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Comment by mcjiggerlog | Hacker News Reader

Who do you think is using renewable power that is not connected to a grid? Poor off-grid communities are pretty much exclusively burning fossil fuels or biomass for primary energy, which are most certainly not carbon-neutral or good for the environment.

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Biomass is carbon neutral.

There's nothing green about chopping down forests for energy - biomass being called carbon neutral is one of the greenwashing scams of the century.

Whether burned forests are ever regenerated at all is something that I'm incredible sceptical about - there's very little oversight into companies' claims. Even if they are being replanted, you are tearing down potentially primary forest and important habitat and replacing it with tree farms.

Finally, burning wood is incredibly polluting and awful for anyone in the region of said power plants.

Nobody is chopping down old growth forest to burn in electrical plants.

What happens is that combustible waste and young growth (especially the bits unusable by the lumber industry) get burned. This is a cylcle, not to be compared with coal or oil.

Yes, it's still polluting.

> Nobody is chopping down old growth forest to burn in electrical plants.

I wouldn't be so sure.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-63089348

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/03/26/biomass-ca...

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/estonia-h...

Indeed, material from logging can end up in a plant to be burned for electrical power. But: that's after the lumber industry has had its way with the logs and by that time you have sawdust and odds and bits, these are pulped and compressed into pellets, those are then burned.

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