Hacker News Reader

Comment by isoprophlex | Hacker News Reader

In 10 years or so, maybe everyone and their mother is back to burning coal. I'm convinced that even in the face of prolonged economical downturn, we'll still be able to increase our greenhouse gas emissions.

For fucks sake, in The Netherlands, we are burning WOOD for """green energy""", while everyone NIMBYs the fuck out of any windmill or power grid expansion project.

Sometimes we, as a species, act in a monumentally stupid manner.

View on HN

Solar/wind is highly overrated in Europe. Nuclear is really the only option in Europe that's climate change friendly. Incredible that there's been a push away from it.

Realistically, in this new world (since Russia's invasion of Ukraine and China's coordination and complicity in it), there's zero reason for China or Russia or any of their allies to coordinate with the rest of the world to reduce greenhouse emissions, especially when their economies are so heavily dependent on greenhouse gas for their energy sources and GDP. Deglobalization is going ahead full-speed, and the forces based upon globalization were the only real way to rein in other countries' behaviors in a peaceful way.

So why should the US and EU cripple themselves? The world is in a state of war, and we need to start acting like it. Nuclear energy is a great solution that solves both climate change and energy demands, but it will take a long time for any country to get there.

Ironically, after decades of laughing at the West for worrying about flimsy global warming affecting poor fishermen in the Pacific, Russia is feeling the pinch itself.

Huge amounts of their infrastructure are built in permafrost, now better characterized as "thawing bog". We're talking cities, roads, power lines, gas and oil pipelines (har har), airports, ports, mines... And it's all literally melting away. Slowly for now of course but steadily. Not to mention Taiga fires which seem to be getting worse and worse.

Part of the problem is that we don't act as a species.

We act as a bunch of individuals, each responding to the incentives which are put before us.

You'll never get people to stop doing something if it is easy and profitable.

I have no axe in this, but what is actually wrong with wood as a fuel? It really is carbon neutral. You could say, solar energy with free storage.

Is it the relative inefficiency and cabron generated throughout supply chain?

It's carbon neutral if you don't consider time. But take wood which took 10-50 years or more to store up carbon, and then release it all at once... and now, while we're already releasing too much.

We can't grow it (absorb carbon) as fast as we can burn it (release it), so it's effectively NOT carbon neutral in our time.

I thought that's taken care of. Fast-growing willow is used, it's not chopping up old forests but rather growing new ones... No?

Woody biomass covers more than trees. Corn stover, sugar cane bigasse, rice hulls and a load of other agricultural and waste plant materials that are produced annually, and can be gasified and burned cleanly to produce electricity and heat.

The core proposal isn't to replace all energy production from burning wood alone, but to explore all renewable energy sources at our disposal. Producing high value heat and energy when the sun doesn't shine through biomass gasification or anaerobic digestion helps us to fill in the gaps and utilize fuel sources that are just otherwise rotting and releasing methane in the atmosphere.

It is wise to look at all waste which each region has and seek ways to use it better. In the case of the Netherlands, I'm not sure how much of those opportunities there are beyond manure (which could perhaps be very big).

Europe is burning wood cut in the US for fuel, and I wouldn't call the logging practices or shipping in any way green 0r sustainable. It's crazy.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/17/climate/eu-burning-wood-e...

Let's be real here, this is Europe we're talking about. It's not like those trees were holding carbon from 500y ago. Wood is pretty ok in terms of carbon. It's the same carbon going around and around again over the course of a century. The tree doesn't grow out of nothing.

Pollution on the other hand...

Perhaps we should be burning manure here... there's a LOT of it to share.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com