this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2024
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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.

As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world. About 1C of total warming. Second chart: about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability. Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases. About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

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Many nations have embraced burning wood pellets to produce electricity — under the assumption that it is carbon neutral. But research shows this approach can boost greenhouse-gas emissions (www.nature.com)
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[–] Triasha@lemmy.world 21 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Technically, the carbon came from the air and returns to the air, but taking the pellets from where the tree died and turning them into pellets and transporting them to the furnace costs energy too.

Also all the tree carbon that doesn't make it into the pellets goes into the air. So the cost is greater than the gain.

If we grew trees and then buried them it could be a form of carbon capture. But we need to get the energy to do that from somewhere.

[–] silence7@slrpnk.net 10 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

The key thing about this is that when you build a power plant which burns wood pellets, it takes a whole lot of mature forest, and converts it into CO2; you go from a whole bunch of mature trees to a mix of trees of varying ages. So something like half the carbon in the forest is in the atmosphere for as long as the power plant is in operation.

[–] Kecessa@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Better to grow trees to build housing, that's carbon capture as well and a well built house can keep the same wall studs for a very very long time... Hundreds of years even, more than enough time to grow back the trees required to build it a couple of times.

[–] SkyNTP@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Yes, wood houses is carbon capture but a trivial amount.

Growing trees to burn them is basically the original solar energy. As with all forms of energy, there are various details about how it is conducted that determines how effective it is or not.

Headlines like "burning trees emits a lot carbon" are as much misinformation as headlines like "burning trees is carbon neutral". Because the reality is that neither of those statements are correct or even genuine to the issue at hand, even if humans are just looking for a simple answer.