OTHER OPINIONS:
ForesterBob:
The logic of Bill McKibben is deeply flawed. I know that he has lots of admirers on this site, but we have to look at the bigger picture.
Remember that our human population is somewhere upwards of 7,000,000,000. Each person will use resources, whether they be renewable or nonrenewable. Taking trees out of the mix will not magically cause those 7,000,000,000 people to use wind and solar. Chances are, the alternative mix will include fossil fuels and strip mines.
There are numerous competing studies regarding the carbon neutrality of using wood for fuel, and much of the contention, as I understand it, is about the starting point. If your starting point is the burning of the tree, then you must wait years for the carbon to be taken back. If your starting point assumes that people are constantly growing and replacing trees, the answer is different.
It is very important to note that, at least in the US, trees are not being grown solely for energy production. What gets burned are the byproducts, the parts of trees that cannot be used for lumber or other more valuable products. Having viable markets for byproducts makes forestry more profitable, and therefore fewer landowners will be tempted to sell their land to developers.
Most of the wood pellets being sold to Europe come from the South, where much of the forestland belongs to private nonindustrial owners. Trees grow quickly in the South, and forests must be thinned regularly to remain vigorous (either we do the thinning, or nature does it more randomly).
If we want to stop trees from burning, let’s focus our attention on fire mitigation in the Western forests. The attitude of “letting trees grow” (along with misguided fire suppression) has brought us to the era of megafires. Preventing a half-million acre wildfire will keep lots of carbon out of the atmosphere.www.dailykos.com/...