Hacker News Reader

Comment by tokai | Hacker News Reader

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

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.)

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.

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.

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

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

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.

> 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.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com