On fuel wood

We live in a burning world. As we record, there are record wildfires across the Americas, record temperatures around the world, falling oxygen levels in the oceans and however much supposedly renewable energy we produce, Jevons' Paradox means we keep on burning fossil fuels. This is not a great...

when you mill trees into structural timber to make buildings out of (as I'm doing at present with trees blown down in Storm Arwen) more than half the tree is 'waste'. In industrial sawmills, a great deal of that waste can be converted into oriented strand board...

Accidental Gods: When is a Tree not a Tree? The 'Net Zero' Wood Burning Scam - with Dr Mary Booth of Partnership for Policy Integrity

Episode webpage: https://share.transistor.fm/s/9adf9941

When you mill trees into structural timber to make buildings out of (as I'm doing at present with trees blown down in Storm Arwen) more than half the tree is 'waste'. In industrial sawmills, a great deal of that waste can be converted into oriented strand board, but for small sawmills (like mine) that isn't practicable. So all the fuel wood that I have used for domestic heating over the past two years has been sawmill waste. The sawmill waste could be collected by truck and driven to the nearest processing plant, but the cost would be unaffordable for me.

If the waste isn't used in some way it will rot, releasing all its carbon to the air. So burning for domestic heat waste that can't be economically processed seems rational.

But there's another major issue here: burning wood from fallen trees is a major source of domestic heat for the rural poor. If you take that away you greatly increase the fuel poverty of some of the most marginalised people in Britain.

Yes, I think it is already illegal just as my little home made house is illegal – but if you enforce those laws then I and many of my neighbours just end up as street homeless. So I just don't care what laws comfortable wealthy urban politicians pass.

Yes, of course we should keep trees as standing timber as long as we can, because one mature tree sequesters more carbon than hundreds of saplings. Yes, of course, when those trees do reach the end their lives, we should process as much of the timber as we can into long-lived products to keep that carbon sequestered as long as we can. And, given the huge carbon cost of concrete, timber must increasingly be our primary structural material.

But there will always be parts of the tree you cannot easily process; and the fossil fuel cost of moving timber from where it fell, to where it can be processed, and onwards to where the products can be used, needs to be part of the equation.

So burning waste wood locally for domestic heating, even if it isn't perfectly efficient, may not be a bad thing. It means the minerals from the timber, as wood ash, go right back into the soil locally to feed the next generation of trees.

(Then again, I may just be indulging in post-facto, self-justificatory rationalisation).