The wood pellets are interesting —- if we were growing forests at the same rate as we consume them via the pellets, would it be close enough to a closed loop system?
Even if it was grown in the country it is consumed in, it would eventually suffer the same issues that industrial farming does. The soil becomes depleted and requires fossil-fuel based fertilizer.
Burning the Amazon is now progress, apparently.
Something like fusion, or cleaner nuclear, is our only hope.
I worry about us.
If we (USA) hadn't stopped building nuclear in the 80s, and had merely continued building it at the same pace, our grid would be (approximately) carbon-free today. Not twenty years from now, not fifty years from now, today.
But no, we collectively decided that no amount of engineering could possibly make nuclear acceptably safe, and we made the grown-up responsible decision to pump our atmosphere full of CO2 instead.
Facepalm.
This is such bullshit. We have reactors that are 40 years old still operating safely. And in the 40 years since, safety systems have improved considerably. A modern reactor could probably have a 100 year service life and no accidents.
But such is the world we live in: people are scared of stuff they shouldn't be, and ignorant of all that should scare them.
(They did lose two nuclear powered submarines, the Thresher and Scorpion, but in neither case is a problem with the reactors believed to be the cause. Though the Thresher's reactor is thought to have SCRAMed in response to it's control circuitry being shorted out, causing a loss of propulsion.)
We didn't suddenly forget how to economically build nuclear power plants. What changed was that
> we collectively decided that no amount of engineering could possibly make nuclear acceptably safe
and prices rose without bound to reflect that decision.
For the most part the Amazon is being burned to provide farm and grazing land.
In the 1980's, old growth logging was shut down in my state (Oregon) for environmental reasons. The new growth forests had a long growth cycle, so the two big operators (Georgia Pacific and Louisiana Pacific) moved the bulk of their operations back to the South, where the Southern Pine had a 12 year growth cycle.
I think a reasonable guesstimate would be that the max wood pellet production from renewable forest land would be far less than the input required to convert all the existing coal-fired plants to biomass. It's just one play in what will have to be a multi-faceted approach to green energy.
This is off by a factor of a million, though I think you reached the right conclusion.