Is Biomass Really Carbon Neutral?

[Dr Transport]

In a way though, isn't keeping the dead trees where they are part of the natural process? When you remove decaying matter you remove important biodiversity?

It does, but in a forest where insects are the culprit in propagating a disease, it also reduces the spread of the devastation.

 

[RonL]

Hi Ron:

I am confused about why a compressed air system is relevant to the topic of "carbon neutral"? Is electricity carbon neutral? It seems to me that both compressed air and electricity are means of transferring energy from one place to another. What seems relevant is how energy is created rather than how it is transmitted.

I suppose that compressed air can be compared with electricity with respect to the efficiency of transmission, that is, the fraction of energy loss by the transmission process. Do you have any data sources on hat? Being more efficient with transmission is no doubt a benefit, bit I don't see that it is a carbon neutral issue.

Regards,
Buzz

I have a hard time using relevance to tie my thought process together one topic to another, "carbon-neutral" registered more than "bio-mass" and I thought of compressed air, which to me is different from electricity by the fact it performs not only because of pressure but by the heat it carries or is exposed to and the variation of such adjustments. Electricity is pretty cut and dried watt for watt.
It might be off topic enough to require it's own discussion thread,

 

[Dr. Courtney]

When I was a farmer in Ohio for a decade, I sold firewood on the side which made up about 20% of the farm business income. But the firewood production was always secondary to another operation, usually the sale of standing timber to be made into furniture. We'd sell a stand of timber to some Amish timber guys who would drop the trees and haul the marketable timber (big logs) out with horses to be sold to the mills to be cut and go into the furniture pipeline. Then me and my guys would go in behind the timber guys and make the "slash" into firewood. These are the limbs and branches that are too small (or poorly formed) to be made into marketable lumber. At least where I was in Ohio, about 80% of the wood mass ended up on the trucks headed for the mills, and about 20% ended up as "slash" which was what we made into firewood and sold as such.

I'm not exactly sure the time scale of the sequestration of the 80% that went to the mills, but the part that made it into furniture got sequestered for a long time. The trimmings and sawdust ends up in various applications with shorter sequestration times: paper, pencils, fiberboard, and pressed wood pellets for wood stoves (same heating application as firewood).

Since firewood (and pellets) and the other shorter sequestration uses are all much less valuable than lumber in most markets, I would reckon that there are very few wood markets where 100% of the wood production gets burned within a year or two of harvest. A sensible discussion needs to quantify how much of the biomass production of the wood ends up in long sequestration applications (homes, furniture) and how much ends up in short sequestration applications (fuel, paper, pencils, etc.)

At least in Ohio, the slash that becomes firewood would just sit in the woods rotting with a comparable sequestration time if it is not picked up and sold in the fuel markets. Due to the cost of labor, a lot of slash from timber harvests is not used for fuel.

 

[Ken Fabos]

Seems like there is a lot of room for continuing use of biomass for energy beyond and apart from simple local use of firewood (because it's there) for cooking and heating - but I think at larger scale it will mostly be as an adjunct to other activities, such as dealing with waste streams from sawmilling (because it's there) or perhaps, in places of high fire hazard (like where I live), harvesting and gasifying flammable plant materials in place of hazard reduction burning around the interfaces between rural and urban (because it's going to be burned anyway). I would be interested to see more development of small scale gasification for rural households - astonishing amounts of highly flammable material get raked into piles and burned or burned in situ each year around rural and forest/park edge households simply to reduce bushfire risks. It's not going to be 100% carbon neutral but it can still reduce emissions by it's participation in the fast carbon cycle. The slow carbon cycle includes mineral weathering, laying down and natural release of fossil carbon via coal and oil - it's the fast carbon cycle, between vegetation, soils, soils atmosphere and oceans that is relevant here and now.
There isn't going to be one ideal forest management regime - we can manage to maximise timber production, manage to reduce wildfire hazard, manage to preserve local natural ecosystems and biodiversity, manage to deal with immediate problems like weeds, pests and diseases as well as deal with long term ones like achieving those aims with expectations of changing climates and shifting land use priorities. The removal of all dead wood for example, will have impacts on nutrient cycling and availability of habitat for wildlife.

 

[Rive]

A sensible discussion needs to quantify how much of the biomass production of the wood ends up in long sequestration applications (homes, furniture) and how much ends up in short sequestration applications (fuel, paper, pencils, etc.)

The very first thing would be to ask about forest from somebody who has the qualifications to manage a forest. A cycle length for forest management is 30-100 years: even for the less valuable forests it is longer than the whole environmentalism in whole.

That's what pissing me off about these kind of discussions (especially the ones where the topic is narrowed down to short term carbon management -> thus rendered completely useless).

There isn't going to be one ideal forest management regime - we can manage to maximise timber production, manage to reduce wildfire hazard, manage to preserve local natural ecosystems and biodiversity, manage to deal with immediate problems like weeds, pests and diseases as well as deal with long term ones like achieving those aims with expectations of changing climates and shifting land use priorities. The removal of all dead wood for example, will have impacts on nutrient cycling and availability of habitat for wildlife.

I don't know how this work for other countries, but here (Hungary) the starting line is that there is a given percent of wood mass what should remain in the forest, regardless of its quality.
The actual topic in forest management is the application of a kind of 'rolling cut' instead of regular 'clear cut', so in any area the trees would be with mixed age.
This one is so 'hot' topic that during the next 30-50 years the whole industry is expected to apply it.

Now, tell me something in environmentalism what could be planned for even just a decade.

...

...Sorry, had to vent some steam.

 

[Buzz Bloom]

This one is so 'hot' topic that during the next 30-50 years the whole industry is expected to apply it.

Hi Rive:

If I am understanding you correctly, you are saying the issues regarding forest management have a longer time frame than the carbon issues regarding policy about climate change. Also, I gather you conclude that the more immediately urgent carbon issues should not be intruding upon the forest management issues. Have I read you correctly? Are you also concluding that the forest management issues should not intrude on the carbon issues?

What puzzles me is why discussions about these intrusions upset you so much.

You also ask

Now, tell me something in environmentalism what could be planned for even just a decade.

I may be mistaken, but it seems to me that the international politics regarding carbon require that shorter term agreements be made, for example the Paris Agreement covering 2015-2020, which followed the Kyoto Protocol which "was entered into force" in 2005, which extended the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. I think there are at most a few people, if any, who believe that the Paris Agreement agreement is going to fix the carbon problem, so (hopefully) there will be more short term (and more effective) agreements in the future.

Regards,
Buzz

 

[Rive]

If I am understanding you correctly, you are saying the issues regarding forest management have a longer time frame than the carbon issues regarding policy about climate change.

I'm saying that as long as the expected survival time of the actual buzzwords regarding (forests,) carbon and climate change are way shorter than the time frame of forest management, hands off from forests.

I may be mistaken

Yes: mixing agreements with actual practice and buzzwords is not the way forward.
A relevant example from the topic: based on those mentioned agreements one actual practice is to import first class wood chopped up to wood chips from Canada to Europe, with higher carbon footprint than coal mined here. And it is still called 'green'.

Ps.: just noticed that I've used the term 'buzzword' - it is definitely not a reference to your nickname, but (I think) the most correct term to describe the actual trend-controlled world of environmentalism...

 

[mheslep]

I don't know how this work for other countries, but here (Hungary) the starting line is that there is a given percent of wood mass what should remain in the forest, regardless of its quality.

I read somewhere the high price of timber in Germany due to its large biomass power capacity is pulling timber out of eastern europe, some of it black market. Have you seen any references about the issue?

 

[Rive]

I've noticed here a seemingly increased rate of wood trade (which does not fit with the local demand): I know about witnesses who claims that they have seen packed trucks heading for a local biomass plant with quite big (1-2m length...) 'wood chips' and I think it is not impossible that black market reaches as far as Germany, but I did not see any reference for that claim.

 

[mheslep]

Romania seems to be the source of some sketchy timber exports.

BBC:
Romania acts to save forests from logging spree

Agenda report, though with apparently sound references:

...Three-quarters of the 300,000 tonnes of wood pellets manufactured annually in Romania are exported.9 And there is growing concern that a combination of government subsidies and foreign markets is feeding the growth of a timber mafia in the country. Biomass burning has become a cause of corruption and conflict in Romania.

http://www.fern.org/sites/fern.org/files/upinflames_internet.pdf

 

[Ken Fabos]

Rive, the climate problem and need for low emissions energy are not due to Environmentalists, no matter that they are some of the loudest voices on the issues. That these make an opportunity for forest owners and managers in the low emissions energy market is not due to Environmentalists.The large scale use of biomass burning for electricity is, for the most part, opposed by political environmentalism - it is the managers of large scale forestry and the closely tied wood fired generators that seek to create market opportunities out of it and to benefit from it, including (mheslep note) by cutting corners and taking no care or responsibility for where or how the wood is sourced. If they do so without regard for the longer term consequences (the ones that many environmentalists keep going on about), then they are not doing such a good job of it and the burden of responsibility rests with them. Blaming environmentalists for the self interested choices and poor decisions of those who are actually responsible for that management makes no sense to me except as a blame shifting exercise - despite the perception that (elements of) environmentalism are the enemies of commercial forestry it largely supports improved long term management over short term and environmentally damaging exploitation.

Changes to local and regional climate from AGW will become ever more significant to forest managers - things like changes of rainfall and seasonal temperature patterns, extremes of heat and cold, flood, storm and wildfire to forests and infrastructure will challenge management based solely on traditions. The very mix of species across forested regions and the wildlife they support will change and I expect regions like Europe - where forests are mostly not primeval, but have been managed for centuries - will probably cope better than the minimal management/exploitative practices of places that lack those traditions or reject regulation. Depending on where, there is likelihood of enhanced droughts and increased wildfire risks (with increasing fire mitigation costs). In places like Australia climate change may make forestry unviable across large regions, especially if we collectively fail to bring emissions down and climate moves further from it's familiar range.

Mitigation of climate change through lowering of emissions is in the long term interests of the owners and managers of productive forests and biofuels can and will play some part in that - not pivotal perhaps, but significant all the same.

 

[mheslep]

Trippling the biomass consumption over the last 15 years in Germany, in keeping with biomass inclusion in EU renewable requirements, caused demand well beyond traditional supply, which in turn caused sharp timber price increases, which always and everywhere is expected to cause black markets in any commodity.

Blaming the "self interested" "managers" for this outcome is a page from Bolshevik handbook, central planning chapter.

 

[Rive]

Ken Fabos,

I think you too needs to face it: regardless of the lot of polite speech and agreements, on their tracks right now there is no actual practice exists for biomass which can be said to be green and sustainable.

In this environment to further propagate biomass as energy source is no different to the practice of those poor farmers who burns up forest in Middle-America just because they have no idea what else should they do.

Thank you for your understanding, but I'm not interested in anything like that.

 

[Dr. Courtney]

I think you too needs to face it: regardless of the lot of polite speech and agreements, right now there is no actual practice exists for biomass which can be said to be green and sustainable.

This is a false dichotomy. One should consider "green" and "sustainable" as a continuous scale rather than black and white. Having the discussion in black and white allows one to keep moving the goalposts where nothing is ever satisfactory. In the real world of energy, nothing will ever be perfect.

I ask a few questions when considering how "green" and "sustainable" a practice or energy source is:

1. Is it more sustainable than oil and coal?

2. Are the net emissions lower than oil and coal?

3. Is there a path where the long term costs are likely to be competitive with oil and coal?

If the answer to all three questions are "yes" then odds are it is a step in the right direction.

 

[Windadct]

And there are some good biomass examples, and some existed long before the environmental concerns. Ex, Burning the leftover sugar cane stalks to process and manufacture sugar. It is a one year or less, cycle. Corn based biodesel, since it drives up the cost of a food source is not my favorite, but collecting and similarly burning the the stalks would be a good field to study.

As for the government funding dead end research, it is pretty easy to cherry pick bad (some very bad) examples of politicians being sold BS - or leveraging Govt research spending to bring home the bacon... but this process is nothing new and has nothing to do with Green research, it is a byproduct of our political system. Sen. Byrd anyone? Some cases are just researchers that have never worked / experienced "the real world" and have drank their own coolaid, they believe in their idea, and keep advocating for it, so in some of this I see no malice or fraud, it takes then good, professional and educated people in government and to make policy that determines how to best spend the tax dollars.

I like Dr. C's post - as I have long subscribed to the thinking that to make significant changes, you should have at least three reasons, don't know why but the successful projects always seem to have 3 or more. Regarding Biomas... there is some good research and development where the objective more than just "carbon focused" - some of the grass projects, that can grow quickly on brown field, or help remediate soil, recover swamp land, provide agrarian buffers and other factors do show promise. Developing plant / algae that feed on our existing waste streams, and consume little additional valuable or important resources - also well worth the R&D cost.

Still - I see them all as " solar" - that is the source, can we grow plants to capture energy more effectively than PV for example? When only looking at energy - I doubt it. When we look at secondary and tertiary reasons to do this - it should be part of the mix, IMO.

Like wise - I vehemently hate coal, sorry, it is a dirty business. From questionable land grants, worker exploitation and abandonment, commercial manipulation of the environmental protections, local and global environmental damage AND then the CO2 issue. As a model, each of our households generate waste, and we have to pay (a cost) to have that removed, or we have to change and work to eliminate the waste - not a trivial task. We have been heavily using coal for 150 years - and not paying the bill (cost) of the waste we have been generating. Like one giant Superfund site.

Napkin Maths... ~ 9B STonns Coal per year, ~ 24B Tons CO2, ... over 196 M Sq Miles... 122 TONS of CO2, for every square mile of the planet, year after year - the numbers to me are in the realm of space travel, so large the layperson can not comprehend, and thus the issue becomes trivialized or ignored.

Making it personal - in the atmosphere above your one acre plot of land - we put ~ 640 lbs of CO2 - every year.

We have more then one reason to stop using coal. And we need to find ways to accomplish this. Unfortunately - simple answers are hard to come by, they have already been done and they clearly are not enough.

Ah.. rant over...

 

[Dr. Courtney]

And there are some good biomass examples, and some existed long before the environmental concerns. Ex, Burning the leftover sugar cane stalks to process and manufacture sugar. It is a one year or less, cycle. Corn based biodesel, since it drives up the cost of a food source is not my favorite, but collecting and similarly burning the the stalks would be a good field to study.

Another thing I don't like about corn-based fuels (that could be in play with ANY biofuel) is that the increased corn prices encourage farmers to plant more and to use more fertilizer to increase yields (production per acre). Those fertilizers are often petroleum dependent in their production, AND also tend to wash downstream and contribute to eutrophication and hypoxia in bodies of water. The large area of recurring hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico would likely be much smaller (or gone completely) if we ended corn-based biofuel subsidies (with expected reductions in fertilizer use in the Mississippi watershed. )

The impact of downstream nutrient loading should be considered when weighing how "green" and "sustainable" a given biofuel really is. I like wood-based biofuels better, since they don't tend to increase nutrient loading. Of course, there are some places where moderate nutrient loading can actually improve fisheries production since it can fertilize relatively infertile bodies of water. One needs to consider whether more nutrients downstream is going to help or hurt.

 

[mheslep]

This is a false dichotomy.

An all-or-nothing decision on biomass would be a false choice if not for the government RE grid share mandates. Numerous governments are setting high majority share renewable requirements (Germany 80% 2050) in places where hydro is limited, and all the energy source mandates I'm aware of exclude nuclear. It seems clear to me that RE sources like wind and solar will grossly fail to achieve targets of 80% or more due to their intermittent nature, eventually forcing a similarly gross overuse of biomass to meet those targets, especially in the context of i) some nuclear heavy countries that long ago removed carbon from their grid (e.g. France, Switzerland, Sweden), and ii) some dense forest neighbors looking for income.

https://www.physicsforums.com/attachments/chart2-png.205653/

 

[Rive]

http://www.spiegel.de/international...kes-toll-on-nature-conservation-a-888094.html

With the use of wood, especially ... the limits of sustainability have already been exceeded several times.

 

[Ken Fabos]

And there are some good biomass examples, and some existed long before the environmental concerns. Ex, Burning the leftover sugar cane stalks to process and manufacture sugar. It is a one year or less, cycle. Corn based biodesel, since it drives up the cost of a food source is not my favorite, but collecting and similarly burning the the stalks would be a good field to study.

As for the government funding dead end research, it is pretty easy to cherry pick bad (some very bad) examples of politicians being sold BS - or leveraging Govt research spending to bring home the bacon... but this process is nothing new and has nothing to do with Green research, it is a byproduct of our political system. Sen. Byrd anyone? Some cases are just researchers that have never worked / experienced "the real world" and have drank their own coolaid, they believe in their idea, and keep advocating for it, so in some of this I see no malice or fraud, it takes then good, professional and educated people in government and to make policy that determines how to best spend the tax dollars.

I like Dr. C's post - as I have long subscribed to the thinking that to make significant changes, you should have at least three reasons, don't know why but the successful projects always seem to have 3 or more. Regarding Biomas... there is some good research and development where the objective more than just "carbon focused" - some of the grass projects, that can grow quickly on brown field, or help remediate soil, recover swamp land, provide agrarian buffers and other factors do show promise. Developing plant / algae that feed on our existing waste streams, and consume little additional valuable or important resources - also well worth the R&D cost.

Still - I see them all as " solar" - that is the source, can we grow plants to capture energy more effectively than PV for example? When only looking at energy - I doubt it. When we look at secondary and tertiary reasons to do this - it should be part of the mix, IMO.

Like wise - I vehemently hate coal, sorry, it is a dirty business. From questionable land grants, worker exploitation and abandonment, commercial manipulation of the environmental protections, local and global environmental damage AND then the CO2 issue. As a model, each of our households generate waste, and we have to pay (a cost) to have that removed, or we have to change and work to eliminate the waste - not a trivial task. We have been heavily using coal for 150 years - and not paying the bill (cost) of the waste we have been generating. Like one giant Superfund site.

Napkin Maths... ~ 9B STonns Coal per year, ~ 24B Tons CO2, ... over 196 M Sq Miles... 122 TONS of CO2, for every square mile of the planet, year after year - the numbers to me are in the realm of space travel, so large the layperson can not comprehend, and thus the issue becomes trivialized or ignored.

Making it personal - in the atmosphere above your one acre plot of land - we put ~ 640 lbs of CO2 - every year.

We have more then one reason to stop using coal. And we need to find ways to accomplish this. Unfortunately - simple answers are hard to come by, they have already been done and they clearly are not enough.

Ah.. rant over...

Some of my own napkin maths - here in Australia the 15 metric tonne average emissions work out at 7500 cubic metres of CO2 per year per person; by volume it is our largest waste product. If it were a column of CO2 with a cross section of an average human body, each person's would be, literally, reach into the stratisphere.

 

[russ_watters]

Yes[edit]
By time I finished writing this post, I no longer believe that [biomass is carbon neutral]. I believe it is presented as carbon neutral on the basis of false and red herring assumptions.
[/edit]

[2 years later] I suspect many of you have heard of the recent of the burning Amazon rainforests. There's a lot of scary language being thrown around regarding it. Indeed, I've been hearing this sort of rhetoric for as many decades as I can remember (3ish). So in the context of this thread, why should we care that the Amazon is burning? If biomass is carbon neutral, it doesn't matter, does it? I mean, it's a bit wasteful to not burn it in a power plant, and less efficient/clean in combustion, but since it's carbon neutral that doesn't really matter in the long run, does it?

"All you can see is death:"
https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/25/americas/amazon-fire-efforts-damage/index.html
"Brazil's Amazon Rainforest is Burning at a Record Rate"
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/08/21/americas/amazon-rainforest-fire-intl-hnk-trnd/index.htmlI'm pretty sure that one was previously titled "Earth's Lungs are Burning" or "20% of the World's Oxygen Supply is Burning" or something equally nonsensical.

Updates on the controversy:
https://ec.europa.eu/eip/agriculture/en/event/sustainable-forest-biomass-light-paris-cop21"Bioenergy currently represents 60% of the EU’s total consumption of renewables. "

https://www.tyndall.ac.uk/news/infographic-biomass-energy-carbon-capture-and-paris-agreement
https://news.mongabay.com/2019/03/e...for-energy-its-not-carbon-neutral-plaintiffs/"Bioenergy was classified as carbon neutral under the Kyoto Protocol, meaning that nations don’t need to count wood burning for energy among their Paris Agreement carbon emissions. However, studies over the last 20 years have found that bioenergy, while technically carbon neutral, is not neutral within the urgent timeframe in which the world must cut emissions."

So can anyone explain to me why I should care, given that biomass is, if I'm understanding correctly, defined to be carbon neutral by the Paris Climate Agreement?

 

[Dr. Courtney]

So can anyone explain to me why I should care, given that biomass is, if I'm understanding correctly, defined to be carbon neutral by the Paris Climate Agreement?

Political definitions are not scientific facts.

Every kind of biomass is effectively carbon sequestration with some time constant. Most of my dinner has a relatively short time constant (a couple days.) Grass and leaves and most ocean algae has a time constant shorter than a year. Under natural decay conditions, carbon sequestered as wood typically has a time constant of decades. Fossil fuels are biomass with much longer time constants.So the question is, "If atmospheric CO2 is bad, are shorter carbon sequestration times worse than longer sequestration times, even if the carbon will eventually be released?"

I think so. All carbon sequestration is buying is time. And longer times are better than shorter times, because the negative effects of atmospheric CO2 are reduced while the carbon in question is sequestered. Burning biomass in the present year releases all the carbon now. Leaving it to grow and eventually die and decay by natural processes releases it gradually over decades.

Now, I'm not convinced burning is a real disaster, as it may be that the net effect is positive, since ash in the atmosphere can have a cooling effect. But that's a broader question. I think the more important point here is not to confuse political definitions with scientific facts.

 

[Windadct]

Typically today "Biomass" is referring to an energy source, and clearly we are getting no "energy" benefit or value from the burning. Technically however Biomass represents all organisms in an area, however, regardless of purpose. The "carbon neutral" aspect is to grow plants explicitly to convert as an energy source - algae for example - so that the energy cycle is Neutral. The challenge is how to develop this in any significant scale where the agricultural activities requires do not offset any real "neutrality" or benefit.

As for the Amazon
So the carbon that has been naturally sequestered in this area, is being immediately released.
The lack of vegetation will reduce the capacity to sequester more carbon moving forward
The area is being cleared for cattle and agriculture activities that carry a very heavy burden - they release methane and CO2. Just because this method on increasing farm production is cheaper than becoming more efficient and use the land already converted better.

This is both a economy and money before all other concerns mentality AND a nationalist power move disregarding regional and global community concerns.

We ether accept that we live in local, regional, continental and global communities and those communities have rules and norms, some of which we do not agree with or we can take an adolescent "I am free to do what ever I want" approach - so I can pour my engine oil in the creek, burn my trash, pollute the waterways, overfish the ocean, etc... as I want...

 

[Vanadium 50]

Russ, first Dr. Courtney is completely correct. What matters is the time constant. One could argue that even coal is carbon neutral - but the time constant is millions of years.

Second, I don't think the concern - at least from what I have read - is that these fires are a source of CO2 emissions. It's that these fires are a consequence of past CO2 emissions. I don't believe this is correct, and the chain of reasoning seems mighty flimsy.

Finally, this seems to be not atypical. Jesse Ferrell of Accuweather (probably not a hotbed of denialism) sums it up https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-blogs/weathermatrix/5-things-the-media-wont-tell-you-about-the-amazon-fires/70009150.

 

[fresh_42]

If we start to discuss it on a "less" scientific level, I'd like to add an information about the $CO_2$ emissions of the current fires, stating that the soil is the actual problem rather than the trees:
https://www.sciencealert.com/wildfi...are-turning-carbon-sinks-into-climate-heatershttp://researchspace.csir.co.za/dspace/handle/10204/7767

 

[anorlunda]

I can't vouch for this article. It is the headline that caught my eye.

https://reason.com/2019/08/23/dont-panic-amazon-burning-is-mostly-farms-not-forests/

 

[bhobba]

An IRS auditor once gave me this advice. "Never ever try to apply logic when dealing with the IRS." I say the same to you Russ when dealing with all things "green." It's 95% political and only 5% rational.

Just as an example you often hear renewables are now as cheap or cheaper than conventional sources so there is no issues, cost-wise, with using them. What they do not say, and my father was an electrical engineer who worked as an electrical estimator mainly on power plants, so I more or less have known this for years as a bit of esoteric knowledge that these days should be better known, there is great cost variation, depending on the source in getting it to the consumer. On the average 44% of what you pay for electricity, is paid to the wholesaler. The rest is getting it to those that need it which varies greatly depending on the source. Wind for example is highly intermittent, some wind farms may be producing tons, others virtually nothing, at anyone time. If you have a lot of wind farms in your network then balancing the network so it delivers power where its needed becomes a big cost. This is very well known in the industry - but renewable supporters never tell you that. It is also possible that you get blackouts if there is not enough electricity for balancing to work. To prevent that you really need a mix of sources - conventional and renewable, yet you have some politicians making pronouncements we will be 100% green by say 2030:
https://reneweconomy.com.au/south-australias-stunning-aim-to-be-net-100-per-cent-renewables-by-2030/
Despite the 'technobabble', it's driven by politics with the poor engineer having to somehow pull it off. South Australia does not have a good track record:
https://www.theguardian.com/austral...arm-operators-court-south-australian-blackout
Who knows they may pull it off - we will need to wait and see. But as cheap or cheaper than conventional sources - doubtful IMHO.

Thanks
Bill

 

[bhobba]

I can't vouch for this article. It is the headline that caught my eye.

https://reason.com/2019/08/23/dont-panic-amazon-burning-is-mostly-farms-not-forests/

Out here in Aus every actual news report with meteorologists etc, rather than opinion type reports from those kinds of shows (which of course is wise take with grain of salt) all say that. I think its likely true. I do know some of the pictures are misleading - one for example was five years old.

Thanks
Bill

 

[OCR]

Jesse Ferrell of Accuweather (probably not a hotbed of denialism) sums it up. . .

Yeah, I read that on August 25 at the link below. . . https://wildfiretoday.com/2019/08/25/many-of-the-photos-circulating-of-wildfires-in-the-amazon-are-not-of-the-amazon/

.

 

[fresh_42]

News manipulation, politics or whatever apart. The following statement remains true:

But scientists in Brazil and elsewhere say there is clear evidence that the spike, which has triggered concerns and anger around the world, is related to a recent rise in deforestation that many say is partly the result of prodevelopment policies of the government of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/201...fires-are-caused-deforestation-scientists-say
Downplay as "liberal opinions" or alike doesn't make it go away.

It is burning. Fire extinction is difficult. Ergo it damages the $CO_2$ balance and the planet's oxygen production. You cannot simply say it is not true or exaggerated.

 

[BillTre]

Just as an example you often hear renewables are now as cheap or cheaper than conventional sources so there is no issues, cost-wise, with using them.

I can not recall having ever heard anyone say this.
Sounds like straw-man argument to me.

Clearly quality will not be as good as new material, but there are some low grade uses for which recycled materials can make sense, such as tires --> doormats.