The absurdity of Europe burning wood for energy | Hacker News Reader

The absurdity of Europe burning wood for energy

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359 pointsGatsky329 comments

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.

> 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.

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.

To replace just a single nuclear reactor you need so many solar panels that the deaths caused by the transportation will be significant - accidents, pollution + you have to count the damaged roads that need to be replaced - again pollution and accidents. And high-voltage electricity is not exactly safe - you would need so much electrical work that there simply must be a lot of death from accidents too, on this scale we're getting into the area where it's statistics and not really something to simply prevent.

Solar panels need to be replaced after 30 years max, but most probably will be replaced much earlier because the operators want to pocket the improved efficiency of newer panels. Reactors will need maintenance but it is normal to keep them running much longer. Also, what about the human labor? To maintain such large solar array you'd need hundreds of people. A modern nuclear powerplant with 5+ reactors is maintained by few dozens of people.

I'm a huge proponent of solar energy - but on rooftops, not as a replacement of nature or nuclear power. It will never be possible to phase out fossil fuels in transport and industrial uses without nuclear power - solar just doesn't scale this much, it's perfect for individual houses but you just can't power thousands of large container ships with it, nor blast furnaces etc - and definitely not the uncountable amount of trucks and cars on roads.

>Solar panels need to be replaced after 30 years max, but most probably will be replaced much earlier because the operators want to pocket the improved efficiency of newer panels. Reactors will need maintenance but it is normal to keep them running much longer. Also, what about the human labor? To maintain such large solar array you'd need hundreds of people. A modern nuclear powerplant with 5+ reactors is maintained by few dozens of people.

To just pick at one of your "statistics": E.g. Flamanville, a reactor plant with 2 reactors (and 1 being built) employed 670 people (not a "few dozens")[1]. I would argue the solar panels are the ones needing much less people. The ones I know don't need any kind of big servicing. But in those sizes this is pure speculation from my side.

> To replace just a single nuclear reactor you need so many solar panels that the deaths caused by the transportation will be significant - accidents, pollution + you have to count the damaged roads that need to be replaced - again pollution and accidents. And high-voltage electricity is not exactly safe - you would need so much electrical work that there simply must be a lot of death from accidents too, on this scale we're getting into the area where it's statistics and not really something to simply prevent.

Electronics-wise I don't see why there is so much more (and more dangerous) work involved in wiring up solar panels compared to constructing a nuclear plant. But I don't have statistics on that. I also wanted to know if your "deaths caused by the transportation will be significant" makes any sense. For that I tried to estimate the kind of size a solar park would have be to replace a reactor plant, e.g. Flamanville. Flamanville produces 14TWh per year. I took [2] as a reference(2.14km², 117GWh) and it came out to 256km² of area to produce the same amount of energy per year with solar in the flat part of germany. Storage is missing there. This is a huge amount of space, but also nothing that will produce "significant accidents" on its own. Constructing reactors and transporting fuel rods and nuclear waste is also a huge act with tons of material involved.

> It will never be possible to phase out fossil fuels in transport and industrial uses without nuclear power - solar just doesn't scale this much, it's perfect for individual houses but you just can't power thousands of large container ships with it, nor blast furnaces etc - and definitely not the uncountable amount of trucks and cars on roads.

Maybe direct batteries are not a solution for transport and industrial uses. But green h2 would be. This then has the fortunate aspect that it can be produced anywhere and independent of the need, e.g. in the Sahara and only when the sun shines. In that way solar can replace fossil fuels and nuclear power. Regarding cars and regular power use (btw germany covers ~40% of its energy with renewables already, taking this times two or three is not an issue of "scale"), lets just take the solar example from above and try to do 150% of germany's current power needs in full solar and see where that gets us. Germany needed 624 TWh in its peak year (2007, [3]), lets be generous and say we need 1000TWh in the future. This comes down to 18300 km². Germany has an area of 358000km². So our (very generous) solar capacity would need about an area of 5%. How much is 5%? According to [4], citys and streets (etc.) sum up to 14.5%, Agriculture has about 50%, Forests 30%. Since we can "simply" put the panels on top of the first category and don't have to replace existing areas most of the time, this looks pretty feasible to me, even with exaggerated demands in napkin calculations. So maybe it does not scale well, but it does scale.

And all of this does not take into account that solar is not the only option. Power from wind is a great way to mix since wind is strong mostly when there is no/less sun.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Templin_Solar_Park (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solarpark_Templin_%E2%80%93_Gr... has the energy statistics regarding GWh in 2017)

[3] https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/daten/energie/stromverbrauch (german, but the graph should be readable)

[4] https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/daten/flaeche-boden-land-oeko... (also german)

How many transportation deaths are associated with ~1,000 works showing up every week to a nuclear power plant for 50+ years?

Ballpark say 1,000 people * 30 total mile daily commute * 365 days a year * 50 years round to ~1 billion miles driven over the lifetime of a power plant in the US should represent around 13 traffic fatalities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

Let’s call it somewhere between 5 a 25 transportation deaths per nuclear power plant, meanwhile large solar farms are often completely empty of people 90+% of the time.

A nuclear power plan doesn’t “use” water. It takes fresh water in and reject it later a bit warmer. That’s pretty much it.

Water usage must be one of the silliest metric used in ecology by the way. Water doesn’t magically disappear when it’s “used”. What’s important is the share of the potable water available in an area used by an activity and how much other pollutants are released in the water.

> A nuclear power plan doesn’t “use” water.

Some nuclear power plants have cooling towers that evaporate large quantities of water.

So it will flow away into universe...

Water use doesn't mean destroying water. It means using some of the limited quantity of water that's available at a given time in a given place, using it for a given purpose and not some other purpose.

Water that evaporates isn't available for drinking and showers and farming.

It is - it will rain down not too far away.

So it will be available again in the future, but it's not available right now anymore.

I guess everyone here lives someplace with abundant water. When water supplies are actually limited, using water for one purpose means water isn't available for something else.

Edit:

I know nothing about European water supplies, but with a quick search I found news suggesting that is an issue even in Europe:

https://www.euronews.com/2022/08/08/nothing-left-in-the-pipe...

Where exactly in Europe are water supplies limited?

Edit for your edit: Europe definitely could do better in terms of making use of the available water - but there's no shortage of water in nature around us.

For example, the communists have damaged many rivers (made the river basins concrete etc), leading to drying of the surrounding areas. We're slowly correcting the damage. But generally speaking we have enough water. And you choose the place to build a nuclear power plant based on water availability.

Perhaps it's more of a problem in the southern states, I don't know about that. But we have an interconnected grid - we can sell electricity from one state to another (it's being done today).

Unfortunately there's water scarcity in Europe and it's only going to get worse. I'll just leave this here: https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/figures/water-stress...

If I understand that map right... We are going to be moving from medium/severe water stress to low water stress in many central/northern areas - isn't that an improvement in water availability? Why couldn't we build the nuclear power plants primarily in the light-yellow places and transfer the electricity via the grid to the places where it's worse?

I don't understand why should we reject it altogether on the whole continent just because it's bad in Spain and Italy - OK, agreed, let's not build nuclear there maybe. The rest of the EU seems like a good place.

Most especially, Germany should stop ignoring science and make the water-rich land they got available for as much nuclear as possible. The Union needs it now more than ever, and it's not like they haven't got a hand in creating the situation.

No, in the heatwave of this summer, some French nuclear plants had to be turned off because the rivers in which the cooling water had to be released had become too warm. (Further French nuclear plants had to be turned off due to technical problems.) So France had to import much energy to meet its demand. It was mainly Germany that helped out. The same problem affected – besides Belgium, Switzerland – Germany, too, though to a lesser degree (no pun intended) because Germany is less dependent on nuclear.

https://www.businesslive.co.za/bloomberg/news/2022-08-03-fra...

https://www.powermag.com/nuclear-power-production-curtailed-...

https://www.theenergymix.com/2022/08/07/failing-french-nucle...

https://www.grs.de/en/news/built-close-water-do-increasing-d...

https://www.thelocal.de/20090630/20301/ [Rhine, too, heated up by nuclear plants]

That is a question of design and not a necessity.

Don’t be silly, “Use“ does not imply destruction it just implies an opportunity cost. Land you use for a nuclear power plant isn’t destroyed, but you can’t put a shopping mall there until you decommission it.

Water evaporated into the atmosphere before it can be use to irrigate crops is one such cost. Nuclear therefore uses ~600 - 800 gallons per MWH not a huge amount but much larger than solar. On the other hand much larger quantities of water are discharged in such a way they an be reused down stream, that’s not what I am talking about.

GAF Energy in the last year came out with nailable solar shingles so the installation process is similar to a normal roof. I think that's the future because it only adds a relatively small cost to the cost of replacing a roof or new one, doesn't require any structural changes to framing (sometimes needed), and the risk of "stuff falling" is the same.

https://www.gaf.energy/timberline-solar/

Are these available to DIYers? I'm building a shed and would just as soon use these if I could. As it stands, I'm just going to overbuild the roof structure a bit and then add racked solar when I get around to it.

I don't know, but I recommend reaching out. Sounds like a cool project!

It’s better, but I still expect some fool to climb up onto their roof in the winter to remove snow etc. When you start talking 100’s of millions of homes your end up dealing with vast numbers of really dumb people.

Bold, wild claims require evidence for the rest of us to believe you. Got any?

Bold? Here’s a video of someone actually falling off their roof, but you can find plenty of videos where people are walking around their roof looking at their panels. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RA4HrMy9djk

Here’s an article actually recommending it for flat roofs.

Using a Shovel Method

Shoveling is the riskiest of the snow removal procedures from your roof. The reason for this is that it requires you to climb to the roof to remove the snow.

There’s risk in climbing the ladder, the shoveling itself, and the risk of damaging the roof if you step in a weak spot or hit the shovel on a delicate part of the roof.

However, it is the best especially on a flat surface/roof https://roofscour.com/how-to-remove-snow-off-roof/

> Rooftop solar is dangerous because people are putting stuff on roofs and can fall off in the process

This is very misleading. Roofing is dangerous and deaths when installing panels are blamed on solar energy.

Yet, people need to build and rebuild roofs anyways. If solar panels or shingles are installed when a house is built or refurbished accidents should not be blamed on solar energy.

Additionally, some countries (especially US) have poorly enforced work safety regulations and that can be improved. Plus, houses can be built with safe roofs i.e. flat roofs.

It’s not just installing panels homeowners will climb up to remove snow, do maintenance, etc.

On a house by house basis it’s not a significant risk, but when you start comparing it to the ~1/2 billion homes it would take to equal the worlds nuclear power plants low risks do add up.

> when you start comparing it to the ~1/2 billion homes it would take to equal the worlds nuclear power plants

...while also completely ignoring the systemic risks involving the latter.

Over grid solar?

There are some edge case advantages to rooftop solar for individual homeowners, but when everyone is connecting to the grid anyway I don’t think it’s a good idea to subsidize the more expensive option. It’s simply a waste of public funds when we can hit a larger bank for the buck both economically and environmentally.

There's not enough sunlight per day in the coming months in most of Europe. How's solar going to help?

Pre pandemic, London air quality was returned to worse than before the Clean Air Act by wood burning for vanity hearths.

Related earlier discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32765950

and earlier NYT article with more information about European protected forest cutting, legal and illegal:

https://archive.ph/7se1H

> I personally think burning wood in housing areas > should be banned entirely for health reasons

Contemporary pellet burners and inserts are incredibly cost-effective and clean.

Gosh, even heating with peat is ecologically sound if it is extracted nearby.

Peat is only arguably renewable though - it grows at something like half a mm a year in thickness. Vegetation takes a long time to come back in those environments, and there's also so many more high-value things the peat could be used for instead. We must leave our grandchildren a world with Laphroaig..

Pellets in Switzerland are all from local Forrest that are specifically used for this. The manufacturing of pellets requires no additives and if 4 or more homes are sharing a burner (recommended) the burner has to meet very strict emissions and needs to be inspected regularly. Because the resources are local and the burning only produces CO2 which is planted again, it is considered quite sustainable.

If course a geo thermal heat pump and solar would be better but not every one has 100k extra to get that installed.

Here in the US I don't think I've ever heard of a shared burner between multiple homes. It seems like an interesting idea. How common are these? How does it typically work? Does one home owner sell heat to the neighbors, or is it jointly owned? Or is there no "typical", and it's always a custom arrangement?

I don't know about typical, but I know a couple of people (here in Switzerland) using pellets and they jointly (that is, together with their neighbours) own the burner. They made the investment together and pay for all expenses together. I also heared that it makes most sense for a densly populated area like an old town (talking about european old towns) or big buildings like a school. Doesn't make too much sense if every one-family home has their own.

It’s just a heat exchanger glycol loop that uses burning wood to generate the heat, very similar to a gas-fired boiler. With a large enough burner you can have multiple heat exchangers or multiple glycol loops with a large heat exchanger for multiple buildings, similar to how commercial buildings use a single boiler or chiller to heat/cool large buildings or multiple buildings that need multiple heating or cooling glycol loops.

Most of the houses that burn wood for heat in the US are in sparsely populated rural areas where sharing a burner wouldn’t make sense due to the loop length and pumps needed to circulate the glycol. Densely populated areas in the US that need lots of winter heating generally have natural gas distribution networks.

How quickly is each consumed tree replaced, how quickly is the CO2 from the entire supply chain recaptured, and how quickly does the other pollutants degrade?

If it takes years to recreate the resources or recapture the CO2 from what is burnt in the course of days, then it is pretty grotesque to call it sustainable, but maybe the numbers show otherwise?

If everybody shares burners for highly processed pelletized wood that lives up to power-plant like smoke processing requirements (how many would you say do? 90%? 20%?), then indeed you might be able to just being as bad as coal... Which is horrible.

Air-to-water heatpumps are also an option, no need to compare to the heating solution with the highest installation cost.

Depends on the surface area of the forest. A single tree takes tens of years to grow but a certain area of forest contains enough growing trees that by the time you cut down the last the one you planted first has grown to full.

Do note that a tree that dies in forest also produces CO2. Exactly the amount it does if it’s burned (unless it’s a peat bog or whatnot). So not burning it doesn’t really change things.

> Do note that a tree that dies in forest also produces CO2. Exactly the amount it does if it’s burned (unless it’s a peat bog or whatnot). So not burning it doesn’t really change things.

Growing trees require more than just CO2, and I imagine there are limits to how much this process can be accelerated without environmental impact. Depending on the tree sort and location they may naturally live for long enough to be considered immortal for all practical purposes, so felling the tree after only 10 years presents a very significant increase in tree turnover, and as the tree is taken away it does not fertilize the soil again, so there's a significant increase in soil nutrient and water requirements in the area.

Plus, the felling operation, timber processing and pellet production require large amounts of energy. There is a significant environmental load even if the pellets are never burnt to release the stored CO2.

So yes, it changes things a whole lot.

I honestly doubt that 100% of Swiss pellets came from Swiss... It would be FAR more expensive and if in Swiss pellets are common like in France or Italy... Swiss pellets production will erase forests in a decade.

Beside that pellets in general is not sustainable due to the usage scale: wood is renewable BUT at a certain rate. If we all heat with pellets the usage rate is simply too high. Solar + heat pumps is nice IF you do not need much heat AND you have enough sunlight AND a veeery big hot water storage: I'm actually evaluating this for my home, witch is new "Minergie/A class" kind, with a small p.v. plant, with potentially enough room for insulated storage in sufficient quantity and well... I need at least 3000l of water, 10kWp solar to pass a single SUNNY winter day 100% on local energy for heating (witch means not counting water circulatory pumps etc). It's potentially feasible on scale, but IF and only IF we re-build all homes, annihilating condominiums, limiting the change to Europe south/center. Oh and heat pumps compressors does not last more than 10 years in general... It's not just a matter of costs, it's also a matter of scale.

> I personally think burning wood in housing areas should be banned entirely for health reasons.

What about for cooking? Smoking meat requires the use of wood splits being used to build a wood fire in a smoker.

Depends. Do you burn tons of wood every day as my neighbor for a daily barbeque or 10 hours in a row in your smoker? Does the smoke go into my sleeping room in the summer? I'd rather prefer if you didn't. Once in a while? I have to accept it (and might to a barbeque once in a while, too).

this is the reality here - dozens of wood fires for small groups of people with zero filtering; so easy and common, difficult to see the cumulative effects. I believe open fires have been completely banned in my area due to simple excess by a small number of careless actors.

> But the reality is more complex than this thread claims.

Disagree - I think it is very simple and you are over-complicating, which is what the EU bureaucrats do to obfuscate their bad decisions bc they do not want accountability for what they do.

Let me simplify:

- past and present decisions by EU bureaucrats = bad

- nuclear energy = good

There. Now the EU people know who to blame and what to do.

But the EU leadership is like - "Hubbuduh hubbuduh, blah blah..."

It's distraction. Don't fall for that politic shit.

Energy is not an EU competency. And to be clear, EU bureaucrats decide basically nothing, the council of ministers makes all EU decisions and they are the elected ministers of the member states.

> Energy is not an EU competency

You’re right about that.

> the council of ministers makes all EU decisions and they are the elected ministers of the member states.

Then whoever is electing those ministers better start electing other, smarter people.

That would be the people of Europe, and I agree. But blaming it on faceless bureaucrats is a distraction from that.

> Let me simplify:

You simply don't know of EU works or you're lying because you have an agenda.

My agenda is that is that I wish the best for the people of the EU. The people running the EU do not, which is proven by their illogical actions.

The issue is not that the people running the EU do not want what's best for the EU. It's that:

    1. "what's best" is subjective
    2. They sometimes lack the ability to understand and measure the consequences of their decisions

> The people running the EU do not

It's not clear why one should believe you do, given that your idea of EU inner working is based on false assumptions.

The fill me in - what do I not get about the inner workings of the EU?

Your points do not dispute doomberg's argument. The reality is that EU wood pellet consumption has been increasing. Germany and France are leading the growth. It is generally accepted that wood burning produces more co2 than coal and natural gas. We have cleaner alternatives. Corruption and poor decision making is hurting progress.

Interesting report from the USDA. https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/european-union-eu-wood-pellet-...

> Your points do not dispute doomberg's argument.[...] It is generally accepted that wood burning produces more co2 than coal and natural gas.

How about this number? Coal consumption in the EU in the last 30 years: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/de/web/products-eurostat-news/...

Still more than 10x the number of burnt wood. Should we replace all coal by wood? Heck no, that'd be insane, but Doomberg framed this whole thing in a sensationalist way. Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is what the whole thread is about:

- UK burned wood a hundred years ago, which was totally inefficient.

- Then they discovered coal, which is more energy efficient.

- Now the EU is back to burning wood, even though it is less efficient than coal and they call this green, which is dumb. (Ignoring many aspects of the whole thing)

- The EU is stupid and they should go full nuclear instead.

I'm simply pointing out that Doomberg's chain of arguments lack actual numbers and neglect a few things (stove efficiency, different goals, etc.), even though the gist of it at least somewhat true.

> The EU is stupid and they should go full nuclear instead.

Policies differ between EU countries. Finland just brought a reactor online. France is planning to build 14 reactors in the next decade. On the other hand Germany is going to shut down 3 reactors.

The last reactors France built all (including the one in Finland) have had more than 10 years delay compared to what was planned, so I doubt we are going to build 14 in the next decade :)

They could well do, if they’re working out how to optimise it, and the workers get the hang of it.

As I understand it a large problem has been with poor quality welds being caught too late in the process.

Quality isn’t an easy thing to change, but I trust they can remedy for future builds.

The last reactors France has built were also the first of their kind built in the country. The reactors built during the Messmer plan were mostly of 4 distinct types built repeatedly. The main to away from analysis of nuclear plant cost history is that plants become cheaper when the knowledge from previous builds is taken to subsequent builds. Problems that are encountered in earlier builds are avoided, lowering cost.

Plants built during the nuclear boom in the 1960s and early 70s often had inflation -adjusted costs of 1-2 billion USD per GW of capacity. And that's with no intermittency and a capacity factor of over 90%.

Also Poland [0].

[0] https://pl.usembassy.gov/civil_nuclear_cooperation/

>It is generally accepted that wood burning produces more co2 than coal and natural gas

That doesn't seem possible unless we are discounting the carbon captured while the tree grew.

I think they mean on a per unit basis, not total from all burnt wood vs. all burnt coal/lng

The factoid that gets thrown about is carbon emitted per energy released. Coal does better than wood on this super specific stat, but it's fossil CO2 we just dug out the ground, whereas wood from a managed forest used for other purposes is carbon negative if the alterantive is leaving it to rot to methane, because it's extracting CO2 from the air and then the managed forest is growing more trees that do the same, because we use wood for things.

There's complications and details, but overall if everyone is doing what they should its okay and most of the hype is fossil fuel propaganda. Windmills upset the worms etc.

> That doesn't seem possible unless we are discounting the carbon captured while the tree grew.

Half of it

The other half lies still safely under the surface. When a tree is chomped we take only half of the tree. This amount should be taken in mind in the model.

> It is generally accepted that wood burning produces more co2 than coal and natural gas.

It's not that simple. Coal (/oil/gas) burning releases CO2 that was previously safely stored in the ground and didn't affect the Earth atmosphere. Burning wood only (granted, prematurely) releases CO2 that is already in circulation.

The main ecological problem with burning wood is deforestation and impact of harvesting on the animals and plants. If wood comes from renewable forests (there are lots of countries that properly manage their forests) then the environmental impact is much lower than with coal/oil/gas.

That said, importing the wood from half the world away sucks.

Trees also store CO2. Actually, burning trees means less CO2 will be extracted from the air. More CO2 in the world means plants and trees can grow quicker.

If one believe CO2 is an issue (personally I don’t buy it), then burning trees is not a great way to fix the issue.

Once trees die they will release all that CO2 back into the atmosphere anyway. And trees will naturally die. Then another tree will grow in its place over time.

It's not a permanent storage of CO2 unless we cut it down and bury it or build something long-lasting with it.

I don't think that's true, how does "all the CO2" get released back into the atmosphere? During the decomposition of wood there are a lot of bacteria, fungi, worms, etc. that feed on the carcass of a dead tree. It doesn't just "evaporate" into the atmosphere...

The bacteria, fungi etc. emit CO2 as part of their metabolic process, just like you and I do.

There's also carbon sequestered in the soil. Decomposition doesn't end up with the entire tree evaporating.

It's great that 95%+ of the people we consider experts in these fields don't matter because CO2 is something plants breathe? Famously you can never have too much of a good thing. Impossible to overdose on water as we all know.

This point needs to be emphasized. Wood burning is renewable compared to coal.

Europe is the second smallest continent in the world. It has roughly the area of the United States. Despite that, Europe has the highest forest coverage of all the continents.

Europe isn't really a continent though.

More like a subcontinent of Asia, like India.

It is called eurasia.

But as doomberg is pointing out the actual alternative we should be comparing to isn't coal but uranium.

We'd need a time machine to start building reactors a few decades ago. And why, just to build more of the most expensive energy source ever conceived with the potential to make large portions of Europe uninhabitable?

Nuclear is expensive, it's unsafe, there's the proliferation risk, and only very few countries figured out how to store spent fuel. Promises of safe and cheap tech to solve these problems are common but still unfulfilled.

Solar and wind energy on the other hand is so cheap to build up and don't need decade long mega projects. We can have a better, cheaper energy source right now. Nuclear has nothing to offer.

Except - I guess - CO2 free energy when it's dark and windless. Like in a typical November night <hen you like having your home heated to acceptable levels.

Doesn't need to be November

Germany is dark and windless plenty of the time during summer: ~8 hours a day

I frequently saw our solar and wind usage below even 5% of their respective capacities

anything that means people living near a thousand open or semi-open fires is vastly more unsafe.

wood in particular is the worst offender.

plus logging and transportation both are very unsafe industries.

spent fuel storage is a complete non-issue. even bringing it up shows the ridiculousness of the anti-nuclear lobby.

the only real risk is proliferation. which fortunately is again a non-issue in Europe, because the counties in question already have nuclear capabilities.

Solar and wind have been the future for my whole life. Now we have an energy crisis. An artificial one for sure - we could open the pipes to Russia and they'd sell probably sell gas again - but a crisis nonetheless. The claim renewables are better was never true and the price of not stopping that deception is that now we face darkness.

As for nuclear, step one is certainly to stop listening to arguments like "it's too late, it would take too long to build":

https://twitter.com/mlanetrain/status/1556381583585804291

"This is some grim real life dramatic irony: Nick Clegg opposing nuclear power in 2010 because it would only come on-stream by 2021 or 2022."

Because people want heat and electricity when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing enough (or at all) which happens pretty regularly

If you haven't won the geographic lottery then...

You can burn coal like there is no tomorrow (see Poland)

Or gas (see Germany, and most of Europe for heating), and enable Russia and other undesirables

Or nuclear and have energy security without directly and indirectly causing death and suffering for millions

>Nuclear is expensive, it's unsafe

Both are true because "spent" fuel isn't reprocessed because mumble mumble nonproliferation, yes?

In the mean time, obscene amounts are being spent on fusion, which will never even compete with fission on any metric.

Distributing uranium pellets for domestic heating might prove problematic, likewise trying to burn uranium pellets in existing coal power plants to facilitate the transition to other sources would be problematic.

Biofuel is the most striking example of why "renewable" is not always equivalent to "desirable". While you can indeed re-grow wood, combusting it at scale maintains an equilibrium level of CO₂ in the atmosphere (which causes climate change), and also releases a equilibrium level of particulate matter, which causes large numbers of deaths from lung and heart diseases.

You're right about the particulates, but I believe that burning wood can't really cause climate change.

Wood is already in the biosphere. Even if we don't burn it, it will decompose and release all its CO2 that way, or burn in a forest fire. The CO2 of that wood is already circulating.

It doesn't actually increase CO2 levels the way that digging up long-buried fossil fuels does.

If you cut down and burn trees that take 50 years to grow in 3 seconds, you've increased the amount of CO₂ in the air. Sure it will eventually go away, but the thing that causes climate change is the CO₂ being in air at elevated levels, even if it's in a cycle.

Biofuel is almost as bad as fossil at 230 gCO₂-eq/kWh. [1]. Compare to solar pv at 40 and nuclear at 12.

[1] https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5...

The footnote on those numbers says:

> Direct emissions from biomass combustion at the power plant are positive and significant, but should be seen in connection with the CO2 absorbed by growing plants. They can be derived from the chemical carbon content of biomass and the power plant efficiency. For a comprehensive discussion see Chapter 11, Section 11.13

https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5...

> have led to strong forest Carbon sinks in many OECD regions (Pan et al., 2011; Loudermilk et al., 2013; Nabuurs et al., 2013; Erb et al., 2013). However, the capacity of these sinks is being reduced as forests approach saturation (Smith, 2005; Körner, 2006; Guldea et al., 2008; Nabuurs et al., 2013; Sections 11.2.3, 11.3.2). Active forest management, including management for bioenergy, is therefore important for sustaining the strength of the forest carbon sink well into the future (Nabuurs et al., 2007, 2013; Canadell and Raupach, 2008; Ciais et al., 2008), although countries should realize that for some old forest areas, conserving carbon stocks may be preferential, and that the actively managed forests may for some time (decades) act as sources.

But burning fossil fuel does _not_ maintain an equilibrium level of CO₂ in the atmosphere (which is the main reason why we have climate change in the first place)

> While you can indeed re-grow wood, combusting it at scale maintains an equilibrium level of CO₂ in the atmosphere (which causes climate change.

True but meaningless.

Sitting in my deck chair also maintains an equilibrium level of CO2, but it doesn't provide any heat or benefit to anyone.

We can't look unfavorably on energy approaches just because they fail to actually reduce CO2. That's some kind of unrealistic purity test.

It's not meaningless. CO₂ in the atmosphere causes the greehouse effect, which allows the sun to heat the earth more. To avoid greenhouse effect you can't have things that require CO₂ to constantly remain in the atmosphere. You need non-carbon sources like wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, geothermal, etc.

> To avoid greenhouse effect you can't have things that require CO₂ to constantly remain in the atmosphere.

But we don’t want to fully avoid the greenhouse effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect:

“Earth's natural greenhouse effect keeps the planet from having the below freezing temperature that it would have if there were no greenhouse gases”

He's talking about the excess unnatural greenhouse effect.

I don’t see how one can read that from “To avoid greenhouse effect you can't have things that require CO₂ to constantly remain in the atmosphere.”

The natural greenhouse effect has CO₂ constantly (I think at least since there’s any carbohydrate burning on earth) remaining in the atmosphere.

It's all implied. Maybe he doesn't know about some of those things, but it is incredibly common to talk about it in those terms without spelling out that you mean excess / problem-causing amounts of the effect, etc. When he says can't have things he's talking about human energy use. He says right after you need to use wind, solar, etc.

> Europe is the second smallest continent in the world. It has roughly the area of the United States. Despite that, Europe has the highest forest coverage of all the continents.

I don't believe that is correct. Unless you are counting all of Russia. https://ourworldindata.org/forest-area

That source does show that Europe has the highest forest coverage, although the weird remark about Russia does imply that Asian Russia is counted. Moreover, North America, which I believe is quite forested, is totally absent from the chart.

Ah, you are correct and I was wrong. I had looked it up, but didn't realize that the multiple different sources I looked at all seemed to count the entirety of Russia.

In hindsight, it should've been obvious that Europe (~10 million sqkm) couldn't have 1 billion hectares of forest coverage.

I don't know how the infrastructure works for biomass, but open pit coal mines in the US are extraordinarily efficient when management isn't fucking them up. We're talking electric conveyor systems that span from pit to plant, diesel-electric haul trucks, and a rail loop that drives right under the plant for loading onto a train that will net about 15-17k tons and ship "directly" to the generator. A coal seam can last a real long time depending on demand. And the infrastructure is already there and has been for ~50 years with various optimizations added along the way - at least in my locale.

I'm under the impression that logging is far less efficient due to the nature and complications of the work, but that is, I admit, simple conjecture: You're constantly moving, maybe with some gravity assist, to transport and load the raw material, I imagine for packing efficiency they're chipping straight into a 53' trailer, which will then port a relatively small sum, about 21-22.5 tons, compared with a haul truck, which range from 153-410 tons for back-and-forth movement. If we consider this holistically, BTU/man, BTU/manhour should both be accounted for as well, since those are real inputs which at scale (I imagine) represent a pretty substantial expense in terms of CO2.

Coal is also "processed" on site, with pretty minimal input: being crushing, drying, and sometimes spraying. There aren't secondary and tertiary processes.

Energy from PRB coal, at the minimum of my data is about 7,420 BTU/lb. Some dry wood can "compete" at this level, apparently, when dry in fact one data point indicates 9033 BTU/lb (Colorado Pinyon). Maximum mean BTU for coal in the PRB is 11k (compared to 8.2 kBTU/lb pellet). I say compete because from what I've heard, generator designs aren't indiscriminate and require certain energy densities to hit efficiency - which may be a benefit of biomass because there's a lot more control, I'd imagine, in pelletizing wood vs. coal, which is a simple mix-batch. At scale it might actually be a pretty considerable boon for biomass.

To me this reads that biomass is going to require more input to extract the same amount of energy. The processing to get biomass to similar energy density is going to require more energy input. But even the primary input, knocking trees over, chipping them, porting them, is going to be less efficient and less centralized, and even once it does culminate in some logistical knot... You said it yourself, it sucks. But also, deforestation sucks. So does human sprawl.

My point here is that I do think the idea that burning wood is "carbon neutral" is spurious, because there are a lot of points which fossil fuels are used, and used less efficiently, and that the process at least by my imagination is ultimately less efficient, and those losses will also inevitably contribute to increases in the CO2 chain which I think is largely ignored. Maybe it's more like slightly-less carbon - cause the whole "if it's wood and we burn it now and let it grow back later while we keep cutting more and more down to satisfy the constantly increasing energy demands..." reads like we're displacing consequences into the future.

But! This is with the caveat that I'm not particularly familiar with the processes of biomass fuel production chain, and that my calculations are based on US information and doesn't necessarily pertain to industries in the EU.

It's not even that simple. Burning wood is only carbon-neutral on a multi-decade timescale. Trouble is, the next couple decades are critical. We're at risk of pushing the climate over tipping points, after which warming will go further even if we take our own emissions to zero.

So it's important that we reduce emissions in the short term. Burning wood increases short-term emissions. By the time it all balances out, it'll be too late for it to matter.

And even that assumes that the forests grow back enough to balance out. Those tipping points include drought and forest fires, so that's not a given.

>Coal (/oil/gas) burning releases CO2 that was previously safely stored in the ground and didn't affect the Earth atmosphere

This sounds crazy to me. The whole issue with climate change and CO2 is there is too much on a global scale. So it's all fungible. Yet people continually talk as though the CO2 molecules have labels on them to determine if they're sinful or not.

Unfortunately the irony of European countries asking India to stop burning coal for power is lost on the leaders of the same countries which are now burning wood...

> - I personally think burning wood in housing areas should be banned entirely for health reasons.

From what I understand, modern fireplaces and wood stoves can be 70% to 80% efficient. Rocket mass stove can be over 90% efficient. I don't know how efficient pellet stoves can be. Smoke is from the wood that isn't completely burned, so more efficiency means more combustion and less smoke. My guess is that this is also going to be a lot better for health than an older and less efficient wood heat source. I would be interested in knowing how accurate I am but a quick web search hasn't turned up a whole lot.

I had a rocket mass heater for a few years and it was awesome - no smoke out the chimney, just steam. I burned sticks raked up out of my yard, pinecones, construction scraps, etc.

There have been a lot of improvements in RMH design in recent years, led largely by the RMH enthusiasts at https://permies.com/f/260/rocket-mass-heaters

IMO traditional metal wood stoves really suck compared RMHs, but they can be made better by routing the exhaust through a stratification chamber (eg a large metal container like a barrel or a old water tank; hot flue gas enters the top, cooler flue gas exits the bottom). Pretty easy to set up next to an existing wood stove, and you get a lot more heat and a lot less smoke out of an otherwise crappy stove.

I've always found rocket mass heaters to be quite interesting. One day I'll get around to making one. I'm in an area where I might be able to use it a couple weeks out of the year so it's not much of a priority.

> sensationalist

unfortunately this is how you get 5~6 digit followers on fintwit. its no longer about nuanced analysis but how can I disguise my political narrative in the form of "DD" or "analytical take" but leave room for contingency in case somebody digs deeper and throws stone at my bridge made out of twigs?

"- I personally think burning wood in housing areas should be banned entirely for health reasons."

It would be a start, if coal for heating homes would be banned (you can buy it in the supermarket here).

But stopping people from burning wood they get from their garden/forests, like I do now, is never gonna get through and I do not see any reasons why it should.

The only time burning stoves bother people, is when people start their fires and more so if they do it non efficient. That smells bad and is bad.

But once it burns? Not a problem, unless everyone in a crowded area would do it.

And about CO2, well, it is a net zero, if the area where the wood comes from, is regrowing trees again.

The US DOE designed the most efficient wood stoves during Jimmy Carter's presidency (he was an engineer by training). Those are the same ones we use today. This isn't a recent thing. This includes cat converter wood stoves.

Strictly wood is NOT a carbon footprint because it's part of a short-term carbon cycle (in <100 years it's already back into trees).

Until recently I lived in the boonies and ONLY used wood for heating.

The biggest problem with wood: you have to constantly manage/regulate the fueling and heating - even the best stoves need to be refilled in 4-6 hours when the temperature is below 10C. Further, you only get this if you've aged (dried) the wood for 2 years first. Newly cut wood is 20-30% water and the heat of vaporization to steam radically reduces the heating value of the burned wood.

I downvoted this because I think you are wrong about some crucial details. Woodstoves have in fact improved considerably since the late 70's: higher efficiency, longer reload times, and lower emissions. Modern woodstoves do not need to be refilled every 4-6 hours.

I'm in a good position to assert this, since we live in Vermont (a place with cold winters) and heat almost exclusively with wood. We recently upgraded from what was a state-of-the-art 1980's stove to a start-of-the-art 2020's stove. Doing so reduced our fuel consumption by about 30%, and improved our reload time from the 4-6 hours you mention to 8-10 hours.

After upgrading, I no longer have to get up in the night to feed the fire. And this is in a 100 year old house with overnight outside temperatures frequently in the -20C to -10C range (-5F to 15F). I do agree with you though on the necessity of properly drying wood and on the carbon cycle.

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".

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-caro...

https://www.wfae.org/energy-environment/2021-12-14/as-the-wo...

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-burni...

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_...

Much of it coming from US does not mean more than 50% of it coming from US, it means a lot of wood chips are going to EU from US.. that is it. The qualitative aspect is open to interpretation.

My second point, If imports from US are to be scrutinized, when I have no clue, I would start with the richest countries and move down the list. Meaning Poland may not importing anything from US, but how about other 20+ odd countries in EU many are much more richer and have bigger international trade foot print.

I live in the countryside in Sweden with its 87 billion trees/10 million population (yes, 8.7k trees per resident).

I also do not think it is absurd to burn wood for energy. The things you need to do:

- Burn wood that is sourced somewhat locally (for me, typically 1-2 km, but I think even hundreds of km would make sense)

- Dry the wood well (like for a year) after logging. Not doing this will lead to higher particle emissions, because you can't reach high burning temperatures.

- Burn the wood quickly at a high temperature to minimize particle emissions. This is quite effective.

CO2-wise: It's ~neutral. We've been doing it in this way/scale in a responsible way (replanting) for much longer than the time it takes to grow the trees.

> CO2-wise: It's neutral.

That's part of what he's rallying against. It's not because it requires a large energy input to produce wood or wood pellets suitable for burning.

That calculation works just as well for solar panels and wind farms in an oil-based global economy, but it's just as fallacious. When there's only one solar panel in the world, each solar farm requires X barrels of oil / CFT of gas, but as you get more and more renewable energy in the mix that number goes down to zero.

(Unless, of course, the pellets take more energy to produce than they produce themselves after burning and conversion... but that just makes them inefficient under any energy market mix, not CO2-producing under any mix.)

That's how you do LCAs, nothing fallacious about it. Solar or wind isn't CO2 neutral either.

Sorry, this didn’t make any sense to me.

The reasoning about non-neutrality is that a tree has captured some carbon (its growth), then we burn it and release that carbon back into the atmosphere (1:1 equality).

However, anything on top of that (production of pellets, transportation, retailing) takes significant carbon, too.

Solar panels don’t take carbon from the air, and we don’t burn solar panels. We do manufacture, transport and retail them, though. So yeah, solar capture is non-neutral.

The merits of one are independent of the other. Neither of which are carbon neutral. Last point, some might argue that solar panels reduce the carbon needed to combust; it’s hard to see that as carbon neutrality, that’s a broken argument. But, I’m not sure who’s making that point.

The difference is that solar panels are only moved and retailed at the point of sale, but after installation there isn’t anything because it’s where it’s supposed to be and it only gets installed once.

Wood is the fuel, so to power a wood stove you need to constantly be moving it to its ultimate destination.

It takes a lot of physical work to stack logs, sure. I figure it's my annual gym exercise when I get the delivery from my neighbour.

I really should upgrade to a motorized/automated burner that can eat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_briquette though. There is a plant that makes those about 30 km away.

I doubt your neighbour has a machine that requires no energy input to go from tree to logs.

I think you problably never witnessed the brutal effiency of modern logging machines. It's quite a sight to behold. These are very expensive machines, so they are typically not owned by the people owning and maintaining the forests.

Yes, it's not zero, but when comparing the extra co2 cost these machines add compared to the fossil fuel alternatives, it might as well be. In a few years they'll probably start to be battery powered, charged via clean nuclear and water power.

> These are very expensive machines

Both to purchase and maintain. Some operators depreciate ~usd70/hour.

> they'll probably start to be battery powered

Expensive machines are typically worked hard (long hours) when they are working. They need to keep working to make them pay. They typically work in forests not near the iTesla charging point by Starbucks.

When working, fellers are ferocious. The cabs are basically bulletproof.

Agreed. I wrote "will start to". There'll be pressure for that.

And perhaps in 10 years with new battery tech and more remote charging infrastructure they'll actually be mostly fossil-free.

Your claim was CO2 neutral, it's what I originally replied to.

I'm sure the machines are more efficient compared to older machines and maybe your neighbour knows approximately how much fuel he has to put in to get a a certain number of cubic meters of wood. It would be sort of interesting to know, you can find some data online but it's very situation specific so it's probably not representative. What happens to all the waste? Does most just turn into mulch?

I don't think we'll see battery powered forestry machines any time soon, the batteries would have to be enormous but most importantly there would be no way to charge them.

Fight the big wins, not the very very small ones.

I.e. be a pragmatic, not a fundamentalist.

Also: If you feel like you don't really understand a particular context: please do feel free to stay quiet until you have aquired an understanding of said context.

I don't really get where your passive aggressive reaction suddenly comes from? The main claim, that it's CO2 neutral is false, so I'm trying to get a better understanding of your specific situation and we can maybe also do some napkin math. To do that, you need to provide some details such as what happens to the material that doesn't get turned into wood logs. And if you also know how much gas is being used to provide a certain amount of cubic meters of logs that's even better.

Considering wood is at most as expensive as petrol per kWh (at least here in Belgium, heating fuel is not heavily taxed), I have a hard time understanding that it takes more fossil fuel energy to manufacture pellets than burning the fossil fuel directly.

His example is wood shipped from US to EU. This is bogus in many cases as wood for pellets is sourced and processed locally, hence energy input is much lower.

If you burn it at utility scale, like in most eastern european towns, then you can add co2 scrubbers effectively making it carbon negative.

I wanted to learn more about the CO2 impact of wood burning, and I found this article which does a great a job at explaining the current situation: https://www.science.org/content/article/wood-green-source-en...

> Burn the wood quickly at a high temperature to minimize particle emissions. This is quite effective.

People don't appreciate the quantity of non carboniferous and long-chain carbon molecules exist in wood. Even if you burn it fast, have them in pellets in the most efficient burner that exists and have your filter, you are still emitting generating the most polluted air you can legally breath in Europe. This air is highly implicated in all manner of lung diseases including cancer.

So yeah, I appreciate there are multiple concerns at play, but there are extremely good reasons for decarbonisation, your and your neighbours health being a pretty big one.

"... you are still emitting generating the most polluted air you can legally breath in Europe."

Dispersion is a thing. Do you understand the rationale for chimneys, beyond avoiding carbon monoxide poisoning?

Accumulation post dispersion is also a thing. If the combined effects of individually harmless activities was not an issue, this comment thread wouldn't exist.

What is your well-researched scientific concern regarding the accumulation of those particles?

I won’t fact check this, but the Bay Area Spare the Air page says the following, which seems pretty reasonable. It’s easier to find science on the danger of the particulate smoke, which you don’t seem to object to.

> During the cooler winter months, more than one-third of particulate pollution comes from wood smoke. On some days, in certain areas, wood smoke can account for up to 90 percent of particulate pollution.

> On cold, calm days, wood smoke can become trapped close to the ground by an inversion layer, typically formed when a layer of warm air acts as a lid over a layer of cooler air. Inversions prevent the air below from rising, which causes pollutants to build up.

https://www.sparetheair.org/about/what-is-spare-the-air

So naturally it depends a lot on the local environment, weather patterns, population density etc.

Yes it depends on those things, but inversion layers can happen anywhere and cover large areas. I think population density is a good consideration, but there will probably be days in the year almost everywhere where the dispersion is limited due to weather.

It doesn't really matter. Even the cleanest stoves output a fair amount of particulate matter [0]. The range in the EPA's database is 0.3 grams/hr to 2.5 grams/hr. That's not a huge range, and it's a lot of particulate matter in your air by any standard.

Also, frequency and volume counter dispersion pretty well. That's why cities are smoggy: all the pollution from cars and cooking (lots of tailpipes, vents, or "chimneys") adds up. These cities are far worse environments for people specifically because of the air quality, which leads to higher rates of asthma, general respiratory disease, cardiovascular disease, developmental issues in children, and cognitive impairment.

There's a lot of defense of wood-burning stoves in this thread, from "get a catalytic stove" to "it's natural", but there's been a lot of research on this. It's bad, it's always been bad. I get the appeal: you can buy a piece of property, get off the grid, heat your home totally self-sufficiently. I've watched a lot of off-the-grid YouTube, I'm into it haha.

But heat's a really inconvenient problem if you face the fact that burning wood is very unhealthy, and very bad for society/climate change at scale. Maybe you can do geothermal, but not everywhere--plus you can't DIY, and getting a crew to come out isn't 100%.

---

Overall I agree with the sentiment that nuclear should have been the solution. I buy into the indictment of the greens; they got most things right, but it really does seem that they've succeeded in categorizing nuclear as a dirty fuel, and that will cost us significantly in the short term as we experience the dip between titrating off of fossil/nuclear fuels and ramping up our wind/solar/geo/tidal power.

That seems wild to me. I know alternate histories are hard, maybe we avoided a nuclear apocalypse by not converting all of our power generation to nuclear and I'm Monday-morning-quarterbacking the whole thing from an alternate timeline where humanity still exists to the degree where we still have things like internet forums. But a lot of things would be a lot better if we'd done that--and not blown up Earth.

[0]: https://cfpub.epa.gov/oarweb/woodstove/index.cfm?fuseaction=...

Yeah, of course we should be all running on nuclear power. Burning wood in a responsible way locally is just a sad fallback. May the propaganda and ideas of the various green European parties who brought us here burn in hell.

> Burn wood that is sourced somewhat locally (for me, typically 1-2 km, but I think even hundreds of km would make sense)

This is unlikely to matter much for carbon (modern ocean shipping is ridiculousy efficient, assuming the goods have a long shelf life). However, you need to do this to avoid spreading tree diseases and invasive insects.

> Burn the wood quickly at a high temperature to minimize particle emissions. This is quite effective.

For about $2000 you can get a 80% efficient wood stove with minimal emissions. It will have a catalytic, and can cleanly burn wood extremely slowly. It takes me about 36-48 hours to really get ours going in an efficient smoke free way. (It dumps smoke at startup, then you need to establish a solid coal bed.)

These are mandated by California, at least. Example model:

https://www.woodstovesguide.com/blaze-king-wood-stove-pricin...

https://www.blazeking.com/products/wood-stoves/princess-clas...

Scandinavians know a thing or two about burning wood efficiently. Can't speak for Sweden or Finland, but new wood stove installations in Norway are mandated to generally have complete combustion and be efficient in combustion and heat transfer.

There's lots of local manufacturers with a long history, e.g. Jøtul. Their stoves are generally >80% efficient. E.g. https://www.jotul.no/produkter/ved

Newly-constructed city apartments are generally heated by centrally installed air-to-air or water electric heat pump, but single family homes are usually built with a modern wood stove for flexibility, atmosphere and redundancy. Older homes and apartments also very commonly (>50%) have a wood-fired heat source, and government mandates ensure that they have practically always been upgraded to modern specs.

The corresponding Swedish company is called Contura, headquartered in Markaryd, Småland, Sweden. Half an hour from where IKEA was founded, btw.

https://www.contura.eu/ (yeah, I know, that tld...)

Their Jøtul F 100 ECO.2 LL is almost identical to the Blaze King I linked. Different aesthetics, but same efficiency rating.

We recently converted our cabin in Alaska to a BlazeKing. Best decision ever! Absolute game changer.

> This is unlikely to matter much for carbon (modern ocean shipping is ridiculousy efficient, assuming the goods have a long shelf life).

Strong doubt on this one. "Modern" ocean shipping is really bad when it comes to emissions.

https://timeforchange.org/co2-emissions-for-shipping-of-good...

Moving something via cargo ship emits 10-40g of co2 per km * ton. I'll assume 10, since fire wood would be extremely low priority.

Assume you buy a 20lb bundle of foreign wood from a store 10 miles away, and transport it in the back of a Prius. (This seems optimistic for a rural area where wood heating makes sense.)

The prius gets about 50 mpg. Round trip, it drives 20 miles, so it uses 0.4 gallons of gas, or 8 lbs of CO2, which is 3.6 kg.

The earth's circumference is 40,000KM. Assume the wood traveled 20,000KM by sea.

20 lbs is 0.01 ton. 10g is 0.01 kg. 0.01kg * 0.01 ton * 20,000km is 2kg of CO2 emissions.

Even ignoring the emissions from harvesting and shipping the wood from the forest to the packaging plant, seasoning (drying) it, and the last mile delivery for the store, the overseas shipping is only 33% of the emissions.

> Even ignoring the emissions from harvesting and shipping the wood from the forest to the packaging plant

This should still be the biggest source of emissions. It's apparently his neighbor that gives him the wood, so I tried to find out some details regarding fuel use to quantify the emissions of his so called CO2 neutral wood but no dice.

Do people with allergies or asthma experience anything from a large amount of wood burning ?

My understanding is it causes the air quality to go down and some people are affected. I like the smell of burning wood, but I can see how it can lead to an ashy experience.

Air quality can be an issue for asthmatics in valleys when there is atmospheric inversion (common in winter). Indoors, smoke rarely enters the home if you're using a modern stove and lighting in correctly.

Modern wood stoves are dramatically more efficient than the typical fireplace you'd remember from youth.

If anything, the issue would be high radiant heating on indoor surfaces causing evaporation and out-gassing. I have heard people complain about this, but it would generally be more of a freshly-installed or newly-built issue. Or perhaps if the home in question is built for passive heating, meaning that it's practically hermetically sealed and hence would require active ventilation.

If you can smell the wood burning, you're not getting a sufficiently clean burn. The post-2020-EPA-regulation landscape for wood burning appliances in the US at least are all significantly better than the older stoves.

As for air quality, a rocket mass heater will get hot enough to put out zero CO, and most or all of the particulate will be broken down as well, but sadly there's only one device I know of that is UL-certified. They are very much a niche concept; most stoves and masonry heaters will be putting out some, and in a city there'll be enough that it'll have an effect on health.

Wood smoke is very bad for asthmatics. It worsens their symptoms and triggers attacks.

Where I live, in the San Francisco Bay Area, the air quality regulator says that wood smoke is the main source of air pollution. It's not ships or trains or trucks or cars or refineries. It's fireplaces and pizza ovens.

Is that Swedish math? Where I come from that amounts to 8700 trees per inhabitant.

Oops. Fixed. Thanks! Interesting fact: It took two hours for someone to find that mistake. It seems like it took a brit to point that out. My first computer was a ZX81 btw. Perhaps that's were I went wrong?

Thought of that keyboard made me laugh. Mine was a BBC Master btw!

A lot of places in the US, rural cabins and such, also use these wood pellets. I did similar research and came to a similar conclusion. It's not as if we are cutting down big old growth trees and shredding them into pellets. These pellets are like propane is to gasoline, a byproduct that would have otherwise been thrown away.

I live in the only ex-EU state and we do burn US wood here. Particularly at Drax power plant in Yorkshire

I'm not following. How does your personal anecdote lead you to believe the tweets are bulls**?

It's not personal anecdote if it covers whole country

It's a personal anecdote because their conclusion was based on their own research and purchase of sustainable pellets used to produce heat, not to be exported by one country and used in a retrofitted coal plant to produce electricity.

It's just a completely off-topic, unrelated story. They heard "wood pellets bad" and told their "wood pellets good" story.

Because he can use his rational powers of observation and inference (otherwise known as instinct) to judge other peoples' assertions about the world. Studies, experts, and statistics are not required to analyze a narrative.

This is satire, right?

So the simple fact remains, how much of your country's wood burnt pellets are actual cast off "junk" and how much of it comes from forests getting mowed down to feed the system? Not just your house.

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.

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.

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.

I 'm sorry what? Changing the marginal pricing which will do a lot to make prices more reasonable is doable today, spain and portugal already did it. Germany can use lignite this winter, and other countries too, under specific conditions, and even changing heating from gas to oil is doable, even now. Can take advantage of remote working to reduce consumption in many places.

I mean the purpose of leadership is to find and show a direction when people disagree. But nobody is even proposing changes. And it's not like the EU needs to change its long-term policies, it can still support renewables (which will happen anyway now because it s cheaper), but in the face of war it should have already changed regulations temporarily and dust off some of those lignite plants. It is instead counterproductive to seek deals with awful countries like saudi or az or venezuela. It's been seven months since the war started, we can't pretend there is no time to react anymore

How can you change heating from gas to oil without exchanging the central heating device and installing oil storage canisters in every das heated home? How is that achievable on short notice?

Rebuilding cities and dealing with hundreds of millions of migrating people is much more expensive than that

Climate change is the most dramatic problem facing humanity and we cannot delay already unambitious deadlines with the excuse of a war. And phasing out ICE cars "early" (IMO 2035 is way too late) is not only good for the environment but a strategic necessity for the EU, which, it's worth reminding, has pitiful amounts of oil and totally depends on external suppliers for it, including Russia and other countries we would prefer not to depend on. Seeing what's happening with gas, which is substitutable as an electricity source, it would be very unwise to depend on oil for transportation. It's a need for Europe to be the first to transition to EVs (and even with all the incentives, it's not even in the lead).

I agree with you re: nuclear, marginal pricing (even without war), Azerbaijan, sanctions, and Van der Leyen being a bad leader, though.

Well who would've thought the value signaling politics of today would be absurd and lack any intelligence or foresight.

There are also sacrifices to be made by everyone, if you want less immigration you'll have to get off your ass and do those "jobs you'll never lower yourself to" yourself, if you want sustainable energy you might want to start building nuclear plants with formally (as in mathematically) modeled, verified and tested components, and you might also use the same phone for 5 years and not have a phone, a tablet, a tv, a desktop and a laptop for every member of the family, 3 cars, always on AC, etc., might use blankets for heat or open your windows for cool air or you know just sweat and drink water, etc. when your only problem in life is whether you'll use a plastic bag or a paper bag when every single product you bought contains 10 smaller products individually wrapped in plastic and every electronics you own (mainly for entertainment since 1 laptop is enough) uses hundreds of materials all shipped across earth to a country that assembles them using almost slavery and ships them back.

But no, you see the right advocating for X thing but not wanting to do anything about it, and the left is advocating for Y but also not wanting to do anything about it, and everyone is trying to convince everyone else that they're really contributing to X or Y cause.

The first thing to do to cut on over consumption and thus energy use would be war, because if you're unable to stop yourself from attacking a country on the other side of the world, kill a million civilians, all for oil, aka murder to get cheaper oil, then you're probably unable to sacrifice personal comfort for a greater cause, and will settle for virtue signaling and larping as a good person.

Now I don't think this problem can be solved, because we're first of all human, aka primates with greed, violence and lack of care for anyone or anything with a DNA too different from ours, and until we start to discuss these things as they are and not as we want them to be, then our decisions won't go anywhere. The other issue to solve this is democracy, people are always dissatisfied and will always vote for the person who serves them best, right now, that's why we allow the central bank to print money and lend it to our government for interest, to be paid by our grandkids through taxes, just so we can have better roads today, and that's why we'll vote for the person who'll make us more comfortable now even if it means the people who'll live a hundred years from now will live in a worse environment than the one we live in.

Someone needs to invent a new protocol for politics, that would serve us now and in the future better than our current system does, but that's super hard and would make some other protocol like say bitcoin seem like a 3 year old's solution to a trivial problem.

And I didn't even talk about how 100 IQ is the average that that means half the population is under that and can't even conceptualize of things more abstract than "do this now" => "experience consequences tomorrow", and wouldn't understand or care about sacrifice today for future generations, unless they're pushed towards it by social shame and other powerful human motivators, but then they won't understand anything deeply, and will spend an hour separating paper from glass for recycling because they genuinely think it's important, but then take 6 flights for holidays, drive huge card, order useless shit online, change electronics every year, because those are also pushed with powerful human motivators like social status etc.

So yeah, there can be no simple solution like vote for Mr. A to get result B.

I have same observation, and i guess many other thing likewise. But at global scale, this is a very small minority.

The very idea of reducing consumption is unacceptable to a large majority.

> when every single product you bought contains 10 smaller products individually wrapped in plastic

I never asked for this, noone ever did. Lets place the blame where is belongs, shall we?

You have swallawed the corporate propaganda of 'consumer is to blame' line, hook and sinker. We know that oil companies have spent billions on disinformation campaigns, we know they falsified scientific studies, villified nuclear power, and lobbied against every solution that would get us off oil.

We ripped out electric trams and trolley busses out of our cities. Sacraficed public walkways for cars and made our cities dangerous

We invented the crime of Jaywalking, something so stupid it still boggles my mind.

It was not the consumer that came up with the genious supply chain that ships shrimp caught in America to phillipines for processing, and then ships it back. A pair of jeans travels around the world three times before it arrives in the store. It's not the consumer that burns unsold fashion items to maintain artificial scarcity.

Its not the consumer that uses copyright to keeps repair manual under wraps, refuses to sell spare parts and makes products unrepairable.

These are the same people that encouraged children to smoke, added cocaine into a drink for kids, added lead to oil, dumped nuclear waste in the ocean and PTFAs into drinking water. They use child labour in every country where they can get away with it.

I don't blame the consumer, I just make fun of those who virtue signal as if they truly do their part, but again the consumer votes with his wallet, but society motivates him into a certain way of spending by bombarding him with ads, etc.

The problem is the system, you can't blame a cell in a cow for now behaving the same way as a cell in a cat, we're just that, cells that interact with one another, the emergent system is our society, and since we've become super connected with the internet, society could be seen as its own brain with its own consciousness and needs, and trying to think about it is as useless as a single neuron trying to imagine consciousness.

Honestly I'm just not smart enough to think about these things, it's a problem with too many variables, and while it can be modeled with analogies and examples limited by language, those are just useful for internet posting or entertaining conversations.

>Insisting in formerly-popular CO2 deadlines in the face of long-lasting ukraine war is absurd

I don't follow. How has the Ukraine conflict not increased the urgency of transitioning from fossil fuels?

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.

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?)

> 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.

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!

>> 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?

I'm just getting into wood burning as an adult, but the rule of thumb I've heard is that you need about one acre to sustainably produce one cord per year. So if it takes 4-5 cords per winter to heat your home with a newer gasification-type burner, then you'd need to be in an area with an average lot size of 5 acres to consider that sustainable. That's decidedly rural, but practical for many, especially with even better insulation. Save the higher density, cleaner burning energy sources for places with denser populations and shared walls. Although unfortunately with nonsensical zoning policies, city buildings tend to be older and poorer insulated.

Obviously we'd be better off with heat pumps run by renewable electricity supplying most heat. But lack of storage seems to be the missing piece right now - peak solar production and peak heating load are on opposite sides of the day, unlike air conditioning. Nuclear would be capable of generating electricity at the right time, but it's presently stalled for many reasons. But even if we had widespread nuclear, that wouldn't help from the individual perspective of still needing a heat source during a power outage.

Solar+heat pump is cheaper than a tractor

Drilled water heat pumps cost far more than you save to install. Air exchange heat pumps don't work in cold weather (that is, cold where I live, ymmv).

They work well enough up to -20C or so. Thats the climate we get here (and occasionally worse) and gov subsidises replacement of pellet stoves (which cost similarly to heat pumps anyway) with heat pumps. You just have to be ok to either rough it out or turn on expensive resistive heating few days per year.

That all sounds great, another great case is to use rest material from other wood production.

If all wood pellet burning had these origins then it's a carbon neutral energy source which is much better than many alternatives.

In my country (EU) the local wood pellet manufacturers use all sorts of biomass that would otherwise be considered junk, such as hulls from sunflower seeds. I find it hard to believe that companies are cutting down trees and using the best parts to make wood pellets, when there is so much demand for that wood elsewhere.

Compared to burning wood directly, pellets burn a lot cleaner meaning they release a lot less local pollution in the point of use. A friend added a pellet hopper to his wood furnace a few years ago and was amazed that after the switch he had no smoke and very little ash. And he no longer has to go and load it every morning and evening.

Same situation with for me, I heat exclusively with a wood stove. Oil is ungodly expensive and so is electricity meaning neither can compete with 250CAD/cord of cut, split wood. Costs me about 1000$ to heat my house all winter long.

Sure it's a bit of effort, but I think it's worth it in my situation. I know a lot of people hate wood, and I understand it's not great for my health, but I'll continue to burn it for purely economic reasons if nothing else.

I'm skeptical of using wood for biomass energy generation, but not for heating.

Sure, you're not buying manufactured pellets, like the majority of burnt wood.

Visit Athens in winter and see how wood burning for heating scales...

Wood burning is fine in the same way ICE vehicles are fine, when you have one it's nice, when you have a billion it's a whole other problem

The point is small communities should be able to have local renewable solutions, even though the solution would not scale to large communities.

Is that the point? Because that's not what the tweets are about at all...

No, but people who live in big cities tend to advocate for solutions that only make sense in big cities. It's certainly worth keeping a bit of perspective.

Worth what? Nobody is stopping or complaining about rural homeowners burning wood pellets for heat. This is specifically about using imported, overseas pellets in a retrofitted coal plant to produce electricity. It's an inefficient environmental disaster.

Even if it does harm the environment its more important people don't freeze, its not really much a of a choice at this point.

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.

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

You may enjoy this old piece by Sam Harris on what he calls The Fireplace Delusion: https://www.samharris.org/blog/the-fireplace-delusion

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.

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.

What safety risk? You’re not going to get meaningful creosote buildup on any reasonable timescale using it so infrequently.

It’s trivial to plug the fireplace when it’s not being used, to mitigate heat loss.

I wonder if that could be somehow fixed in some kind of two step combustion. Like if you cut oxygen supply and are now basically pouring coal particulated up the chimney could that the somehow "afterburned" to be turned back into heat and CO2?

Catalytic converters basically do that with CO

This is how modern wood stoves work either with a catalyst or with oxygenating tubes that sit in the ceiling of the firebox to help more completely burn the soot. Big increase in efficiency and reduction in particulates.

FYI the article is talking about industrial power wood burning, not personal consumption.

If your stove has a catalytic converter then the oxygen-starved combustion is also very efficient at producing heat. It's common to put some pieces of wood in at night, turn it all the way down, and still have enough in the morning to keep the fire going.

Wood pellet combustion is significantly better than thick wood logs but it does produce particulates so it's not as clean as gas.

Modern wood burning stoves have catalytic combusters that significantly reduce the emissions coming out of the chimney. They essentially burn the wood, then re-burn the smoke from that fire at a very high temperature (and then sometimes a third time). This results in much lower emissions and much more efficient burning where more heat is extracted.

They're mandated by law in many places now.

Anecdotally, friends in the Yukon used to burn ~10 cords of wood a winter. After upgrading to a catalytic combusting wood stove they now burn about 5 cords. Same house, same wood.

>Anecdotally, friends in the Yukon used to burn ~10 cords of wood a winter. After upgrading to a catalytic combusting wood stove they now burn about 5 cords. Same house, same wood.

Thank you, I just learned a new word/unit of measure (cord) and went down the rabbit hole:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cord_(unit)

has a photo that really helps in visually dimensioning the amount it represents.

Maine has the "loose thrown cord", and then there are:

>Other non-official terms for firewood volume include standing cord, kitchen cord, running cord, face cord, fencing cord, country cord, long cord, and rick, all subject to local variation.

It seems like we are damned if we do, damned if we don’t. I was starting to feel smug for having a 2-year-old catalytic wood stove fired by locally grown hardwoods (I am in NH). Then I found this article [1] about a Finnish study showing high dioxin and furan emissions due to the catalyst.

Luckily we just added hyper heat air source heat pumps to the rest of the house. We also have hydronic heat from an oil-fired boiler, which we are planning to only use when it’s too cold for the heat pumps (less than 25 degrees F).

The boiler also supplies hot water, so looking to replace that with a heat pump water heater to avoid burning oil in the summer. However, even with the efficiency of heat pumps, the electricity is mostly generated with gas, which is <40% efficient (factoring in transmission and distribution losses). Our boiler is 82% efficient, so from a carbon/GHG point of view, heat pump water heater may not be any better. Of course electricity is fungible, so more nuclear, solar, and wind would change the equation.

What I want to know is, where is the Department of Energy, etc. guidance on this. I have a fair amount of experience with energy policy and technology and the right path is far from clear to me.

[1] https://www.familiesforcleanair.org/catalytic-wood-stoves-sh...

Even heavy oil for boilers requires some energy to produce from raw oil. Plus there are transportation losses. They are less than transport losses for electricity but not much.

Great post. We're in a parallel situation in Vermont: current EPA woodstove using locally harvested wood, fuel oil backup that we use only when we aren't home. We did install a heat pump hot water heater and have been happy with it, but it was replacing electric so a clearer win.

I'm not sure what to make of the Finnish study. Full version is here: https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/j.chemosphere.2012.02.027. It's hard to know how the elevated levels compare to other sources, since 2x of almost zero might still be negligible. It does mention though that the "PCDD/F level exceeded the emission limit in Europe for MSW incinerators" so maybe it's real.

One other factor that might help us remain "smug" about our modern wood stoves is that the Finnish study was done on sauna stoves without secondary combustion and with high flue gas temps. I suspect the results might be completely different for compliant woodstove with good secondary and much lower flue temps. Of course, different might end up worse.

Thanks for posting the original article. One of these days I’ll look for citations that might elaborate this work.

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.

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.

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.

Doomberg is also on substack: 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.

> replacing mostly natural gas and electric heating with wood.

This right here is complete and utter BS. Please stop repeating this.

> 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.

What does "sensible" mean here? The topic is carbon neutrality. And for wood-burning to be carbon neutral, tree cutters would have to somehow accelerate forest growth enough to absorb the extra CO2 from the burned wood, plus the CO2 emitted from processing and transporting the pellets. There is no evidence that they are doing this. On the contrary, old hardwood trees are being chopped down, and their regeneration is slow and uncertain. https://e360.yale.edu/features/wood_pellets_green_energy_or_...

Why is exporting fuel from another continent in any way better than producing the same kind of fuel in EU? Other than said policy loopholes

> 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.

If you burn deadwood, sure, maybe, that would just rot back into CO2. But removing trees for burning is just removing the CO2 storage living trees provide.

If you make a furniture out of cut tree that CO2 is trapped for 10-50 years, if you burn it it's right back to atmosphere

How many years did it take for that wood to grow?

Using wood from an equilibrium is perfectly fine, yes. But Europe has that equilibrium, responsibly managed forests since many generations. That's why we import from the USA, where apparently strip-mining live biomass is still a thing. We already exceed live biomass capacity even while still burning through millennia of fossil biomass per year and as long as we do exceed live capacity, substituting fossil with even now live is no improvement.

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.

> “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.

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.

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.

> 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.

When the green movement makes a party and swallows enough to make being anti-nuclear part of its manifesto, it's a monolith.

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/

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?

Yeah, with Zola, Hyde, etc. and Github pages there's really no excuse.

Makes it so hard to refer to in the future.

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).

The poster also has a paid Substack blog: https://doomberg.substack.com/

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.

'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.

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?

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).

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.

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...

Context: a couple of days ago the EU voted to keep wood as renewable energy.

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/...

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11209335/Historic-U...

https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2022/09/15/251690...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2022/sep/05/...

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.

> 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.

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-woo...

https://biomassmagazine.com/articles/16371/report-eu-demand-...

More recent (as in, published September 14, 2022) article from Biomass Magazine 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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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-Pelletproduktio... [2] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/171887/umfrag...

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)

Doomberg has a great substack, and these threads are a great tease. The substack is like $300 per year.

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.

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/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.

Just wanted to say massive thanks for doing the massive research on this. Can't believe I had to scroll down most of the way to find this. This is the single most informative comment I've seen on this whole thread and deserves to be at the top.

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.

>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.

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).

No thanks.

> 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-japa...

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

Good God - longer threads are dreadful to read on Twitter. This is the worst medium for longer pieces

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1571063488860286977.html

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.

Which information is false/fake?

Reading some of the other top comments should give you some idea.

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.

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.

Threadreader: <https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1571063488860286977.html>

Related humor (from the Swiss):

https://twitter.com/ivan_8848/status/1570869727739936773

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

Remember the corn kernel stove fad in the USA?

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.

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.

"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.

The absurdity of political correctness, welcome to the dystopia, self-created, self-imposed, draging everybody down with the ship.

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.

To all those defending EU’s march towards coal and wood, please remember that India and China will follow the suit :)

War is hell.

Absurdity comes along for the ride.

How is this cost effective?

It's called a stopgap.

> 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.

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.

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/Factitious_disorder_imposed_on... (Aka Munchhausen by Proxy)

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.

But that is a different argument. People can have an irrational fear against something new and protest purely from those fears not with logic. That might be the case for nuclear power too. I don't know all the factors but I would also rather see nuclear power instead of burning coal. It is just that I do not buy that people protest against it because conciously or subconsciously they know it is the answer to the problem and fear of becoming irrelevant. This is luddites that fear that progress would stop their livelihood.

This is an actual argument that nuclear PR reps make in detail:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/05/06...

> The goal of renewables was to turn modern industrial societies back into agrarian ones, argued Murray Bookchin in his 1962 book, Our Synthetic Environment.

> The reason renewables can’t power modern civilization is because they were never meant to. One interesting question is why anybody ever thought they could.

I guess it works in certain political bubbles, even if it appears insane from others

It's not just that they would be obsolete, there is religious fervor into having those sacrifices and somehow a dislike for growth and progress.

Simplistic view. You don’t have to sacrifice everything if you switch to more sustainable options. For example, if every car had an electric engine, we’d save >50% of transportation energy, just because an electric engine turns electricity into movement way more efficiently (>85%) than an ICE with a max efficiency of <40%.

Sure, there are other challenges, but it’s too simple to say that anything else but nuclear is worth it.

Irrelevant. Who cares how much energy is being saved by an electric engine when the energy provided by nuclear energy means that relatively minuscule savings like 50% would not be appreciable in any way? The only way that percentages such as those you describe would even matter is when the energy substrate is either in shortage or pollutive, or if the infrastructure isn't scaled. When the energy is beyond plentiful, why quibble over engine efficiency other than from a personal cost standpoint?

> but it’s too simple to say that anything else but nuclear is worth it.

Nonsense. You call my argument "simplistic", but all you've done is point out how great you think electric engines are, as if that says anything at all about nuclear energy or the philosophy behind its opponents.

Because nuclear energy has risks that solar and wind don’t have. And nuclear does pollute a lot more. If we plaster the world with nuclear reactors, risk and pollution goes up. You dismiss these two factors as completely irrelevant. Energy efficiency is important, because it helps to reduce both.

> Because nuclear energy has risks that solar and wind don’t have.

Everything has risk. Solar panels can fall and kill you. Wind turbines kill birds.

> And nuclear does pollute a lot more.

Oh really. Tell me more.

> If we plaster the world with nuclear reactors, risk and pollution goes up.

What pollution? What about CO2?

> You dismiss these two factors as completely irrelevant.

That's because it is irrelevant.

What you were doing is applying a benefit of a technology to a situation where it's anything but impressive. In the most logically extreme circumstance, imagine if humanity achieved unlimited power; why would anyone care at that point whether their electric engine was even 200% more efficient than an internal combustion engine? Without something to make the efficiency meaningful, such as energy shortage or personal cost, it wouldn't matter. What you appear to be saying is that electric engines running on wind and solar can replace nuclear as if they can as easily scale and be as affordable, neither of which are true because they can't produce electrical energy 24/7/365 the way nuclear energy can.

And where you get that energy in the first place ? You still need to produce it and get it into the car.

You're not saving "50% energy" if you're not generating that energy efficiently in the first place. And nuclear is best way to have consistent stream of it without massive storage facilities that renewables would require

> Many environmentalist causes and activism around climate change would be obsolete

No, they absolutely wouldn’t be. I’m sorry but this is so wrong it’s close to a bad-faith argument. Even with an immediate 100% switch to nuclear across the globe there would still be a shitload of work to be done just on the climate change front.

I live in Germany and the cost of storing existing nuclear waste will be over 100 billion [1]. It will be paid by me, my children and their children and God knows how many generations because the companies would've just declared bankruptcy if they had to pay for the whole thing themselves. And it doesn't even work with all of these massive explicit or implicit subsidies! More harm has been done to the environment by wasting money on this grand delusion for decades than anything other than directly emitting co2 in the atmosphere. It was figured out already in the eighties that the math doesn't work, which was the first time we saw concepts like small modular being designed on purpose [2]. But those didn't work either, so it was back to the beginning, which predictably failed like it did the first time. Now we are back at maybe small modular can help us, and any reasonable person can make a good guess if it will work. People building these things are laughing all the way to the bank.

[1] https://learngerman.dw.com/en/german-government-does-nuclear...

[2] https://wiseinternational.org/nuclear-monitor/872-873/forgot...

Germany is one of the world's largest economies. Your GDP is 4.2 trillion USD. How do you picture the cost of 100 billion being a problem?

100 billion you spend on something is a 100 billion you can't spend on something else. It's the basic definition of opportunity cost. It's especially a problem because even if you ignore it, nuclear is not competitive. So basically you have to overpay other solutions and then later you need to spend a huge chunk of money to get out of the investment. It's a bad deal in every way. The promise of nuclear was unlimited energy for almost free. This hasn't panned out, we have decades of evidence. The last bastion is can we run a grid on 100% renewables -- you can debate it, but renewables have been dismissed for 10%, 20%, 30%, 40% of total grid and the critics were proven wrong every time. It's not a guarantee, but I won't bet on the losing horse.

> 100 billion you spend on something is a 100 billion you can't spend on something else. It's the basic definition of opportunity cost.

I agree on principle, except it doesn't matter because that logic is respected at all by modern international monetary policy.

> The promise of nuclear was unlimited energy for almost free.

I'm not sure who was suggesting that, but it was always wrong.

> The last bastion is can we run a grid on 100% renewables

According to?

> renewables have been dismissed for 10%, 20%, 30%, 40% of total grid and the critics were proven wrong every time

No and no. Renewables have their place but they have not proven to be able to support the grid on their own the way that deposit forms of energy do. This is entirely self evident. No one would be advocating for nuclear if solar and wind were a viable alternative to fossil fuel. Solar technology has been around for over half a century and its efficiency pales in contrast to internal combustion. Even the Stirling engine is more efficient (but was abandoned because its use in solar poses a danger to birds). They have to be able to make a profit, and they can't do that without having society as a group pay for them through policy.

Don't worry, you and your kids are paying for green subsidies as well.

The math on nuclear power is not a settled matter: some studies say it's convenient, some studies say it's not.

It's hard to say who's right on the matter, but we also spent decades not improving nuclear reactor technology.

Overall I'd say I'm more confident in nuclear energy being the best for generating energy at scale, while renewables are great for reducing or eliminating the dependency on a national grid.

I am not paying for renewables subsidies, nor did I ever. There was a guaranteed price per kWh minimum, that was funded by the consumer, but even this part of the bill was reduced to 0 this year.

It's a settled matter. We know how much it costs to produce electricity from different sources based on upfront and operational costs, and nuclear is not competitive.

100 billion sure, but how much is that over each kWh produced? Not a lot of money. Every nuclear power plant Germany closes is more CO2 emitted when inevitably a gas or coal plant will have to pick up the slack.

Nuclear does indeed not require sacrifice, but it does require things like manufacture, transport and use of dangerous materials. (And not just radioactive, it's also a matter of poison, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32613470 has numbers.) Handling dangerous materials is expensive and IMO likely to grow more so, as our societies seem to grow more risk-averse. We didn't have policies to avoid all traffic deaths a few decares ago, for example. And with many voters being opposed to nuclear, I think states will be less likely provide free insurance cover in 10-20 years than was the case 10-20 years ago. This too increases the costs to nuclear power operators.

An increasing cost curve that faces a decreasing cost curve for solar and wind isn't something about which you can say "is the best". You need some solid arguments. (FWIW, I think nuclear has no hope.)

> but the problem with nuclear energy is it doesn't require human beings to sacrifice anything

Not true.

   1. Compared to renewables, grid energy would be much more centralized if it was mainly nuclear based.
   2. It is much more expensive to build, especially the upfront costs. This is the real reason it is not popular. 
   3. Only a minority of countries are developed enough to be reasonably trusted with nuclear energy. What about the rest?
   4. Nuclear is not suitable for areas with low population density, this is related to point 1. 
   5. Nuclear waste is a solved issue or acceptable risk according to so academics but not all.
   6. With nuclear energy you still have the same problem of grid storage because nuclear plants cannot be ramped up or down quickly enough, so you either need lots of storage or gas peaker plants. 
   7. Sunlight and wind are free, and some locations have an abundance of them. Uranium is not.
   8. Political ties necessary for most countries to source uranium fuel need to be taken into account, too.
   9. Once you build a nuclear plant you are invested in it for a decades. You cannot very easily shut it down and upgrade to a new model or use a newer technology altogether. This is one of the reasons we are stuck with nuclear plants decades ago.
   10. The risk of a nuclear catastrophe is always there. The fact that it has been averted in most cases, does not mean the risk does not exist. Especially when you have extraordinary situations like a tsunami or a war breaking out.

This is not meant to say that nuclear energy should not be considered. But I just cannot stand these childish takes on the subject.

> Compared to renewables, grid energy would be much more centralized if it was mainly nuclear based.

That's not necessarily a bad thing. Modern nuclear reactors can also be built at a much smaller scale than previous generations. Just because this hasn't truly been implemented doesn't mean it isn't absolutely feasible at this point.

> It is much more expensive to build, especially the upfront costs. This is the real reason it is not popular.

"But it costs money" isn't really a good argument for anything in and of itself. Politicians not wanting to deal with the upfront cost of building new nuclear plants isn't really a good excuse for not doing the right thing. Under the premise that climate change is an existential threat to human civilization, switching to nuclear energy is the right thing to do whether or not it's popular. Eating healthy is not popular and costs more (in the short term), therefore no one should eat healthy?

> Nuclear is not suitable for areas with low population density, this is related to point 1.

Fine, small areas can use renewables or even fossil fuel. No one is suggesting that nuclear is a panacea. It does take care of at least 85% of the problem, and possibly more given that smaller nuclear reactors are achievable.

> Nuclear waste is a solved issue or acceptable risk according to so academics but not all.

My opinion of academics is not good. Also depends on what "solved" means.

> With nuclear energy you still have the same problem of grid storage because nuclear plants cannot be ramped up or down quickly enough, so you either needs lots of storage or gas peaker plants.

So do renewables to a much, much larger degree, and without constant output.

> Sunlight and wind are free, and some locations have an abundance of them. Uranium is not.

Nonsense. You think that all the silicon, copper, silver, and steel that go into solar panels and wind turbines are free? Do they have no repair cycle or EOL? They are not "free." Not even close. How about all the lithium for the batteries needed just to keep the lights on when solar fails? Does that grow on trees?

> Political ties necessary for most countries to source uranium fuel need to be taken into account, too.

Yeah.

> Once you build a nuclear plant you are invested in it for a decades. You cannot very easily shut it down and upgrade to a new model or use a newer technology altogether. This is one of the reasons we are stuck with nuclear plants decades ago.

We should be invested in nuclear. The trouble with things that don't have obvious long term consequences is that we tend to not take them seriously.

> The risk of a nuclear catastrophe is always there. The fact that it has been averted in most cases, does not mean the risk does not exist. Especially when you have extraordinary situations like a tsunami or a war breaking out.

All the more reason to build multiple smaller ones than having a few large scale nuclear power plants. All the more reason to invest in R&D so that nuclear can be made even safer and distributed than it already is.

We are far more at risk of true catastrophe from nuclear weapons than nuclear reactors. If climate change is an existential crisis, then we are more at risk from that than nuclear reactors being compromised by war.

Or we can choose power sources that haven't seen a meaningful leap in advancement in the last 60 years and require civilization's progress to slow to a crawl to accommodate.

Lesson here is, listen to Trump next time, ahhh hahahahaha.

Can anyone explain this - 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.

I don't see any reason that bail couldn't be used to feed animals.

Except it's straw. Hay is used for food. Straw is used for bedding.

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.

It can't be used to feed animals because it's literally inedible.

It's straw.

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.

That’s not for feeding but straw for bedding. Hay is in very short demand these days. Straw is probably doing ok.

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...

https://agriflame.com/#howitworks (hay)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9rZzgkq2OQ (straw)

https://www.wattagnet.com/articles/1876-growers-build-a-hay-... (hay)

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 !

Well, it's pretty low density for heating, furnace that big isn't exactly practical for anything else but some industry building

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.

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."

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!

just for curiosity, who is the "you guys"? who is not included?

Obviously people inside Europe

so it doesnt cover the USA for example?

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