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Burning wood is not ‘renewable energy,’ so why do policymakers pretend it is?
(news.mongabay.com)
this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2025
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Burning trees planted two years ago doesn't actually release any carbon that wasn't already in the atmosphere two years ago.
Yes and leaving trees alone rather than cutting them down to burn for wood just means they’re going to end up releasing that carbon when they die and rot on the forest floor.
The only way for trees to sequester carbon is turn them into a form that does not rot. In the distant past, that process was geologic. Temperature and pressure turned the wood into fossil fuels which were trapped underground until we started digging them up to burn.
To replicate that process today we’d have to bury a bunch of trees in deep mines or empty oil wells and cap them off to make sure the CO2 doesn’t escape.
Wood is enjoying a resurgence of development as a building material. Perhaps it can be treated such that it becomes stable on the order of thousands of years instead of just hundreds, and replace a great deal of highly emitting materials like steel and concrete.
Yeah I’ve heard of some kinds of processes where the wood is injected with polymers or something, turning it into a much more solid structure.
I have a coffee table I inherited from my grandfather which is wood encased in some kind of ultra hard epoxy resin. The thing feels like an absolute tank!
Engineered wood products have replaced steel girders in a small number of highrise/skyscraper buildings. It's a huge, huge carbon win, not even considering the sequestration in the frame.
That is really cool! I didn’t know they were that far along!
The Portland (Oregon) airport recently finished remodeling their main atrium area and they used some pretty incredible engineered wood beams. I know a guy who worked on the mill that built those beams. The mill assembles plywood veneer (thin sheets about an eighth of an inch or so, usually in 4x8 foot sheets) into like 16 inch thick, 12 foot wide, however long you want pieces, and then they can basically cut out anything that isn't a beam from this massive brick of engineered wood.
Here's a pic
The picture doesn't show these massive plywood beams, but if you ever fly through pdx, go check out the main atrium just past security. It's absolutely breathtaking, and it's mostly wood.
Wow thanks for sharing! That is beautiful!
I’ve often felt very depressed because I’ve long had the idea that the best days of architecture were behind us. That we’d never have anything beautiful (like the gothic cathedrals of Europe) again and we were doomed to a dystopian feature of steel and glass monstrosities.
This engineered wood and its potential for more natural and beautiful architecture gives me hope!