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Comment by rob74 | Hacker News Reader

My nitpicking brain immediately stumbled over these two consecutive sentences:

> something very close to forty percent of all the shipping on earth is just devoted to getting oil and coal and gas (and now some wood pellets) back and forth across the ocean.

Wood pellets are not fossil fuels though...

> That’s a remarkable snapshot: almost half of what we move around the seas is not finished products (cars) nor even the raw materials to make them (steel), but simply the stuff that we burn to power those transformations, and to keep ourselves warmed, cooled, and lit.

Oil is also a raw material, e.g. to make plastic. Not sure about what percentage is used as raw material vs. how much is used for fuel...

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Wood pellets are shipped across the ocean in large quantities because of a loophole in carbon accounting, allowing coal power stations to burn wood pellets across the EU, 'carbon free', as long as the wood came from outside the EU.

Interesting!

Do you have a reliable source for this?

https://www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/axedrax-campaign/

(biased source, but nobody seems to disagree with their wood source claims)

Wood pellets are counted as renewable. Creating something of loophole. Not sure what difference non-EU would make other than making tracking of regrowing trees more difficult.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/europ...

I don't see how that's a loophole. It sounds reasonable to me.

Green washing.

this:

https://archive.fo/VwYJQ

from this:

https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/drax-green...

I would say wood pellets are a grey area, similar to nuclear power. On one side, if the pellets are produced from wood that can't be used for other purposes and from responsibly managed forests, they're better than burning fossil fuels. On the other side, if they are produced from cutting down virgin rainforests and are then shipped halfway around the world, that's definitely not good.

Less than 10% of oil is spent on making plastics, though.

And much plastic feedstock comes from natural gas, not oil.

The point of the wood pellets is that it's a fuel source that will have drastically reduced demand in the future.

You are clearly not familiar with the Bio-mass 'green' lobby in the UK and US.

The UK does not have enough woodland for all these tax payer subsidized 'green' energy plants so they are physically shipping wood pellets from US and Canada to these bio-mass plants. Trees are cut, shredded, put on a truck, put on a boat, then burned in furnaces, to generate steam, to produce 'green' energy.

And those boats and burning... you guessed it... oil?

I am familiar with that, but given its environmental damage it seems quite likely that in the future this energy source will be somewhat reduced. Especially as renewable energy gains greater penetration in the UK.

You make it sound like all of it is from North America. There's import from the european continent and scandinavia as well.

Sweden exports a lot of wood pellets. Plenty of woodlands there. Plenty more to grow, if the Union will let them.

Wood pellets are "green" because the source material is replantable, albeit not that much locally for you. Seems like nothing is ever "green enough" though, besides a complete stop in consumption..

The distance from Sweden/Scandinavia/Continental europe is a lot less than from North America.

The whole argument around Bio-mass is that it becomes carbon neutral because it emits carbon that itself has been captured.

The concept of burning bunker fuel on ships to keep these plants at break even is ludacrious. The fact that the pellets come from Finland or Malaysia is irrelevant.

I have nothing against Bio mass energy generation from gasing garbage or agriculture waste. But these wood furnace burner plants are a borderline racket.

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