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Comment by dublinben | Hacker News Reader

Indoor cooking fires are a significant source of pollution in developing countries. A solar-powered solution would be a significant improvement.

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Suffering in abject poverty is infinitely worse than pollution. It doens't even compare. Thus, developing countries should optimize for economic efficiency. Hurting human well-being in favor of environmental "well-being" is criminal.

You misunderstand. Indoor cooking fires are a major source of indoor air pollution that sickens the families, and particularly the women. Not to mention, many women spend hours per day gathering and hauling wood for their fires.

Particulate pollution kills people and causes suffering, mostly to women and children.

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs292/en/

    Over 4 million people die prematurely from illness attributable to the household 
    air pollution from cooking with solid fuels.

    More than 50% of premature deaths among children under 5 are due to pneumonia 
    caused by particulate matter (soot) inhaled from household air pollution.

I'd rather die prematurely from pollution, than die immediately from exposure or lack of clean drinking water.

Pollution really is way, way down on the list of concerns for people in impoverished nations. Water, Shelter, Food are much more pressing concerns.

Wood or other biomass-fueled fires are CO2-neutral, but do cause particulate pollution. There have been a number of efforts to develop clean-burning wood stoves for developing countries to combat that problem.

"Wood or other biomass-fueled fires are CO2-neutral"

Okay, I'll bite. How does burning wood not result in a net increase in CO2? Are you assuming that for every cord of wood burnt, that someone is simultaneously planing and growing a cord's worth of tree (which, of course, pulls carbon out of the air?)

That's a pretty big assumption.

In fact, I took his statement the other way:

At one point, there was some n amount of CO2 in the air.

A tree was planted. Through a few biological cycles, CO2 is exchanged and stored as various sugars within the wood.

Burning the wood releases the CO2 back into the air.

This is a net zero process.

On a large enough time scale burning coal is net zero, too. (It's just, that we don't care about these scales.)

I happen to agree with you; just pointing out what I thought OP meant.

The impacts of release (or sequestration) on those scales on other ecological systems are non-trivial. Which is why we care about those releases.

Carbon embodied in wood is current-cycle carbon, it's already part of the biosphere. In most cases, it was sequestered from the atmosphere at most a few decades ago, for the very oldest trees, a few centuries (and most of those aren't burned for fuel).

Carbon embodied in coal, oil, and gas was last part of the biosphere hundreds of millions of years ago. And that's precisely the problem: humans have re-introduced, mostly in the past 50 years (95% of all oil was burned since then, a large portion of coal and gas) carbon that was deposited over hundreds of millions of years. The biosphere portion of the carbon cycle (atmospheric uptake, oceans, plant growth) simply cannot keep up.

Yes, if you were to burn all forests at once, you'd run up CO2 a bit. That is, however, a pretty self-limiting prospect.

If you don't burn the wood, it will naturally decompose and release the same amount of C02 into the atmosphere. Possibly with methane which is an even worse greenhouse gas.

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