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Comment by Aerroon | Hacker News Reader

This point needs to be emphasized. Wood burning is renewable compared to coal.

Europe is the second smallest continent in the world. It has roughly the area of the United States. Despite that, Europe has the highest forest coverage of all the continents.

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> Europe is the second smallest continent in the world. It has roughly the area of the United States. Despite that, Europe has the highest forest coverage of all the continents.

I don't believe that is correct. Unless you are counting all of Russia. https://ourworldindata.org/forest-area

That source does show that Europe has the highest forest coverage, although the weird remark about Russia does imply that Asian Russia is counted. Moreover, North America, which I believe is quite forested, is totally absent from the chart.

Ah, you are correct and I was wrong. I had looked it up, but didn't realize that the multiple different sources I looked at all seemed to count the entirety of Russia.

In hindsight, it should've been obvious that Europe (~10 million sqkm) couldn't have 1 billion hectares of forest coverage.

Biofuel is the most striking example of why "renewable" is not always equivalent to "desirable". While you can indeed re-grow wood, combusting it at scale maintains an equilibrium level of CO₂ in the atmosphere (which causes climate change), and also releases a equilibrium level of particulate matter, which causes large numbers of deaths from lung and heart diseases.

You're right about the particulates, but I believe that burning wood can't really cause climate change.

Wood is already in the biosphere. Even if we don't burn it, it will decompose and release all its CO2 that way, or burn in a forest fire. The CO2 of that wood is already circulating.

It doesn't actually increase CO2 levels the way that digging up long-buried fossil fuels does.

If you cut down and burn trees that take 50 years to grow in 3 seconds, you've increased the amount of CO₂ in the air. Sure it will eventually go away, but the thing that causes climate change is the CO₂ being in air at elevated levels, even if it's in a cycle.

Biofuel is almost as bad as fossil at 230 gCO₂-eq/kWh. [1]. Compare to solar pv at 40 and nuclear at 12.

[1] https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5...

The footnote on those numbers says:

> Direct emissions from biomass combustion at the power plant are positive and significant, but should be seen in connection with the CO2 absorbed by growing plants. They can be derived from the chemical carbon content of biomass and the power plant efficiency. For a comprehensive discussion see Chapter 11, Section 11.13

https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5...

> have led to strong forest Carbon sinks in many OECD regions (Pan et al., 2011; Loudermilk et al., 2013; Nabuurs et al., 2013; Erb et al., 2013). However, the capacity of these sinks is being reduced as forests approach saturation (Smith, 2005; Körner, 2006; Guldea et al., 2008; Nabuurs et al., 2013; Sections 11.2.3, 11.3.2). Active forest management, including management for bioenergy, is therefore important for sustaining the strength of the forest carbon sink well into the future (Nabuurs et al., 2007, 2013; Canadell and Raupach, 2008; Ciais et al., 2008), although countries should realize that for some old forest areas, conserving carbon stocks may be preferential, and that the actively managed forests may for some time (decades) act as sources.

But burning fossil fuel does _not_ maintain an equilibrium level of CO₂ in the atmosphere (which is the main reason why we have climate change in the first place)

> While you can indeed re-grow wood, combusting it at scale maintains an equilibrium level of CO₂ in the atmosphere (which causes climate change.

True but meaningless.

Sitting in my deck chair also maintains an equilibrium level of CO2, but it doesn't provide any heat or benefit to anyone.

We can't look unfavorably on energy approaches just because they fail to actually reduce CO2. That's some kind of unrealistic purity test.

It's not meaningless. CO₂ in the atmosphere causes the greehouse effect, which allows the sun to heat the earth more. To avoid greenhouse effect you can't have things that require CO₂ to constantly remain in the atmosphere. You need non-carbon sources like wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, geothermal, etc.

> To avoid greenhouse effect you can't have things that require CO₂ to constantly remain in the atmosphere.

But we don’t want to fully avoid the greenhouse effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect:

“Earth's natural greenhouse effect keeps the planet from having the below freezing temperature that it would have if there were no greenhouse gases”

He's talking about the excess unnatural greenhouse effect.

I don’t see how one can read that from “To avoid greenhouse effect you can't have things that require CO₂ to constantly remain in the atmosphere.”

The natural greenhouse effect has CO₂ constantly (I think at least since there’s any carbohydrate burning on earth) remaining in the atmosphere.

It's all implied. Maybe he doesn't know about some of those things, but it is incredibly common to talk about it in those terms without spelling out that you mean excess / problem-causing amounts of the effect, etc. When he says can't have things he's talking about human energy use. He says right after you need to use wind, solar, etc.

But as doomberg is pointing out the actual alternative we should be comparing to isn't coal but uranium.

We'd need a time machine to start building reactors a few decades ago. And why, just to build more of the most expensive energy source ever conceived with the potential to make large portions of Europe uninhabitable?

Nuclear is expensive, it's unsafe, there's the proliferation risk, and only very few countries figured out how to store spent fuel. Promises of safe and cheap tech to solve these problems are common but still unfulfilled.

Solar and wind energy on the other hand is so cheap to build up and don't need decade long mega projects. We can have a better, cheaper energy source right now. Nuclear has nothing to offer.

Except - I guess - CO2 free energy when it's dark and windless. Like in a typical November night <hen you like having your home heated to acceptable levels.

Doesn't need to be November

Germany is dark and windless plenty of the time during summer: ~8 hours a day

I frequently saw our solar and wind usage below even 5% of their respective capacities

anything that means people living near a thousand open or semi-open fires is vastly more unsafe.

wood in particular is the worst offender.

plus logging and transportation both are very unsafe industries.

spent fuel storage is a complete non-issue. even bringing it up shows the ridiculousness of the anti-nuclear lobby.

the only real risk is proliferation. which fortunately is again a non-issue in Europe, because the counties in question already have nuclear capabilities.

Solar and wind have been the future for my whole life. Now we have an energy crisis. An artificial one for sure - we could open the pipes to Russia and they'd sell probably sell gas again - but a crisis nonetheless. The claim renewables are better was never true and the price of not stopping that deception is that now we face darkness.

As for nuclear, step one is certainly to stop listening to arguments like "it's too late, it would take too long to build":

https://twitter.com/mlanetrain/status/1556381583585804291

"This is some grim real life dramatic irony: Nick Clegg opposing nuclear power in 2010 because it would only come on-stream by 2021 or 2022."

Because people want heat and electricity when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing enough (or at all) which happens pretty regularly

If you haven't won the geographic lottery then...

You can burn coal like there is no tomorrow (see Poland)

Or gas (see Germany, and most of Europe for heating), and enable Russia and other undesirables

Or nuclear and have energy security without directly and indirectly causing death and suffering for millions

>Nuclear is expensive, it's unsafe

Both are true because "spent" fuel isn't reprocessed because mumble mumble nonproliferation, yes?

In the mean time, obscene amounts are being spent on fusion, which will never even compete with fission on any metric.

Distributing uranium pellets for domestic heating might prove problematic, likewise trying to burn uranium pellets in existing coal power plants to facilitate the transition to other sources would be problematic.

Europe isn't really a continent though.

More like a subcontinent of Asia, like India.

It is called eurasia.

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