The Millions of Tons of Carbon Emissions That Don't Officially Exist (newyorker.com) 62
How a blind spot in the Kyoto Protocol helped create the biomass industry. From a report: In essence, Drax [a tiny village in North of England] is a gigantic woodstove. In 2019, Drax emitted more than fifteen million tons of CO2, which is roughly equivalent to the greenhouse-gas emissions produced by three million typical passenger vehicles in one year. Of those emissions, Drax reported that 12.8 million tons were "biologically sequestered carbon" from biomass (wood). In 2020, the numbers increased: 16.5 million tons, 13.2 million from biomass. Meanwhile, the Drax Group calls itself "the biggest decarbonization project in Europe," delivering "a decarbonized economy and healthy forests." The apparent conflict between what Drax does and what it says it does has its origins in the United Nations Conference on Climate Change of 1997. The conference established the Kyoto Protocol, which was intended to reduce emissions and "prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system." The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (I.P.C.C.) classified wind and solar power as renewable-energy sources.
But wood-burning was harder to categorize: It's renewable, technically, because trees grow back. In accounting for greenhouse gases, the I.P.C.C. sorts emissions into different "sectors," which include land-use and energy production. It's hard to imagine now, but at the time, the I.P.C.C. was concerned that if they counted emissions from harvesting trees in the land sector, it would be duplicative to count emissions from the burning of pellets in the energy sector. According to William Moomaw, an emeritus professor of international environmental policy at Tufts University, and lead author of several I.P.C.C. reports, negotiators thought of biomass as only a minor part of energy production -- small-scale enough that forest regrowth could theoretically keep up with the incidental harvesting of trees. "At the time these guidelines were drawn up, the I.P.C.C. did not imagine a situation where millions of tons of wood would be shipped four thousand miles away to be burned in another country," Moomaw said. In the end, negotiators decided only to count land-use emissions. "But these emissions are very difficult to estimate, and the United States and Canada aren't even part of the Kyoto agreement," Moomaw said. The loss of future carbon uptake due to the removal of forests, even the plumes chugging out of a biomass plant's smokestacks -- these did not go on the books.
But wood-burning was harder to categorize: It's renewable, technically, because trees grow back. In accounting for greenhouse gases, the I.P.C.C. sorts emissions into different "sectors," which include land-use and energy production. It's hard to imagine now, but at the time, the I.P.C.C. was concerned that if they counted emissions from harvesting trees in the land sector, it would be duplicative to count emissions from the burning of pellets in the energy sector. According to William Moomaw, an emeritus professor of international environmental policy at Tufts University, and lead author of several I.P.C.C. reports, negotiators thought of biomass as only a minor part of energy production -- small-scale enough that forest regrowth could theoretically keep up with the incidental harvesting of trees. "At the time these guidelines were drawn up, the I.P.C.C. did not imagine a situation where millions of tons of wood would be shipped four thousand miles away to be burned in another country," Moomaw said. In the end, negotiators decided only to count land-use emissions. "But these emissions are very difficult to estimate, and the United States and Canada aren't even part of the Kyoto agreement," Moomaw said. The loss of future carbon uptake due to the removal of forests, even the plumes chugging out of a biomass plant's smokestacks -- these did not go on the books.
Doesn't matter how you fudge the numbers. (Score:3, Insightful)
You can't math your way around bad shit happening to the planet.
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Well yeah but nobody cares about the planet. You don't get campaign contributions by caring about the planet. You lose campaign contributions by caring about the planet. That's all that matters, and because of that, fuck the planet.
You need corrective glasses (Score:2)
Spelling it out, the trends are real. Human individual perception and attention is limited, and to a space and time scale not suited to perception of this scale of system or system issue.
So you have to look at the aggregated and calculated data, and the model results, to really see it. You have to pay attention to the science, in other words.
To become wise, we should become aware of the limitations of our direct perceptions and cognition, compared to the scale of the systems of the Ea
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Koch Bros fund study [huffpost.com]
Koch admits climate change [huffpost.com]
Koch Brothers Fund Bogus Studies to Kill Renewable Energy [huffpost.com]
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Your observations vs NASA's (Score:2)
And they ARE exactly rocket scientists, lol.
Re: ice caps (Score:3)
This shows what's happening to the arctic sea ice (which doesn't materially affect sea level.
But the same scale of reduction is happening on greenland terrestrial ice sheet and the antarctic terrestrial ice sheet. Those are the ones that will eventually lead to increased rates of sea level rise.
Another figure to be interested in. There is 4% more water vapour held in the now 1.1 degree C warmer atmos
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It's not math... it is a flaw in the creative accounting system setup by the bureaucracy, they should Not have been arbitrarily excluding things that release
more carbon or that reduce carbon absorption.
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Not Quite the Picture the Summary Paints (Score:3)
So instead of what the article suggests - that this is just a tiny village burning wood apparently for no reason - the reality is that Drax is a 4GW coal-fired power station that is being (or has been) converted to burn wood biomass which is undoubtedly why the amount of wood burnt is increasing.
Regardless of exactly how this is counted in terms of reducing carbon,
Re: Not Quite the Picture the Summary Paints (Score:3)
No it isn't because peak climate is just one aspect of peak everything. Peak fertile soil and peak fossil fertiliser are also a problem, not that these intensively cultivated land is even fertilised. They are just running the soil to death in a couple generations with the fast growing biomass and open nutrient loop.
Also it will prevent investment in nuclear or storage.
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Re: Not Quite the Picture the Summary Paints (Score:2)
Indeed it isn't fertilised, but it should be. Paper industry alone already causes deforestation, the biomass suitable suitable for pulp/pellets will cause soil depletion far faster than wood for carpentry.
Open nutrient cycles with large scale extraction are rarely sustainable for more than a couple generation.
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Pulpwood grows in less than a single generation. Pulpwood farms are the example of where pellet wood is headed, not mixed forestry which is extremely inefficient acreage and harvesting wise. The mixed approach makes up for it with the higher value of some of the wood, but the vastly larger scale required for pellets will make any mixed approach ridiculous. It's going to be monocrop short lifecycle intensive tree agriculture, it will have to be just to keep the area use reasonable.
Re: Doesn't matter how you fudge the numbers. (Score:2)
But if you value signal hard enough you do get invited to Davos.
Fake it to make it, to Davos and politically correct private industry jobs.
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Problem is, that a number of governments would walk away from agreements, etc if we do this CORRECTLY. Why? Because they will be forced to lower at a faster rate.
Right now, IPCC numbers are mostly additive. That is, they
Unintended consequences (Score:1)
As a wood-burner myself, I got in to an argument about this in which I discovered the kind of thing the article is talking about. I had no idea industrial scale wood burning was taking place. It's giving us artisanal wood-burners a bad name.
Our way *is* sustainable. Most of the wood I've burned in the past few years has been cut from neighboring trees that were diseased and had to be removed anyway. Most of the splitting is done by hand, with only one session involving a worker with a hydraulic splitter
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This is an UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCE OF MAKING CARBON THE SOLE ACCOUNTING METHOD FOR ENVIRONMENTAL ACTION.
Without agreeing or disagreeing with you, the problem here is not that. It is simply that they considered wood-burning as "renewable" indiscriminately. That's a major fuckup. You can have renewable production of wood to burn - as you say you do that yourself. But industrial scale deforestation is of course not renewable - it would be easy to make the distinction (even though it would have been harder to enforce it), but it should have been quite obvious.
I mean, whatever small-scale thing you might have goin
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To be truly renewable on an industrial scale you'd first have to grow what you burn. So, plant the trees, come back in 20 years, then burn. Otherwise you're trying to borrow from the future. A future we're told we don't have if we don't act now. Nobody sees the problem with that? No? Carry on then.
Perhaps more important than loophole abuse is that the IPCC are a bunch of careerist science-y types with no real world experience on what people faced with rules do: Dig around for gaming the system. Even moreso
Re: Unintended consequences (Score:2)
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It's really pretty simple. It's renewable if it's actually renewable, and it's not renewable if it isn't. If you're growing wood and burning it and growing more wood to replace what you've burned at an actual replacement rate, and you're also not chopping down old growth and replacing with new growth or otherwise causing environmental damage to grow your biomass, then you're renewable and carbon neutral (especially if other aspects of your operation, like transportation of the wood, use the power you genera
Re: Unintended consequences (Score:2)
California wouldn't be big enough for all the forest needed if everyone did it, it's cheap but it doesn't scale.
They don't make pellets by grinding up trees. (Score:2)
The industrial wood-burning is the antithesis of that. They're denuding forests, transporting wood thousands of miles, and pumping the carbon back out at industrial scales.
Wood pellets are NOT made by cutting down trees, grinding them up, and using the ground tree for pellets. Trees are not cut down to be made into this fuel.
When trees are harvested for lumber, the cuts that turn the trunk into lumber, and the lumber into parts for wooden objects such as furniture, inevitably converts a small but significa
Burning wood pellets is a horrible solution (Score:2)
Re:Burning wood pellets is a horrible solution (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words, burning wood is pretty much meaningless in terms of AGW unless you grow trees, then chop them down and BURY the wood for at least a few megayears, then dig them up and burn them.
DO note that burning enormous amounts of wood puts enormous amounts of wood ash into the air. Which might cause some global cooling.
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Actually that might be the best alternative. Recycling is quite costly in terms of energy, which comes from fossil fuels currently. So yes, recycling wood and paper probably isn't better than just burying paper and wood waste, and growing new trees and cutting them down. Let nature do the recycling.
Of course I know it's not that simple. But it's an interesting thought exercise.
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Right on. Seems like if we stop recycling paper products, and bury it instead, the carbon captured by the wood products becomes sequestered into the earth
Maybe a little of it. The bulk degrades back into carbon-containing atmospheric gasses,
If it's above the water table, the carbon returns to the air mainly as CO2. If it's below the water table, it returns mainly as methane. Carbon as methane captures about 40 times the amount of solar energy vs carbon as CO2. Fortunately, atmospheric methane molecules
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Byrning wood is completely irrelevant to AGW.
Outright falsehood, right here. CO2 is CO2.
Wood is NOT fossilized CO2.
Correct. It is part of a much shorter carbon cycle than fossilized sources.
Wood extracts CO2 from the air while growing, then puts it back into the air when it dies.
Seems here you have a good grasp of carbon cycles. I'm wondering now how you got so confused.
In other words, burning wood is pretty much meaningless in terms of AGW unless you grow trees, then chop them down and BURY the wood for at least a few megayears, then dig them up and burn them.
Or, chop them down, and burn them.
AGW cares not if your CO2 is sourced from a long-term carbon cycle, or a shorter one- because here, even the shorter one is measured in centuries to millennia.
DO note that burning enormous amounts of wood puts enormous amounts of wood ash into the air. Which might cause some global cooling.
Wood ash falls out of the atmosphere quickly. That CO2 is here for the long haul.
Every tree you burn will
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Drax has always been pretty awful when it comes to pulling scams. I live not far from it, and it's worth understanding the history of it to understand, somewhat, why.
Drax is near two other old coal power plants, and they're withing visual distance of each other. Go up a hill around here and you can see all 3.
As coal power has phased down over the last 2 decades, coal power plants have been wound down. When you have 3 coal plants in such close proximity as this, it's inevitable that not all of them will surv
Big tax breaks, questionable emissions. (Score:2)
A good write-up on this can be found on the Ember website:
https://ember-climate.org/proj... [ember-climate.org]
Intentionally obscured (Score:4, Interesting)
This article seems to be intentionally over-complicating things to make them sound more scary. If you have an operation that burns trees from steady-state tree farms, then it seems fine to tally that as not producing any carbon emissions. Also if one tallies the CO2 emission when the tree is cut (even if is not immediately burned) then there is no reason to tally it again when it is actually burned. I think the point here is that cut trees provide a way to displace the "CO2 charge" from the place where the trees are burned to the place where the trees are cut. So in the end the headline that this emission "doesn't exist" (i.e. is not tallied) is false. Except that the US and Canada are not part of the Kyoto protocol, so the UK can ship in lumber from there without having it add to their carbon tally, but it is not tallied elsewhere within the Kyoto system. But if those trees are being farmed in a sustainable way (which I think many places in the US and Canada they are because not doing so would be obvious) then that's actually correct, there is no net emission on a global scale.
Large swaths of Alabama are basically just tree farms - they are owned by people who just get them cut whenever they are ready to be cut. The only real problem here is that there aren't good metrics on the tree farming industry in some places and measuring whether a tree farming operation is net carbon positive or negative is pretty tricky.
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I mean... if you're growing trees to build homes from wood - you're storing all that carbon in the wood in the homes you live in.
If you then take the waste products like bark and sawdust and use that to burn for heat - you're releasing some of that carbon back into the atmosphere.
Overall I like the idea of the renewable aspect. I don't know what other chemicals come out of the combustion though. Would be nice if we could sustainably filter out the exhaust though.
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I mean... if you're growing trees to build homes from wood - you're storing all that carbon in the wood in the homes you live in.
For the lifetime of the house. Which is what? one hundred years (it may be able to last longer, but realistically most houses aren't going to go more than a century before being demolished)? Then the construction waste may be burned, or it may be put in a landfill with an eye towards it decomposing and outgassing (including potentially a lot of methane). That's not really long-term sequestration.
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I think you would need to account for forests as a whole, not individual trees. There will always be some dying and some new ones growing. It depends on the type of tree and its lifespan, of course, but carbon is probably sequestered better in trees than in houses over the long term. Wood left to the elements one way or another is going to rot and release its carbon. Some might stay in the soil, but most of it will end up in the atmosphere one way or another. Nothing all that wrong with that really, but it
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I don't know what other chemicals come out of the combustion though. Would be nice if we could sustainably filter out the exhaust though.
Wood pellets are made from sawdust, which is nearly pure cellulose and lignin. Those are not proteins (so no sulfur from lysine) and are composed of just hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen. The exhaust gasses from burning pellets efficiently are nearly pure water vapor and carbon dioxide, with a tiny trace of sulfur (far less than you get burning other biomass, or coal or oil)
Blame it on China. (Score:1)
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Yes, China, or rather the CCP, is a deserved and undeserved scapegoat for many environmental problems, but not for this one.
Math... (Score:1)
Tree growing - Carbon negative.
Tree dies and leave it where it is (it's in the forest, no one cares!) - Carbon positive slow, but ends up slightly carbon negative as the carbon ends up in the soil.
Burn tree - Carbon positive fast + PM2.5 (icky-bad!).
Anything else that happens to the tree - bucking, transportation, conversion, etc. is going to be carbon positive and needs to be accounted for.
Not only do we need to not only stop adding to the carbon load , but I think the thing folks are forgetting - We need
Huh. (Score:2, Insightful)
It's almost like the IPCC *wasn't* purely, scientifically, and objectively about reducing Climate Change (y'know, because it's a "crisis" and "emergency", right?) but in fact a POLITICAL document whose purpose was at least somewhat about picking winners, losers, the guilty, and "fixing" societal issues through the 'ostensibly objective good' of mitigating climate change.
It's kind of like screaming "the house is on fire, the house is on fire! Get everyone out! Save everyone inside!"...but on the way to putt
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Clearly, if you even dispute if the house is, in fact, on fire, you MUST BE in the pay of big-money Koch-funded industries who will profit from burning the house down.
I was born not far from Drax (Score:2)
in Doncaster actually. I have been enormously grateful for the last 59 years that the whole family moved many miles away to a country location when I was still pre school age. If I never see the town again that will be fine.
I don't recall Drax from that age but do remember fairly regularly seeing Ferrybridge power station from the back of Dad's Jowett Javelin. Specifically the trains and canal barges offloading thousands of tons of coal. The whole place was filthy and the pollution must have been horrendous
We're listening to the IPCC now? (Score:2)
In the article they mention the IPCC several times as a source on global warming to be a problem and as a source on where to look for solutions. Here's an example:
The conference established the Kyoto Protocol, which was intended to reduce emissions and âoeprevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.â The U.N.â(TM)s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (I.P.C.C.) classified wind and solar power as renewable-energy sources.
The IPCC says wind and solar power is good, therefore we should use them. What else does the IPCC say we should use for energy in the future? Nuclear fission power: https://news.un.org/en/story/2... [un.org]
But that's not all they say about solutions. They talk about costs. Their 2018 report was cited on Wikipedia and put in a nice chart for us: https [wikipedia.org]
And then there's... (Score:2)
And then there's the missing count of how much CO2 is breathed out (and farted) by all human beings on the planet.
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It's pretty safe to ignore it.
I'll start worrying (Score:2)
Same with San Francisco bay area (Score:2)
Bay Area has one of the most polluted air in the nation. The air quality index goes to yellow / red many days in the winter season: https://www.baaqmd.gov/about-a... [baaqmd.gov]
(In summer we have other problems, mainly scorching UV radiation).
People love their fireplaces. In theory if would be more "natural", in practice entire streets reek of ash. It does not help that the geography traps the bad air inside. And if people don't burn wood at home, our electric provider (PG&E) is more than happy to start nation's la
This is just more F-ups from the far left (Score:2)