Comment by kristjank | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kristjank | Hacker News Reader

The paragraph about wood pellet exports really makes me mad. I have always harbored some disdain for "green" policies in well-developed countries, because they always seem to simply move the "filth" into another, poorer country and make it their problem.

If the wood were burned locally (and without the additional expenditure of pellet-making), I could see a sustainability argument in there and support it. The place I live in is heated by firewood. If it makes it any better, it's delivered from less than 10km away, by a farmer that manages his forest with respect. It's not the best, but considering it's worked for generations that way, it seems renewable enough. And it's a mountainous region, not really usable for anything else agriculturally.

But considering the majority of Estonian exports is just for heating two extremely wealthy european countries with a industrially processed wood product, I just see affirmation of my prejudice that the Eurozone and EU mostly exist as a tool for the richer global west to exploit poorer eastern countries that get added to the union when the existing ones are squeezed dry of their resources.

Most political institutions exist to funnel wealth from poorer people to richer people.

Sounds rather simplistic.

The purpose of a system is what it does.

POSIWID: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

I live in western EU and I confirm that. There's so much forest in my place that nobody cares about that you could heat the whole area without cutting a single tree, just by picking up what fell down. I'm totally serious about that, there's so much trees on the floor that cutting new ones for firewood is mostly useless.

And despite all of this, we import processed pellets and the only wood we cut is sent to China for making furniture, that's absolute insanity.

I have first hand experience with this scenario: a large forest property that yields enough firewood for a season in the form of naturally felled trees.

The problem is that it's incredibly labour intensive vs clear cutting. It's hard enough to make paths to haul logs or equipment let alone all the work to prep and store the wood. It's doable, I've done it, but at the end of the day it's more efficient to import from someone else's lot. And pellets, even locally made, are even cheaper.

We've settled on partially supplying from felled trees (which is somewhat of a convenient byproduct of clearing trails) but the bulk of supply being purchased and delivered in the fall, to get us through the season. Pellets would be the obvious winner if we were willing to convert over, but I have too much attachment to the old stove.

The other thing is that felled trees provide a lot of resources back to the forest, and so at least for property I maintain, I prefer to let nature take course for the most part.

Eastern countries added to the union benefit from Union. They are the ones who are given quite a lot of money. They are not squeezed, they are directly financially benefiting.

They do receive a lot money through the funds, cheaper loans and investments, but it has to be compared to the money their counterparts earn by exploiting the much cheaper workforce, resources and energy prices in the global east. The minimum wages discussed in the article are at a 1:3 ratio. It's trivial to funnel some money back if you've managed to gain 3 foreign workers for the price of 1 domestic. There is a word for such phenomena and it's social dumping.

Why does it matter that somebody benefits more if everybody benefits?

Btw 1 foreign worker rarely equals to 1 local. Even just the quality of their work isn’t equal usually and averagely, and language, culture, distance, etc differences are on top of that. Interestingly, who moved to Western countries usually works better than those who stayed, even with the same background. Source: my Eastern European ass, who still waits a project which has outsourced workforce and they really worth it not just on paper.

> Btw 1 foreign worker rarely equals to 1 local. Even just the quality of their work isn’t equal usually and averagely, and language, culture, distance, etc differences are on top of that.

Full agreement here. 1 exploited foreign worker will have much more output than 1 local unionized, low working hours worker.

Do you have any source that an environment where quality is secondary to quantity produce more value than where quality is more important? Because, GDP on paper tells us exactly that they don’t.

For example I have a friend who worked next to the production line the exact same job for Mercedes both in Hungary and Germany. In Hungary, the quantity was way more important than quality. In Germany, the opposite. So where that same exact person produced more value?

The ridiculous part is making this comparison on a per-country basis. Whole regions and their populations have been ruined by industries closing overnight to move abroad. Yet, by simplistic accounting, they should be considered winners?

Society, maybe not. People that own capital, definitely yes, and they shape EU policy.

Over time cheaper countries and regions of countries get improved standards of living etc and stop being cheap.

The Poland that joined the EU is so different from the Poland of today etc. It is subtle and not instant so perhaps younger people don’t see it so easily?

That workforce was even cheaper prior joining the Union. Quite a lot unemployed.

You know why people travel for bigger salaries? Because they want bigger salaries.

Wood burning is never sustainable, 'green', nor healthy. It boggles the mind that it is not normal to outlaw it.

> Wood burning is never sustainable, 'green', nor healthy. It boggles the mind that it is not normal to outlaw it.

That's right! Then everyone will have to buy this expensive heat pump sold by few corporations around the world! It is only green when it fills correct pockets.

It's not that few really, the technology is not very complicated.

Well, I work for one of such corporations, doing modelling and simulation of HVAC/R systems, heat pumps included. You can believe or not, but there is not much competition there, unless you consider, for example, Carrier and Viessmann as separate manufacturers (and they are not since May 2023).

Nibe, Stiebel Eltron, IVT, Thermia, Vaillant, Daikin, IME, Hoval, Grubmann, Hitachi, Atlantic/Fujitsu, BDR Thermea, Mitsubishi Electric, I could probably find many more. Some are probably local to Central Europe, but that only reinforces my point.

I do not understand how it's not sustainable if it has sustained itself as a part of normal wildlife management for centuries without any destructive interventions besides cutting and replanting old trees in a fairly remote region.

Deforestation has gone wrong many times in human history, from early to current. Tree logging has the same issues all other types of farming has, soil erosion, chancing of biotopes, disrupting runoff etc. The bigger the scale the worse consequences of tree farming are. The mono-culture of tree farming is closer to a parking lot than it is to nature.

There is forestry without tree farming, particularly for local firewood production from hunting lands, etc

Something that was sustainable when heating few hundred million people won't necessarily be sustainable when heating a few billion.

> I do not understand how it's not sustainable

It was “sustainable” only due to small population.

Most things in life are not sustainable with current population levels.

Can you point out something that is sustainable, green and healthy?

In many rural/remote locations – especially off the grid – heating with wood (or oil-based products) is the only way to survive the winter. It isn't necessary to cut down entire forests to produce wood either – if you own some forest it is largely a byproduct of cutting down dangerous/dead trees and clearing ones that fall down naturally.

Burning wood only becomes unsustainable when it is done on a commercially viable scale.

The problem with wood burning is particulates in the air. Even the cleanest burning stoves produce too much, both internally and externally.

(I live rural and have a wood burning insert and a fireplace. I don't use them much anymore.)

Wood burning can be made sustainable. Where I live, the forest service encourages people to take dead trees out of the forest. It reduces the fire load. And building codes and EPA certs have done a lot to clean up wood stoves. https://www.epa.gov/burnwise

It is sustainable if the amount of biomass taken is less than the amount of biomass generated per area.

It is green in the sense that logging a forest net sequesters carbon from the atmosphere. Yes, even if you burn the wood. There's still carbon left in the ash and from discarded branches, and forests are most productive when regrowing.

You are right they are not healthy. The air pollution generated is nasty and even with a good catalyst stove cannot be reduced very much.

It can be sustainable... at 5% of the population.

Sorry, but this statement is just wrong. Look into gasification and biochar and you'll realize that controlled combustion can produce power (motive force or electricity), heat, and be carbon negative. Also while producing less greenhouse gases then letting the wood decompose naturally (compost produces methane and CO2).

Burying biochar (carbon and minerals left over after gasification of woody biomass) is one of the only means of reversing mining of carbon (coal and petrochemicals). The carbon that you introduce into the soil as biochar has a carbon lattice that is fairly inert and can remain in the soil for thousands of years. It also improves the soils friability, moisture retention and ability to harbor micro-organisms.

Lastly the plant matter that you're burning has absorbed it's carbon from the air, and is one of the only ways to "draw down" CO2 from the atmosphere. You're working within the carbon cycle, removing fuel that will either compost or result in wild fires and be released into the atmosphere anyways...instead of using petrochemicals to produce heat and power.

Many of these gasification systems run fine on dead standing wood (fallen branches), corn stover, biogasse and nut shells. So you aren't even utilizing woody biomass that would be used for lumber construction, just the agricultural waste products.

It is all of that, if done rurally and in small enough scale. I wouldn't mind outlawing wood as a source of heating in urban areas, but banning someone who literally lives in middle of a huge forest from utilizing wood would make zero sense.

It really was an own-goal how the green movement in Europe has been shutting down nuclear power plants.

The green movement has two roots, one is the worry about global warming the other (and much older) is about pollution/ecology and in some circles new age/hippy pseudo religion

The latter has always been opposed to nuclear and the former converged into it because until relatively recently they were the only ones listening

I'm not saying it was smart (it wasn't) but it's how we got here

The anti nuclear power movement in Europe was also pretty strongly influenced by Soviet info ops. The Soviets badly wanted to sell natural gas to Europe, because it was one of the only products that the Soviet Union was competitive on in the Western export market.

Nuclear was, in the 70s, looking like potentially a complete replacement for gas, as it almost became in France. Slowing down or stopping nuclear in Europe was a big priority for KGB active measures.

The anti nuclear power movement in Europe was also pretty strongly influenced by Soviet info ops.

Citation needed, especially for the "pretty strongly" part.

>Citation needed, especially for the "pretty strongly" part.

Are you the kind of person who also needs citations that the KGB (and modern FSB) try to influence western elections too?

Are you the kind of person who doesn't understand the difference between "tries to influence" and the obviously much stronger "pretty strongly influenced" claim the above commenter was making?

Or who thinks: "Okay, so we've been hearing a lot about the FSB and attempted election meddling. So if someone on the internet makes a spurious claim about an amazingly successful operation the KGB supposedly pulled off back in the 80s -- heck, why not just believe that also? Even though apparently nothing has been ever been written about it; and in fact what they're saying runs counter to direct observation of events at the time."

You certainly sound like that kind of person.

It's not "supposedly", there:s plenty of evidence of Russian troll farms online pretending to be Americans trying to influence elections and denigrate Ukraine online.

And regarding gas and nuclear, Plenty of EU high level politicians from Germany and Austria were close to the Kremlin and after their mandates were over took well paid positions in Russian oil and gas companies being proof.

What part of this logic makes you think that Russia couldn't have anything to do with pushing the anti nuclear agenda on Europe in order to maintain EU dependent on their gas that you need to be spoonfed precise proof? It's not like the FSB publishes their dark ops online or that western counter intelligente Tracking FSB ops publish their immediate findings. But various journalist do make educated guesses on this without the "we did it" explicit proof.

So please be so kind as to use Google and your brain before demanding "source pls or it never happened" for every little thing.

[Troll farms, recent German scandals etc]

I'd continue further with you here, but you seem to be very, very confused about some very basic things. We were talking about (empty) claims of KGB influence back in the 1980s. Not modern troll farms or German scandals in the past decade. The latter have absolutely no bearing of any kind on the former.

But various journalist do make educated guesses on this without the "we did it" explicit proof.

At least in principle (when they are not being grossly irresponsible) they attempt to draw inferences from boring things like, you know, actual substantiated facts (from multiple sources), or at least interviews with people claiming direct knowledge of such. Not -- as we have with the assertions you are strenuously defending -- wild-hair speculation about "could have" happened, in the complete absence of any hard facts or direct evidence of any kind.

That eso stuff ends way to often in nature purity ideology which is close by a hair to racism. I never understood why that ideologic "field" escapes all scrutiny and is considered idealistic and good by default. They can yell for genocide on the poor via foolish agrarian policies and nobody bats an eye.

There's also the third branch of anti-capitalism-first, who only care about ecology insofar as they can use it as an excuse to get on their soapbox. I'm really not trying to be sardonic, but there certainly is a tribe of green activists who demonstrably have no actual interest in the environment, just in insisting that the only solution to any problem is economic revolution - sometimes to the extent of actively sneering at and opposing practical, immediate measures to improve the situation (and green politics is not the only movement where they do this)

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