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Comment by woodisgood | Hacker News Reader

Is wood not a renewable resource? Closed loop of carbon.

Technically coal is also a closed loop of carbon because the CO2 once came from the atmosphere.

Which brings us to the problem: The CO2 shouldn't be in the atmosphere right now: If you burn wood today and the CO2 gets removed again by new plants within the next 100 years, that's still a problem.

I don’t understand why you’re being downvoted.

Your point is absolutely correct and as far as I can tell you pointed it out genuinely, not facetiously. Edit: read other later posts here: didn’t know about the bacteria part. Learned something today!

This is absolutely not my area of expertise but intuitively there are two categories of energy sources: one which releases co2 (or other climate change impacting gases) and one which doesn’t. Wood, oil, gas, coal falls into the former. It’s just a question of time as you say until the loop closes. Solar, wind, thermal, etc would fall into the latter as far as I can tell.

He gets downvoted because the real question is if burning wood causes climate change. Instead, he prefers to debate the exact meaning of closed loop.

Wood burning does not cause climate change provided it's matched by reforestation efforts.

As others point out, the real problem with wood burning is it's effects on air quality.

Most wood burning happens in more rural areas where people are harvesting the renewing resource on their own land, like fallen trees in winter. Many times, areas need to do controlled burns to prevent uncontrolled wild fires, and it's better to manage that burning for a purpose, useful heat, that lessens the heat needed from other energy sources that aren't renewable.

In California’s mountains (Sierra Nevada range and similar) people who want to burn wood legally have to use pellets. The stoves that burn them are meant to comply with pollution regulations. People kinda don’t like them but they use them.

Montevideo didn’t seem like a place where suburbanites were burning wood of any form, but I was there in the summer, just for a day.

Got any sources? I know many people, including a firefighter and sheriff, that burn wood outside on the many burn days, or use it in wood fireplaces.

Here's one such county ordinance https://www.tuolumnecounty.ca.gov/365/Burn-Program

I have family in Mono County.

https://trademarkmammoth.com/woodstove-inserts-and-epa-compl...

Given that EPA regulations were cited, I assumed that the same rules apply everywhere. It seems instead that the harshest rules apply in one town.

Isn't coal the result of a massive accumulation of plant matter that couldn't be digested by any organism?

But then, once the current mushrooms and bacteria manage to digest it, there is no way for it to accumulate again like that.

Petrol might be a different story, coming from the plankton falling at the bottom of the sea instead.

Coal is not a renewable resource because bacteria and fungi evolved to decompose wood before it turns into coal. That's why almost all coal comes from (nomen omen) Carboniferous Period.

A fun theory, but it's wrong. The likely explanation is tectonic:

https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/how-ancient-fo...

That's kind of missing my point. I obviously know that coal is not renewable.

The point was: When you burn wood today the atmosphere isn't going to be like "oh, but that CO2 was absorbed out of the atmosphere during the last 100 years, so that CO2 shouldn't contribute to global warming".

As long as we haven't solved climate change any CO2 released into the atmosphere should be avoided. It's okay to burn wood that would have rotted anyway.

But if you cut down a healthy forest, burn it and say "but it will be reabsorbed when the forst grows back, it's a closed loop" that's technically correct, but it still contributes to global warming because we now have additional CO2 in the atmosphere. Simply because it takes time for a forest to grow.

The closed loop argument is only really valid long term and when we've already solved climate change.

> Technically coal is also a closed loop of carbon because the CO2 once came from the atmosphere.

As you say, the loop has to close on a timeline shorter than the greenhouse gas effect's impact on climate. That can be true of wood but not coal.

The CO2 is going back into the atmosphere regardless, if the wood is not burned, it will decompose.

Sure, but the CO2 from burning wood goes into the atmosphere right now. The CO2 from decomposing wood goes into the atmosphere over time, sometimes even over the span of years, depending on environmental conditions.

And, regardless, it's not like we only burn wood that's starting to decompose. Quite the contrary.

Coal is possibly a closed loop on a geologic scale, while trees are a closed loop on a human lifetime scale. If a cut 100 acres, and burn it, replant it, I'm net neutral. If I burn the same amount of coal, I don't have the 100 acres to plant. Coal adds net carbon to our system on the timeline we care about.

It is - but particulates are a massive health issue.

I totally agree.

In the UK, many (often well off) people in towns and cities want to have an open fire or wood stove for fun. It makes no sense for this to be legal in densely-populated areas, that can afford cleaner alternatives.

We moved into a house during COVID and it came with a stove - it was significantly cheaper to run the stove than our gas boiler - £3 roughly for an evening compared to probably £12-15 to heat with the boiler. Across 3-4 months of winter that's an enormous saving

Cheaper for you but if you live anywhere near others the cost to the communities health is a lot more. London's air is often terrible thanks to wood burning and bloody fireworks! Why we allow this I will never know.

I'm gonna stick a "citation needed" here. I have discerned no obvious difference in air quality from wood burners in the winter so unless London has a lot of folks burning wood in the summer I find it unlikely. As for Fireworks, their usage is so infrequent that I find the idea of "often" slightly confusing.
Disclosure, my family had open fires and then log burners for as long as I've been alive. Not in London where I now live. I love a proper fire, it's great, one of the things I enjoy about visiting family in the countryside.

I am, however, ambivalent about the things and wouldn't resent them being banned.

I'm the person with a city center wood burner - They're terrible for air quality [0].

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/mar/30/home-woo...

And not all particulates are the same. If i recall, wood burning yields rather large particulates which are less bad then something like diesel fumes, which are smaller. I find some of the comments here strange… complaining about lack of insulation and use of wood. While the alternative is over insulation with inevitable mold in the walls from vapor.

> As for Fireworks, their usage is so infrequent that I find the idea of "often" slightly confusing.

Not in the context of London, but I live near an amusement park and they launch fireworks every weekend while the park is in season. I don't smell or notice any difference in air quality except for after the 4th of July when they launch a lot more of them.

You're probably not noticing any odors from your local municipal fireworks because they launch them quite a bit higher into the air than your typical neighbor is going to be sending their firecrackers and bottle rockets, making it someone else's problem. The reason industrial smoke stacks are as tall as they are is to get the smoke away from the immediate vicinity/surface.

That absolutely makes sense.

lol at citation needed, just go out in a village that has more then 10 people running wood/coal stoves and try to breathe...

_Disclosure I also have open fire pit in a garden, and love occasional fire_

I mean, I grew up in environments like that and I and there is no noticeable difference as I walk out and back again (order miles).

I will say that if folks are having proper bonfires - that absolutely makes a difference. Largely because they are not burning dry wood.

> Cheaper for you but if you live anywhere near others the cost to the communities health is a lot more.

I live in the middle of a city centre. My next door neighbour burns coal in an open fire too, it's shocking.

I don't disagree with you, but when I'm looking at saving £250/month on top of all my other costs skyrocketing, it becomes an attractive thing to use.

That makes me wonder: Can you take a car's catalytic converter and fit it onto a fireplace's stovepipe? It seems like it should be a simple fix for lowering the amount of soot that gets out

Not sure why you're downvoted, but yes! Modern wood burning stoves can come with catalytic converters [0], which can make the stove burn more efficiently as well as lowering emissions.

Generally the stoves are designed specially for this. The stove burns hotter and may have a second combustion chamber. DIYers welding in the catalytic converter from a car is not the norm and not expected to be safe, but I bet there are some hackers who have made it work.

[0] https://ambassadorfireplaces.com/the-difference-between-cata...

Wow, either your boiler is inefficient, or your house is huge! We live in a 4 bed semi, victorian and could do with more insulation for sure - and (according to my smart meter) it is a very rare day that we spend £10 on gas for heating and hot water plus cooking.

Don't you still need to heat the rest of your house?

Inefficient boiler, yep. A medium-sized house, I would say.

I live in Edinburgh in a tenemant house with 12ft ceilings. Combine that with spiking gas prices last winter, it's a recipe for disaster.

Ouch! I can only imagine - then. I grew up in a stone built farmhouse with open coal fire in the living room and an Aga in the kitchen. Those two rooms were lovely and warm, the rest of the house not so much!

Yeah my house has sandstone walls with brick internal walls 12 foot ceilings, and a 25 year old gas boiler that isn't even a condensing boiler.

Unfortunately for us, it's also installed in a way that doesn't meet building regulations (thanks previous owners) - the flue vents onto a path that belongs to our neighbor, so if we want to upgrade the boiler we need to move it to somewhere else, and the suitable locations for it require upgrading the gas pipework in the house to a larger diameter, and pulling up the floors in all our living areas to do so.

The only spot that's "suitable" for it doesn't have room for a hot water tank either so that's more work to reroute the hot water back, and renders the spot the boiler is currently in dead space.

Last quote we got was about £15,000 all in including fixing the decorating in our office, kitchen and living room, so we decided we'd use the log burner instead for a little while. We got caught out pretty badly with this problem unfortunately

You can burn wood cleanly and very efficiently, so why not just ban inefficient stoves rather than wood burning in general? A TLUD isn't going to be any worse for your health than a gas-burning stove or furnace.

Our neighbour has a modern, top-of-the-line, highly efficient wood boiler. Still makes the area smell like a parking garage for a couple of hours each day during winter.

It's not just about the stove. It's also about the state of the wood you're burning (humidity mostly). Very dry wood burns much more cleanly than less dry wood.

In that case they aren't operating it correctly.

We should be (and are) banning those as well though, because they're bad for your health and bad for the wider communities health.

Wood smoke can also trigger asthma, so roughly 10pct of the population face a potential life-threatening situation from it. https://www.cdc.gov/asthma/triggers.html

And if the problem is because of your neighbour, there is not a lot you can do about it.

It depends very very much on the desihgn of the stove and how they are run. DEFRA in the UK has just upped the required standard of stoves that can be installed in smokeless zones. The best ones have very low emissions.

It's a renewable resource but burning wood for energy causes much worse environmental issues than climate change.

If we cultivate trees, then remove them from the earth and atomize them into the air, then plant more trees, they're a renewable resource but it's still causing climate change.

I don’t understand. There’s no net increase or decrease of atmospheric carbon in the scenario you describe

The effects of climate change are not instantly reversible. Imagine shifting weather patterns dry up a wetlands. Removing carbon from the atmosphere does not recreate that biome

CO2 doesn’t disappear from the atmosphere the moment you plant trees. In fact, burning wood is worse than burning coal here, because, for the same amount of energy provided, burning wood is going to emit more CO2 than burning coal.

Is it? Energy output is directly related to carbon content. More energy density from coal mean more co2.

But coal is much much worse due to toxic pm2.5

> Energy output is directly related to carbon content. More energy density from coal mean more co2.

No. It means you need to burn a larger volume of wood to get the same amount of energy. And when you increase the volume, you increase the emissions. The first sentence of this quote may be true, if we are talking about absolute amounts, but then in the second sentence density is a ratio (energy to volume), which is why it’s not true.

I don’t know all that much about relative PM2.5 emissions, but a brief search shows a paper, which argues that PM2.5 emissions depend more on combustion conditions than fuel type[1].

[1]: <https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31340411/>

A ton of coal will create much more co2 than ton of wood, isn't it?

For the same amount of energy the result should be similar amount of co2.

Coal is worse for people because burning it creates many unhealthy chemical components. Sulfur, heavy metals, etc

> A ton of coal will create much more co2 than ton of wood, isn't it?

Yes. But that hardly matters.

> For the same amount of energy the result should be similar amount of co2.

No. Apparently, wood is estimated to emit 30% more CO2 than coal for the same amount of energy[1].

> Coal is worse for people because burning it creates many unhealthy chemical components. Sulfur, heavy metals, etc

Is it more than when you burn wood though? I’m not knowleadgable enough to answer this question. I found one link about it[2], but currently I don’t have time to read it. In any case, the fact that it produces more CO2 than coal is a good argument against wood in my eyes. My argument is against wood, not in favour of coal. Coal is just a benchmark to measure against.

[1]: <https://ecosystems.psu.edu/research/centers/private-forests/...>

[2]: <https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/18644>

And wood is even worse in that regard

That is not true. Check out chemical components of coal ash.

I live in the region where people use coal for private heating. It is much worse than wood.

Not from a carbon perspective. Forestry isn't cutting down ancient forests and then randomly thinking it would be nice to plant some new ones. Trees are a crop. They are planted, left to grow, and then harvested, in a cycle.

It’s going to take time for a new tree to consume the CO2 produced by burning a tree. If instead you leave a tree standing and burn coal, you will produce less CO2, so it’s going to take less time to consume it (and the older tree is going to do it faster than a young one).

Moreover, it’s not only a question of net emissions. It’s also a question of location. People burn wood and coal in their homes and that affects the air most near them the most. It is the worst near cities, where you can’t plant a new forest. Instead just think about how the local air is going to be affected if people burn there 1MWh of wood vs coal. Because trees are not going to help here, if they're planted far away.

And, when trees die naturally, they don’t emit CO2 at the speed that they do when they’re burnt. It happens much slower, so it’s not that much of a problem.

Mind you I’m not advocating for burning coal. I’m advocating against burning wood.

> I’m advocating against burning wood.

Ok, there are many rural properties in the world populated with trees. These trees naturally fall and contribute brush. Firefighters and forest management will tell you to clean up the brush by burning, otherwise it will decompose (still co2) and eventually lead to a natural wildfire (same effect). Better to burn it for heat than outside for nothing. What would you do instead?

In this instance I’ll say burn it if you want. Although it leading to a natural wildfire is highly dependent on local climate. Where I live, for most of the year it’s too cold and humid for anything like this to happen, except during maybe 2 months a year. But I appreciate that in places like California or Australia it may be different.

There’s probably not a simple yes/no answer, but rather a function of the rates of both planting and harvesting trees, unless one is pedantic about the distinction between able-to-be renewed and actually renewed, which is useless in the context of our climate issues.

That’s no good if replanting is slower than consumption.

No, it isn't, but people who run a forestry business obviously plant enough trees to make sure they have enough timber to keep going.

It is, and can be done sustainably. But only in conjunction with (1) good harvesting / forestry practices (2) good wood "processing" [i.e. drying] practices (3) good insulation in the homes that use wood for heat (4) good wood-burning stoves and filters.

The Nordics, perhaps unsurprisingly, are the lead innovators in this space.

In the long run, perhaps. Depending on the rate of tree replacement of those used as fuel.

Theoretically maybe (ignoring all the other effects of burning wood and the time spans one has to consider), but globally we have a massive deforestation and loss of trees so it is sadly not a reasonable option.

How do you expect to prevent deforestation if there is no economic value to keeping the forests? People, in general, don't object to deforestation because it's 'productive' - it's building things, making jobs, making money. If deforestation was destroying a valuable resource that provides heat and energy for your community, you would absolutely not allow it, and definitely not support it.

yeahhhhh....it is but I think when framing energy independence and renewables its a good call out to note if homes are heating with electricity or burning fuels.

Yes but it's not sustainable, kinda defeats the purpose

Depends on where the word comes from I would say

Using the same logic, you could say coal is renewable depending on your time horizon, no?

No, fungi evolved that can digest lignin now ;).

On a less facetious note, Solar needs time to renew the energy it made the day before as well. Time scale is very important to questions of renewables, and people have been sustainably burning wood for a long time. Unsustainably too, but I would bet that’s not the case here if it’s being included in a census of sustainable sources.

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