadreader: <https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1571063488860286977.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1571063488860286977.html>
• dkjaudyeqooe 4y ago
  We burn wood for heating and it makes perfectly good sense environmentally and economically. I live in a small village surrounded by scrub and smaller to medium size trees. Typically we rent some land (or use our own) and chop down what is there, or find fallen trees on public land, for use in our central heating wood furnace. It's not old growth forest, it grows back in a few years, and as a result we're not burning fossil fuels. And if you don't mind a bit of labor, it's cheap.
  • usrusr 4y ago
    Immediately stops making sense when you try to scale it to anything beyond what would be possible sourcing from basically walkable distances. (also: you can rent land, scrub it clean, then return it bare without the owner minding?)
    • dkjaudyeqooe 4y ago
      > you can rent land, scrub it clean, then return it bare without the owner minding That's the idea, he's renting it for firewood. So we might rent it for 3 years during which time we'll have wood for 3 winters then return it to him cleared. We use a tractor, which of course burns diesel but that's only a few liters. The wood is maybe 2 to 5 kms away. It still makes sense compared to using fossil fuels or (local gas based) electricity.
      • usrusr 4y ago
        Ok, so "renting" is more a term for "buying the harvest, but we have to do the harvesting ourselves". Perfectly makes sense in an environment where that's a regular occurrence, but here in isolation it sounds a bit like "I live in hotel rooms: it's not actually that expensive, if you put the furniture on eBay at the end of your stay the room almost pays for itself". Thanks for the clarification!
      • gus_massa 4y ago
        >> Immediately stops making sense when you try to scale it to anything beyond what would be possible sourcing from basically walkable distances. More than walkable distances, I think the problem is the population density. It escales until the population is so high that you must reuse the same spot before the tree grow back. How many years you must wait to reuse the same spot? Does the owner plant new trees or they grow naturally? Are you burning the leftovers? I think that similar arrangements were usual, but the idea was to cultivate some crops for a few years after removing the trees. Are you skipping the cultivation phase? Is the land bad for crops?
• sylware 4y ago
  pick your poison: - climate change (oil/gas/wood, germany and japan chose this path). - nuclear wastes (dangerous without competent and honest ppl, france chose this path). - mass and global war/military grade production/deployment of wind turbines/solar everywhere with inefficient energy storage, with ther massive production/recycling/refurbishment/disposal facilities, not forgetting the energy requirements of the whole population reduced by several orders of magnitude (don't think we can match nuclear/fossils/wood everywhere). And this will require massive maintenance. Yeah, need to change the economic system, because it won't probably have any meaning in this context, not saying it currently has any... - finance, until it is mathematically and scientifically proven we cannot do it, ITER and pray we manage to make it work, namely getting enough energy from a chaotic/extremely unstable system (aka plasma physics or weather).
  • goodpoint 4y ago
    No thanks.
  • schroeding 4y ago
    > japan chose this path AFAIK they are contemplating using nuclear again [1] (This is a recent policy shift, though - so we have to see whether or not they stay on this path) [1] https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2022/08/660896401eda-japan-considers-allowing-nuclear-reactors-to-operate-beyond-60-years.html https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2022/08/660896401eda-japa...
• locococo 4y ago
  Wood is a renewable resource and in many countries in europe forest management and wood harvesting are conducted sustainably for hundreds of years. The wood burning heating is also very efficient with special ovens that store the heat of the fire for many hours. I do not have access to the article but I am really curious what makes it so absurd.
  • croo 4y ago
    It states that " Nearly 40% of Europe’s so-called renewable energy is currently obtained by combusting wood, much of it coming from forests in the US." And that uses a lot more co2 than the carbon neutrality of wood implies. I'm in a dire need of a citation on that "coming from USA" part though. I don't know about nation wide deals about pellet based energy sources but there's no way anyone chooses USA made pellet over a local firewood seller for home. And around me (EU) local wood supply can be found like everywhere...
• usrusr 4y ago
  US trees? So that's why it took so long from February 24th until fuel wood prices exploded. I had always assumed that our irresponsible fuel wood imports were coming from the east.
• Reason077 4y ago
  > “the European Union and Britain are incentivizing a return to the primitive concept of burning wood for energy on a massive scale.” This is false, at least for Britain. Subsidies for new biomass plants were ended some time ago. One large plant, Drax, receives subsidies because it was converted from coal back in the era when subsidies were still available. But no new ones will be developed.
• bluedino 4y ago
  Remember the corn kernel stove fad in the USA?
• locallost 4y ago
  > Nearly 40% of Europe’s so-called renewable energy is currently obtained by combusting wood, much of it coming from forests in the US. No citation given since the claim is ludicrous.
  • alecco 4y ago
    I don't have a citation but the wood pellet industry even brags about it. First results on a simple search: http://www.woodpellets.com/blog/2014/12/01/where-are-the-wood-pellets-going-a-look-at-global-biomass-exports/ http://www.woodpellets.com/blog/2014/12/01/where-are-the-woo... https://biomassmagazine.com/articles/16371/report-eu-demand-for-wood-pellets-continues-to-grow https://biomassmagazine.com/articles/16371/report-eu-demand-...
    • yorwba 4y ago
      More recent (as in, published September 14, 2022) article from Biomass Magazine https://biomassmagazine.com/articles/19339/eu-vote-allows-biomass-to-continue-to-help-meet-red-goals https://biomassmagazine.com/articles/19339/eu-vote-allows-bi... ... USIPA said in a statement. “Primary woody biomass provides 20 percent of the EU’s renewable energy ... Also: “This new measure will make bioenergy from primary woody biomass the only renewable source not eligible for support, creating an uneven playing field with other solutions, and this is not acceptable,” [Bioenergy Europe] said in a statement.
• mberning 4y ago
  The fact that the solutions to our problems are to simply go without for an indeterminate amount of time is a failure of leadership at the highest levels. Why aren’t our governments funding “Manhattan Project” style programs for energy, food, medicine, etc. ? We should be fast tracking and fully funding dozens of nuclear power plants, desalination plants, etc. No, we can’t do that. But we can decide almost overnight to send billions of dollars to fight a corrupt proxy war which will greatly enrich defense contractors and government cronies.
  • goethes_kind 4y ago
    Amongst other reasons it goes against neoliberal policy. I mean, the same policy that liberalized the energy markets and let the free market decide to source the majority of gas from Russia.
• Joeri 4y ago
  Too bad this twitter thread is completely free of sources. It made looking up the real numbers way more difficult than it needed to be. I was also entirely unsurprised to see a push for nuclear at the end, because the pro-nuclear camp shares with the green NGO's a visceral dislike of proper sourcing of facts. But, ok, let's check just the first tweet that makes factual claims: "Nearly 40% of Europe’s so-called renewable energy is currently obtained by combusting wood, much of it coming from forests in the US." 40%! Wow, that's crazy! If it were true of course. So here's the EC brief on biomass energy in the EU, with data as of 2018 (pre-brexit): https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC109354 https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC1... "Biomass for energy (bioenergy) continues to be the main source of renewable energy in the EU, with a share of almost 60%. The heating and cooling sector is the largest end- user, using about 75% of all bioenergy (see section 1)." So, 60% of renewable energy comes from biomass, but what is biomass? "Forestry accounts for more than 60% of all EU domestic biomass supplied for energy purposes: in 2016, direct supply of woody biomass from forests and other wooded land contributed 32.5% (44 Mtoe), and indirect supply of wood contributed another 28.2% (38 Mtoe). Almost 27% (36 Mtoe) originated from agricultural biomass (equally from agricultural crops and agricultural by-products), with waste (municipal, industrial, etc.) making up the remaining 12.4% (17 Mtoe)." So, that's 60% of wood that is part of the 60% that is biomass, which comes to around 36%. Not quite 40%, but still bad if all of it is unsustainable. And you can clearly see that rounding this number up is where the 40% comes from. Greenpeace by the way uses 35% in their materials, also opposing wood pellets but for different reasons, so you can tell they're drawing from the same source but rounding down instead of up. But, is it unsustainable? What do direct and indirect mean? - "Direct supply of woody biomass from forests and other wooded land for energy generation includes: fellings, residues from fellings (tops, branches, bark, stumps) or landscape management residues (woody biomass from parks, gardens, tree rows, bushes)." - "Indirect supply of woody biomass includes: residues from sawmilling, woodworking, furniture industry (bark, sawdust), by-products of the pulp and paper industry (black liquor, tall oil) or processed fuelwood, post-consumer recycled wood (recycled wood for energy generation, household waste wood)." I would say that the indirect wood does look like it's a sustainable practice, reusing material that otherwise is wasted. And the direct wood includes landscape management residues, which also are clearly material that otherwise would go to waste. So, I would say that if we look at actual felled trees that are used directly for burning, that comes to less than 30% of 60%, or less than 20% of renewable energy that comes from burning actual felled trees. That's already quit a step down from 40%. Alright, but where do those trees come from, and are they unsustainable? Are there really vast amounts of wood pellets being transported from the U.S.? "Biomass supply for bioenergy (i.e. primary energy) in the EU reached 140 Mtoe in 2016. Of this, 96% was sourced from within the EU and the remaining 4% was imported from non-EU countries." "Wood is the most important single source of energy from renewables in many Member States." "Wood pellets have become an important energy carrier traded on a large scale and over long distances, due to their high energy density and stable characteristics. Global production reached 29 million tonnes in 2016, of which more than 50% was produced in the EU. The EU is also the main consumer globally (23 million tonnes, of which 32.6% is consumed in the UK, 9.1% in Italy, 8.7% in Germany, 8.7% in Denmark and 7.4% in Sweden). In some Member States, the consumption of wood pellets relies mostly on imports, e.g. the UK (94.7%) and Italy (81%). Wood pellets are mostly used in the residential sector for heating (in Italy, Austria, etc.) or for electricity production (in the UK, Austria, etc.)." So, not that much is actually imported, and the EU is actually the largest wood pellet producer in the world, and fully a third of the consumption of wood pellets was done by the UK. So, that means that the EU numbers will look better post-brexit. Amusingly, the UK is a nuclear energy proponent. So, that's just the first tweet that makes a factual claim. There are a bunch of others which with a cursory glance look equally dubious. I'll leave it to others to fact check those. So, in conclusion, I would say make of this what you will, but I think it's safe to say that this twitter thread is mostly nonsense.
• ynniv 4y ago
  It's called a stopgap.
• franczesko 4y ago
  Good God - longer threads are dreadful to read on Twitter. This is the worst medium for longer pieces
  • majkinetor 4y ago
    https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1571063488860286977.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1571063488860286977.html
• thrwyoilarticle 4y ago
  The irony of the tweeter complaining about nuclear being shut down in favour of wood is that it's the hand-wringing of environmentalists that caused them to side with fossil fuel companies and make us continue to depend on oil, gas and coal in the first place. Now they're doing it with wood, complaining about imperfect implementations to give up on the concept while we burn gas and make things out of plastic. More demand for sustainable wood means more wood planted means more CO2 captured. More wooden furniture and housebuilding material means more CO2 sequestered. Eventually it will rot but anything that ages and is still needed will be replaced, leading to a constant net reduction in atmospheric CO2, like a capacitor. Fossil fuels are the alternative, not nuclear - and that's the green movement's fault.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • mandmandam 4y ago
    > it's the hand-wringing of environmentalists that caused them to side with fossil fuel companies I'mma stop you right there. It's a safe bet all that noise was sponsored and amplified by fossil fuel companies. MANY environmentalists are pro nuclear. They don't get as much time on the fossil-fuel sponsored airwaves though. Blaming "the green movement" as if it's a monolith, unanimously or even majorly anti-nuclear, means you swallowed the fossil fuel propaganda. Spit it out.
    • thrwyoilarticle 4y ago
      When the green movement makes a party and swallows enough to make being anti-nuclear part of its manifesto, it's a monolith.
      • mandmandam 4y ago
        That is unfortunate, but there are two important points you seem to be missing: 1. The US Green party is NOT the green movement. 2. Even in the US Green party there is a large block of dissent: https://www.greensfornuclear.energy/ https://www.greensfornuclear.energy/
• chris123 4y ago
  The absurdity of political correctness, welcome to the dystopia, self-created, self-imposed, draging everybody down with the ship.
  • morpheos137 4y ago
    Maybe in 50 years if there are historians they can analyse how civilisation was imploded by virtue signalling on social media, wokeness, and gerontocracy. Anyway today buy your foxcon phone, fly the blue and yellow and commute to your advertising fueled job.
• icare_1er 4y ago
  Wherever green leftists are in power (and yes, they drive most of the EU Commission's agenda via their huge influence in Germany), things quickly turn to crap.
  • jokethrowaway 4y ago
    I don't know how many Brexit we need before things change. Electing some retarded politician from your country is pointless: they don't do shit and it's always some random unelected committee making the decision. The only problem is that poor countries can't afford to lose the EU money.
• awiesenhofer 4y ago
  This thread reminds me that twitter STILL doesnt offer you false/fake information as a reason when reporting a tweet... basically anyone can lie and post whatever they dream up (like in this case) without any option for recourse.
  • tppiotrowski 4y ago
    Which information is false/fake?
    • awiesenhofer 4y ago
      Reading some of the other top comments should give you some idea.
• alecco 4y ago
  Context: a couple of days ago the EU voted to keep wood as renewable energy. https://biomassmagazine.com/articles/19339/eu-vote-allows-biomass-to-continue-to-help-meet-red-goals https://biomassmagazine.com/articles/19339/eu-vote-allows-bi... Europe Is Sacrificing Its Ancient Forests for Energy https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/07/world/europe/eu-logging-wood-pellets.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/07/world/europe/... https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11209335/Historic-U-S-southeast-hardwood-forests-threatened-rapacious-11B-wood-pellet-industry.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11209335/Historic-U... https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2022/09/15/2516907/0/en/Wood-Pellets-Market-Expected-to-Surpass-US-26-Billion-by-2032-amid-Rising-Demand-for-Carbon-Neutral-and-Sustainable-Fuel-Future-Market-Insights-Inc.html https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2022/09/15/251690... https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2022/sep/05/burning-forests-energy-renewable-eu-wood-climate https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2022/sep/05/...
• mensetmanusman 4y ago
  War is hell. Absurdity comes along for the ride.
• cpursley 4y ago
  Related humor (from the Swiss): https://twitter.com/ivan_8848/status/1570869727739936773 https://twitter.com/ivan_8848/status/1570869727739936773
• Roark66 4y ago
  Well, I stopped reading here, because it is complete bull** "Nearly 40% of Europe’s so-called renewable energy is currently obtained by combusting wood, much of it coming from forests in the US." I live in Poland and my (self built) house uses a wood pellet heat source. 30% of the surface area of my country is used for woodlands. Most of the wood produced is used by manufacturing industry. One of the byproducts made when manufacturing furniture and other things from wood are shavings, wood chips and wood dust. This can be made into many engineered wood products, but a lot of it is purchased by small manufacturers of wood pellets as fuel. Before I chose a heat source for my house I did enough research to know that the pellets I use (and are mostly accessible here) come from sustainable sources. So if there are countries in Europe that import their fuel wood from US it is not "much of it coming from US".
  • nrjames 4y ago
    I can’t speak for the rest of the US, but there is a lot of wood pellet export happening from North Carolina: https://www.dogwoodalliance.org/2019/10/statement-north-carolina-is-now-the-worlds-largest-wood-pellet-exporter/ https://www.dogwoodalliance.org/2019/10/statement-north-caro... https://www.wfae.org/energy-environment/2021-12-14/as-the-wood-pellet-industry-expands-in-north-carolina-global-debate-ensues https://www.wfae.org/energy-environment/2021-12-14/as-the-wo...
  • jnsaff2 4y ago
    I too live in a country in EU, the forests of which are being chopped down so british chicken farms can claim renewables subsidies. But a quick search will return these things https://theconversation.com/british-power-stations-are-burning-wood-from-us-forests-to-meet-renewables-targets-54969 https://theconversation.com/british-power-stations-are-burni...
  • adolph 4y ago
    The sell on wood pellets is that the pellets are generated from industrial by-products. While that is true, it is also true that some percent is sourced directly from forests (which may or no also be byproduct from forestry activity). I'm not able to find a source to understand the big picture, but my impression is that pellets aren't all from waste. Another selling point for wood pellets is that they are sustainable. That may be true as long as the total use is lower than the growth rate. But sustainable isn't low-carbon. The energy source is still the recombining of carbon and oxygen that some plant broke apart earlier. At best this is carbon neutral atmospherically, at worst it is greenwashing. If you think that none of your personal wood pellets are sourced from the US, then welcome to a globalized commodity market where your purchasing power comes in part by some neighbor of neighbors purchasing from somewhere other than Poland. Do the math on your pellet use. How many acres of trees are needed to sustain your energy operation? If you think that they all come from waste, then multiply that number by 10 to account for the volume used industrially. If Poland is 312,683 square kilometres, and 100,000 are forest, then how much of that can be sustainably harvested? https://e360.yale.edu/features/wood_pellets_green_energy_or_new_source_of_co2_emissions https://e360.yale.edu/features/wood_pellets_green_energy_or_...
• greenthrow 4y ago
  "Nearly 40% of Europe's so-called renewable energy is currently obtained by combusting wood" This is not true. It's just factually false. Flagged accordingly.
• PicassoCTs 4y ago
  They are already stealing wood out of the forests. Brother cut down a tree day before yesterday, cut it up and we walked by that yesterday. Half of it gone already.
• mritun 4y ago
  To all those defending EU’s march towards coal and wood, please remember that India and China will follow the suit :)
• forty 4y ago
  It might be a good point, though I'm under the impression that natural gaz is also not magically collected and arriving in Europe either. So the argument is moot until some fair comparison of number is done.
• mihaaly 4y ago
  An other absurdity is someone having a story and starts to cut it up into short messages. There are much more appropriate ways of spreading thoughts please. We shouldn't cut a tree with a pocket knife and we shouldn't cut a continous story into text messages. (I did not read the twitter stream, I get agitated by this kind of inadequate dissemination)
  • josu 4y ago
    Doomberg has a great substack, and these threads are a great tease. The substack is like $300 per year.
• inglor_cz 4y ago
  "In a farce so perverted and obscene" Wow, that guy is really bloviating. There is a huge dollop of hypocrisy in labeling wood burning as nature friendly, but it has its advantages, too. For example, you do not have to mine it, unlike coal. I grew up in a coalmining region and the work underground is both rather dangerous and has extreme CAPEX requirements; modern mining equipment is expensive. We have a lot of wood in Europe north of the Alps. Just look at the satellite maps of tree cover. It is not a scarce resouce and, unlike coal, it replenishes itself if competently managed. By far the worst problem I personally see with burning wood is the contamination of air with solid particles.
• morpheos137 4y ago
  Many comments in this thread are simplistic and handwaving. Burning wood at mass scale as an energy source is not necessarily carbon neutral just because trees can grow back. Additionally wood is not an energy dense fuel and it is expensive to process and transport. Importing any wood from America to Europe for fuel, regardless the percentage is insane and is the product of greenwashing demagoguery. If wood is such a great fuel source then at least Europeans could source it from their eastern and northern regions which are as heavily forested if not more so as the east coast of the USA. A far better thing for governments to support would be substituting wood and wood based products for plastic in durable structures and packaging.
• imtringued 4y ago
  3/ and 6/ are in direct contradiction of each other, coal was known for centuries, it took an environmental disaster for people to switch to coal even in the presence of superior alternatives.
• ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  I saw a libertarian insulting nuclear fanboys as being too extreme in their communication style the other day. Saying they were more interested in attacking hippies than actually achieving anything. When you've gone so far off course that the Libertarians are trying to pull you back into the realms of acceptable discourse you are in real danger of undermining whatever goal you think you are advocating. Nuclear power? Oh that thing all those angry conspiracy theorists on Twitter like? The ones who hate every other renewable energy with a bizarre passion that borders on religious? And this one's called "Doomberg"? I'll pass on that even before looking into the details thanks.
• PeterStuer 4y ago
  '10/ In a farce so perverted and obscene that it can only be the work of bloated and arrogant bureaucracies, a carbon accounting loophole is causing huge amounts of CO2 to be pumped into the atmosphere today that will take decades to abate using natural means.' That had nothing to do with 'bloated and arrogant bureaucracies', but was the result of highly efficient lobbying and kickbacks by the foresting and incinerator sector.
  • pjkundert 4y ago
  • origin_path 4y ago
    You really think that in a world that'd never heard of global warming, the EU would be burning tons of wood purely due to lobbying by that well known oligopoly of global titans that make up the forestry "industry", such as it is?
• travisgriggs 4y ago
  And in another hat tip to medieval times, essayists now break their long form prose into numerified verse (call long tweets), just like Ye Bibel of Olde.
• erddfre3423 4y ago
• arrabe 4y ago
  take a giant grain of salt when reading Doomberg: Doomberg has a habit of wildly exaggerating and also were openly funding the Canadian "insurrectionist" trucker convoy (not taking a political position just pointing out he has a specific political tint to his tweets sort of like Zero Hedge). Who is he? Well first of all he appears to be parroting a lot of talking points from a specific political spectrum, this much is true, given his open support for the Trucker Convoy movement in Canada which has been associated with the typical antithesis to what the other side of the political spectrum. I'm deliberately refraining from using the term "left" or "right" here, just highlighting that Doomberg amongst other fintwitters (financial twitters) have begun to weaponize analytical financial "findings" by discounting/exaggerating/excluding contradictory data that would hurt their narrative. In the case of Doomberg, his narrative and "analysis" tie together to ring well to a particular ex-president now being investigated for withholding top secret documents that supposedly impact national security. Again, refusing to use terms like "Trump" or "Biden" and being impartial to convey the ilk of which characters like Doomberg are weaponizing what superficially sounds rational with numbers to boot (which when you dive deeper is riddled with obvious omissions, discounts and exclusion) to echo back what his followers who lean in a particular political direction want to hear and buy his newsletter. tldr: Doomberg has a long history of questionable accuracy and partiality to create an echo chamber which he is able to monetize by carefully disguising political narratives of a particular lens (and one which much of HN crowd who are employed at a large company would be alarmed at) in the form of "alpha generating macro economic analysis" (but never materializes).
• BiteCode_dev 4y ago
  The forest in France are growing faster than we are cutting them. Therefore, using them for energy would make for: - a cheap, local energy source; - one that is renewable; - one that captures as much carbon as its consumption emmitted when its renewed (minus transportation and transformation, which is true for any energy source we use). So it seems it's not that of a bad idea if you manage to keep the forest sizeable and healthy. It's hard to do for the UK because it's a small densely populated islande, so maybe the tweet is valid for them, but extending it for all Europe is far fetched. Espacially since the UK brexited. Now, I'm pretty sure if we start abusing it, we will discoverd it kills some important ecosystem to regularly turn over trees like that, or suck all minerals from the the soil. So I'm not going to assume it's without problems, but we don't have an energy source for 8 billions humans that don't have any.
• Cyberdog 4y ago
  I know other people are tearing this apart in other subthreads, but it doesn't look like anyone's addressing the "orgy of deforestation" nugget, so I will. It literally made me laugh out loud. Hello, northern California native here - and I don't mean the Bay Area; I mean the real northern California. You know, that massive area between Sonoma and the Oregon border. I know it's easy to forget it exists, but it's really there! Check out a map! There's all these places called Eureka and Redding and did you know Crescent City is actually the most tsunami-prone spot in the continental United States? Anyway, in this area, there are a lot of coastal redwoods, sequoia sempervirens. And they're harvested for building material and pulp and a whole lot of other useful things, and have been for centuries. Yet the area isn't deforested by any measure of the imagination. How can that be? Because trees are crops. The companies manage the forests; after they harvest some trees, they go back in and plant new ones, and tend to them as they grow. This seeding and tending means they are actually planted more densely and grow more quickly than they do in unmanaged nature. The lumber companies are businesses, and when there's no more trees, there's no more business, so it is actually in their best interest to grow as many trees as possible, as quickly and as densely as possible. There is no "orgy of deforestation" in the United States. Of course the further point, that Europe should embrace nuclear energy, is obviously correct, but the assumptions this person made to get there are so, so stupid.
• ThePowerOfFuet 4y ago
  >Rooftop solar is dangerous because people are putting stuff on roofs and can fall off in the process, so rooftop solar probably shouldn’t be subsidized IMO. What on earth does the installation risk have to do with whether or not it should be subsidized? Reducing reliance on the grid by decentralizing production of energy, and in an environmentally friendly way at that, is definitely a step in the right direction.
• kkfx 4y ago
  Wood is a multi-purpose natural resource, renewable if the demand is not too high, VERY easy to source in most inhabited land. When a crisis happen... Well... We all dream something but we need also to go to war with the weapons we have not those we want. Let's say you have an old, far from being insulated and airtight enough home, in a climate cold enough that you need 10-15-20-30-40+ degrees more inside than outside to be in comfort. You can't count on electricity grid AT LEAST that's what many keep saying, so far without real world cases but... So you can't count on heat-pumps nor gas nor pellet nor essentially 99% of heating gear since they need electricity, even just few W to run. What you can do quickly and cheaply? Burning wood is the most simple, cheap, quick, reliable answer. Oh BTW in most EU wood burning in cities is forbidden, just some Pizzerias are allowed with deep filters for fumes, so 99% of wood burning users are outside cities and outside there is typically a significant amount of trees around so I really doubt anyone buy wood from USA to burn it directly. Instead I think some companies buy it to made pellets, and that's yes an absurdity but also another story. Pellets in theory should ONLY be made from wood waste from other usages (like producing panels, laminated stuff etc) and NOTHING more, but "the market" decide differently for business reasons and the absurdity happen. Said that wood demand have skyrocket for the green new deal, for constructions, witch again is another story.
• thrawn0r 4y ago
  At least Germany is not importing US pellets as stated in the thread.[1] Indeed, Germany is producing more wood pellets than it consumes [2] Wood burning (pellet burning to a lesser degree) can be detrimental due to the small particles, not an issue on the countryside, but in big cities. Germany requires pellet heaters to have particle filters by 2025 (incl. old systems) [1] Last Image of https://depv.de/p/Deutschland-europaweit-bei-Pelletproduktion-fuhrend-4P1oyFG3UMWmnEADk4ZVVY https://depv.de/p/Deutschland-europaweit-bei-Pelletproduktio... [2] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/171887/umfrage/bedarfsabhaengige-pelletproduktion-und-inlandsbedarf-in-deutschland/ https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/171887/umfrag...
• midislack 4y ago
  Lesson here is, listen to Trump next time, ahhh hahahahaha.
• FunnyBadger 4y ago
  Of course it is absurd. The most logical, green and efficient solution is to burn Russian natural gas. But when you have politicians irrationally ignoring the needs of the people they are supposed to represent, this is what will necessarily happen! "The five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, buying Russian gas in rubles."
• dieselgate 4y ago
  There’s some good Twitter content linked to from HN but I feel this post would be better served in a blog format. I’m interested in this particular piece of content but it seems somewhat absurd to me to have at least a dozen sub tweets comprising a single thought list
• spookie 4y ago
  This guy seems to not understand the current context. Wood is cheap and readily available. You know what isn't for this next winter? I don't even have to answer my own question...
• dqpb 4y ago
  How is this cost effective?