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Comment by zajio1am | Hacker News Reader

Not only from fossil fuels. Burning (renewable) wood is significant source of particulate pollution, while burning (fossil) natural gas is not.

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Fair, but hardly relevant in a western context— the push is to close coal-fired power plants in favour of gas and nuclear/solar/wind. No one's talking about a wood-fired power plant, much less pitching it as renewable.

In any case, Schellenberger makes this least-harm argument vigorously in Apocalypse Never, that communities in Africa and India where people are currently burning wood, coal, or even animal dung for heat and cooking must be upgraded as quickly as possible to gas-based infrastructure, and NGOs and celebrities wringing hands about "building new pipelines" to facilitate that as a stepping stone is ridiculous and counterproductive (and ultimately just leads to maintaining the status quo).

> Fair, but hardly relevant in a western context— the push is to close coal-fired power plants in favour of gas and nuclear/solar/wind. No one's talking about a wood-fired power plant, much less pitching it as renewable.

But in the context of particulate pollution (at least in the west) the primary issue is not power plants, but cars and local heatings (including fireplaces).

In many western cities, the air is heavily polluted with wood smoke. Walking around suburbs of Seattle I see many of the older homes emitting thick white woodsmoke from their chimneys. This is very bad for everyone's health. If it's not raining or windy, the air is bad most of the cooler days during the year. It seems absurd to me living in the very wet pacific northwest that more homes are not using renewable hydro power to efficiently warm their homes with heat pumps.

My city in Europe is the same. On cold calm days we regularly have pollution warnings and recommendations to stay inside. Nobody burns coal here, this is just from wood.

If you go to any village on the outskirts of the city (where there is no gas), almost everyone there will have a wood furnace used for central heating and hot water. These furnaces can fairly easily (with some financial investment) be converted to burn pellets, which burns a lot cleaner. These are sealed systems in a basement, not for ambiance as the sister comment suggests.

Even in the city there are still enough old houses without gas to cause problems. My walk to the office goes past a couple of these, and I can feel the air quality is worse in this area.

Newer houses usually use electric heat pumps, but older houses are poorly insulated so that would be very expensive there.

Because humans crave radiative heat. Heat pumps and other kinds of modern indirect heating can't make it.

I'm thinking myself about installing some electric infrared panels due to spouse that keeps turning the termostat up and up to uncomfortable levels, or wants to burn wood.

Your point is good but biomass power plants do exist and our promoted as being sustainable.

Here’s an example in Canada

https://energynews.us/2018/04/02/despite-promising-advances-...

What’s terrible about it is that they expect to produce the pellets locally but need to import them across the ocean from Norway! Not very green.

>hardly relevant in a western context

Quite a few people burn wood for heat in the suburb of San Francisco I live in.

I cannot prove the resulting smoke is harmful, but it sure feels that way.

This is something I'm having a hard time figuring out, whether burning wood or natural gas for heat is net worse. If people are burning nat. gas for heat instead, that is still resulting in emissions around you, but can anyone confirm wood emissions are worse healthwise? On the other hand, won't burning natural gas greater contribute to CO2, since it's taking long dormant reserves and releasing them, rather than wood which is a short term cycle? That wood will be decomposed/burned sooner or later anyway, just maybe not in a populated area.

I think wood is considerably worse in the local area, probably enough-worse that it's better not to do it at all unless you're quite remote.

Honestly, this business about people in suburban environments burning wood for heat is news to me— are there like actual high efficiency wood burning furnaces [1] people are using for this? Or is it single-room solutions like a Franklin stove or open fireplace? The only time I've encountered an open indoor fire has been at Christmas at Grandma's house, and that was always for ambience more than heat— most of the heat was going straight up the chimney, and that was despite it making the room smell like smoke for the next two days.

[1]: For example: https://www.drolet.ca/en/products/furnaces/heat-commander-wo...

My suburban place came with a wood pellet burning fireplace for (mostly) a single room. My partner staying warm by running that costs about half the price of natural gas heating the whole place. Would be interested in ways to calculate emissions based on how many lbs/kgs of wood pellets vs. therms of nat. gas.

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