Bread and Circuses on Nostr: Yikes. As if we didn't already have enough to worry about... ...
Yikes. As if we didn't already have enough to worry about...
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"Wood isn’t the climate-friendly material you think it is"
A new study shows that cutting down trees for paper, furniture, and fuel emits three times more carbon than flying.
Whether used to heat your house or build it, wood is often touted as carbon-neutral, especially by biofuel and lumber companies and even some environmentalists. The logic seems simple enough: Sure, logging unleashes planet-warming carbon into the air, but that can be replaced with new trees that suck carbon back out of the air.
But this doesn’t reflect how the emissions from harvesting wood actually work, according to a paper published this week in Nature. Even when the carbon captured by new trees is taken into account, wood consumption accounts for about one-tenth of the world’s annual greenhouse gas emissions, the study’s authors found — less than electricity and heat generation, but more than passenger cars.
The emissions associated with timber harvests mainly come from burning logs and pellets for fuel and from rotting branches, leaves, and roots left in the forest or tossed in landfills, where they decompose and release carbon into the air.
Global demand for wood will grow by 54% between 2010 and 2050, largely driven by fuel and timber products like wood chips, as well as paper and cardboard. Logging to meet that demand will cover an area roughly equivalent to clear-cutting the entire continental U.S. The resulting climate pollution is likely to measure 3.5 to 4.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year — about three times the emissions from aviation and roughly equal to the deforestation caused by agriculture.
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FULL STORY --
https://grist.org/economics/wood-climate-friendly-logging-emissions/#Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #CO2 #Emissions
Published at
2023-07-13 12:29:12Event JSON
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"content": "Yikes. As if we didn't already have enough to worry about...\n___________________________\n\n\"Wood isn’t the climate-friendly material you think it is\"\n\nA new study shows that cutting down trees for paper, furniture, and fuel emits three times more carbon than flying.\n\nWhether used to heat your house or build it, wood is often touted as carbon-neutral, especially by biofuel and lumber companies and even some environmentalists. The logic seems simple enough: Sure, logging unleashes planet-warming carbon into the air, but that can be replaced with new trees that suck carbon back out of the air. \n\nBut this doesn’t reflect how the emissions from harvesting wood actually work, according to a paper published this week in Nature. Even when the carbon captured by new trees is taken into account, wood consumption accounts for about one-tenth of the world’s annual greenhouse gas emissions, the study’s authors found — less than electricity and heat generation, but more than passenger cars.\n\nThe emissions associated with timber harvests mainly come from burning logs and pellets for fuel and from rotting branches, leaves, and roots left in the forest or tossed in landfills, where they decompose and release carbon into the air. \n\nGlobal demand for wood will grow by 54% between 2010 and 2050, largely driven by fuel and timber products like wood chips, as well as paper and cardboard. Logging to meet that demand will cover an area roughly equivalent to clear-cutting the entire continental U.S. The resulting climate pollution is likely to measure 3.5 to 4.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year — about three times the emissions from aviation and roughly equal to the deforestation caused by agriculture. \n___________________________\n\nFULL STORY -- https://grist.org/economics/wood-climate-friendly-logging-emissions/\n\n#Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #CO2 #Emissions\n\nhttps://climatejustice.social/system/media_attachments/files/110/706/756/951/780/812/original/139c1ca8c962cd77.webp",
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