[backstop]

Ludi -

Re Carbon banking, a few points I hope may be of interest.

Some Elephant grasses will sequester more carbon from the air in a summer over a given acreage than some young trees will achieve
(given suitable rainfall, soil temp, etc), but they don't last. Trees of course last 50 to 250 years.

While it's accurate to say that trees will die & release their carbon (as CO2 & CH4)
if they're seen as part of a sustained woodland then younger trees are of course taking in that carbon,
and so maintaining the overall bank.

There is some confusion of terminology between "sink" & "bank."
While woods do 'bank' carbon, it may be released by fire or felling for agriculture.
In the right conditions they will build soil under them which might logically be called a carbon 'sink,'
though it too can be disrupted and made to release its carbon.
That soil building is not automatic though - I understand the Amazon Forest is around 60 MYrs old
and has an average of just one foot of soil under it.

The one carbon destination that is indisputably a 'sink' is on the ocean floor
where vast numbers of the minute cabonate 'shells' of plankton fall and build sediment.
Their carbon is taken from carbon flowing in with rivers and sequestered with wave-splash from the air above.

Your observation of the need for global-scale reforestation effort seems to me spot on -
but it won't be funded, let alone maintained, by taxes (let alone Greenpeace et al).
The best they will manage is little gesture patches -worthy but irrelevant to the scale of planting needed.

If truly widespread reforestation is to be achieved, then it will be productive and profitable to the local community.
Given that energy is the huge new market that forest could supply, location becomes important,
for wood's energy content is only about 55% of that of coal by weight, so haulage has to be minimized.

While the Burlington VT Wood-Fired power stn is exemplary,
our primary shortage will be of household gas and of liquid fuels such as methanol,
both of which can be commercially produced from wood feedstock.
Both of these are far more energy-dense and so more worth transporting than the original fuelwood.

Finally, it's worth noting that sustainable harvesting of fuelwood doesn't remove Coppice-woodland's function as a carbon bank,
and the fuelwood can itself displace fossil fuels' usage under appropriate government.
To clarify this, if a wood is seen as 20 plots felled at one per year and allowed to regrow from the stump,
then after 20 years the first to be felled holds 20 years' growth, the next 19y-g, the next 18y-g, and so on.
In fact the wood holds about 10y-g on average across its area, which is the amount of its sustainable carbon bank.

regards,

Backstop

[Heineken]

By "fireplace" do you mean wood stove, tyler? Can't heat a home with a fireplace---90% of the heat goes up the chimney.

I question your claim that there are enough trees in your area to heat all of the homes in the area. Perhaps for a few winters, at best. After that, your suppliers are going to have to go farther and farther afield, and the wood will get more and more expensive. The trees that are cut won't quickly reappear, either. Trees, especially the hardwoods needed for firewood, grow very slowly. It takes about 20 years for an oak to reach a size that has any practical value as firewood.

Wasn't it the Easter Islanders who perished because they used up all their wood?

[ararboin]

I still think pellet stoves are the way to go. Any American joe blow could operate one of them and they can actually be set up with a hopper large enough to burn for a couple days. I'm not sure of the EROEI is of wood pellets.

Remember you have to buy those pellets from someone. Then transport them home. You also have to have electricity to run the conveyor and blower. I prefer to have more control over keeping myself warm in the winter.

I've heated with wood for 15 years here, and harvest only dead wood from some 50 acres of woods on my place. Enough new dead wood comes on line every year to keep me supplied.

[Heineken]

Standing dead wood is usually beautifully seasoned. If it isn't rotten, you can cut it and burn it. I like to leave some standing dead trees for the woodpeckers and other wildlife, though. Because my stand is young to middle-aged, with a relatively small proportion of dead trees, I've girdled a fair number of trees of undesirable shapes and species (especially gums) to provide this benefit to wildlife.

[Ludi]

Yes, trees are mostly a carbon "bank" whereas prairie is a carbon "sink." Thanks for clearing up that terminology.

[thorn]

I had a feeling this wood happen, they are going to cut down all the trees!

Oil Spike Sends New England to Wood
Distant Events Stoke Homeowners' Interest in Stoves for Winter Heat

By David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 11, 2005; A03

LYNDEBOROUGH, N.H. -- There are plenty of ways to tell that the market for firewood has taken off here. Wood-burning stoves are selling out in stores, the price of split wood has jumped past $200 a cord and would-be woodsmen are filling up classes on lumberjack skills.

But perhaps the best way to see what's happening is to watch Maxine work.

Maxine is the nickname that logger Tom Chrisenton has given to the refrigerator-size, chain saw-swinging mechanical chopper that he uses to fell trees on his property here in southern New Hampshire.

With the frightening grace of a "Terminator" robot, Maxine needs less than a minute to make a living spruce tree into logs, limbs and sawdust. She does the job about 20 times faster than a lumberjack with a chain saw.

But even with Maxine, Chrisenton said he can barely stay ahead of the demand now -- as New Englanders stunned by the high price of oil flock back to a fuel source as old as the Colonial forests.

"The stuff I'm cutting today will either be delivered this afternoon or tomorrow," Chrisenton said. "We can't keep up with it."

wash post

[rogerhb]

Sad thing is he's proud of the "fridge" thing.

I can't help feeling that the mobs who broke the automated spinning machines at the end of the 19th Century were actually right.

[Bedevere]

Click

[FireJack]

The bigger problem with this is that after TSHTF ecology no longer matters. It may seem like there's lots of trees now but thats what they thought in the past too. After 10-20 years of using trees as sources of energy this world will become a giant easter island, probably worse.

[backstop]

FireJack -

your concern is spot on. That's why we need to agree and to enforce sustainable harvesting rates now in all states with the local political coherence to achieve them.

No doubt this will end up with some states having conserved better tree cover than others - it'll be intersesting to see how that pans out both across the US and across the EU.

regards,

Backstop

[EddieB]

Wow, lots of good comments on this page. I'm glad to see some people making informed comments that I would like to reiterate in the interest of disemanating truth.

Wood is a "dirty" fuel. The particulate emissions from many, many woodstoves is pretty terrible for human lungs - i.e. asthma (I believe wood smoke can predispose kids to asthma, so does my father-in-law who is an MD) and lung cancer. The newer stoves, especially those with catalytic convertors, are far cleaner, but they are still in the minority since stoves can last a very long time.

I just went to Burlington. The power plant there is impressive, but I'm not sure whether it actually can supply all of Burlington's electricity. There is another woodchip fired power plant of similar size on the other side of the state just south of St. Johnsbury. I've been on a tour of it and they said they generate enough power for about 20,000 homes. I don't know how many homes there are in the Burlington area (where would you draw the line, Williston, Sherburne?). Vermont also has a nuclear power plant (Vermont Yankee) in the south of the state, which I suspect contributes mightly to the state's overall generation...

Standing deadwood. Whoever it was advised leaving some of it up, I concur whole-heartedly. Germany, France, and England all did damage to their forests by keeping them too clean. In temperate deciduous forests a fair amount of down wood is good for the soil (moisture retention), and standing dead is good for pest predators. Woodpecker populations stay higher in areas with standing deadwood. A higher woodpecker population can more easily head off a bug explosion than just a few birds can - if that makes sense. In my woodlot I haven't cut anything recently but I plan to take live trees before I take what standing dead is there. In many respects the live trees are less valuable than the dead ones to total forest health. The indivdual live tree that is cut obviously doen't profit from getting the axe, but by careful selection the whole lot can be improved dramatically.

I question your claim that there are enough trees in your area to heat all of the homes in the area. Perhaps for a few winters, at best. After that, your suppliers are going to have to go farther and farther afield, and the wood will get more and more expensive. The trees that are cut won't quickly reappear, either. Trees, especially the hardwoods needed for firewood, grow very slowly. It takes about 20 years for an oak to reach a size that has any practical value as firewood.

This is true. My parents have a small fireplace insert in one room of their large house. Perhaps it's realistic to think that every couple of houses around could heat a single room with wood. But if you think the trees of suburbia could heat suburbia at the level it currently is heated for more than five years you are dreaming.

Having said all that I think wood is a great form of energy and heat. I love the comments about coppicing. I think by the time I die (I'm 25 now, and hoping for another 50) North America will have many, many acres under active coppicing. I hope so.

[NTBKtrader]

How do bums stay alive in the winter in the north? or does the north not have bums anymore?

[Heineken]

Bush and the corporations and the downtown boutiques have rounded up all the bums and turned them into Soylent Green.