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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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If we are looking at just the carbon though, that carbon is collected by the 2 year old trees, right? So it's net carbon-neutral in that sense.
The tree itself would in theory have consumed as much carbon as it releases when burned, but when you take into consideration harvesting and processing, then it's still a net producer.
is it from the machinery using fossil fuels?
It should also be noted that the order of magnitude is very different to fossil fuels. And at least in theory the harvesting and progressing can be done using renewable energy sources (at least for large parts of it). We are very far from actually doing this though.
The main issue in practice is the combustion byproducts and fine particulates.
Depends on what would be there if those trees weren't grown/cut for wood. Old-growth forest stores more carbon than young forest. This perhaps would have been a more important point for the author to have made.