Preface. More than half of Europe’s “green” energy comes from burning wood, a lot of it imported from America. Now Denmark would like to import methanol made from pinyon pines and junipers from hundreds of thousands of acres in the Southwest. And American biomass burning electric plants would like to burn them as well. The first article below is about the consequences of doing that.
The second article, from Science, doesn’t address the fact that after you cut down a forest and convert the wood into pellets destined to be burned in European furnaces for “clean energy”, the next forest won’t grow back with nearly as much lumber. So CO2 isn’t being replaced, not even after 100 years. Forests don’t regrow to their former magnificence because logging causes soil erosion, depletes the water retained in soil needed for regrowth, and compacts the soil (Elliot 1999). Therefore the new growth won’t be able to absorb as much CO2 as their burned parents emitted because they contain less biomass, and since it takes half a century for a forest to regrow, whatever CO2 replacement occurs will take an awfully long time. Too long given the State of the World.
Preface. Much of this post is based on Miriam Pemberton’s 2023 book “Six Stops on the National Security Tour”. Large sections of the book are about why past attempts to cash in on the ending of the cold War since 1991 or even before that didn’t work out. She proposes that military funding should be diverted now to prevent the climate crisis to set up companies to build electric vehicles, wind turbines and more.
