Tuesday, November 12, 2013
HM / PY
From an article on a competition to find the most efficient wood-burning stove.
Wood and pellet stoves hold tremendous potential as a carbon-neutral, renewable energy resource, according to the Alliance for Green Heat. Wood releases carbon dioxide when it’s burned, but most U.S. firewood comes from trees that are already dead, Ackerly said. Removing the dead wood allows new tree growth to occur, which will absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. “Burning wood is 70 to 80 percent energy efficient with these modern stoves,” he said. “Even if you don’t accept it as carbon-neutral, you come out very carbon-positive.”Removing dead wood absorbs carbon by allowing new trees to grow???? Huh? I suppose this calculation makes sense to a Gaian, just as the calculation of HailMarys per PurgatoryYear makes sense to a Papist. It's religion. Or maybe it's economics, like the "logic" of Quantitative Easing, in which moving counterfeit money from one column to another supposedly creates jobs. In either case it's utterly crazy. Why not simply talk about avoiding waste? You're burning trees that otherwise wouldn't be turned into anything useful. Would you rather heat a house or feed termites? That's logical. If we're going to talk about real pollution, woodstoves are unquestionably dirty and noisy. The smell is usually nice, but most high-tech woodburners emit a siren-like sound that I can hear from 500 feet away, even with my dull elderly ears.
Labels: Carbon Cult
¶ 4:08 AM
