this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2024
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People were using other fuels before they start using fossil fuels. Like wood. It is double whammy - more CO2 (less efficient burning) and no CO2 recapturing by those burned trees.
Oh no! Not the 680M or fewer people burning one of the less dense forms of carbon for home heating and cooking food! This is very noteworthy alongside industrial and motor usage of hydrocarbons that have to be extracted from under the ground and water for the population of now over 8 Billion!
Much more efficient per person though. Or per Joule of energy.
Wood is more or less carbon neutral though, the carbon that is released by wood burning is the same carbon that the tree pulled out of the atmosphere to build the wood in the first place. The only extra emissions come from how the wood was gathered and prepared, so if they weren't using diesel trucks to haul the wood and they weren't using chainsaws to cut the trees down then yes, it would be carbon neutral.
If the result is deforestation it's not really carbon neutral, that would require another tree to grow in its place. Otherwise oil would be carbon neutral too, since that once came from plants.
The main difference is the sheer amount of energy we use honestly, if we covered all our current needs with wood we'd probably run out of trees faster than they could ever regrow. In that sense coal isn't strictly worse, if we stayed on 17th century level energy consumptiom but used coal instead of wood, we wouldn't have to worry about global warming either.
But a tree grows quickly, say 50 years. compared to how fast oil is produced by dead organic matter underground. Is not the burn wood-> grow a tree -> burn wood a much shorter and more sustainable co2 cycle?
Wood burning do have a problem with local polution do.
There are plenty examples of total destructions of forests in the beginning of industrial revolution in Europe. So, no, a tree does not grow.