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Burning wood for power worse for climate than gas equivalent
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2026
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Climate
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It's not a compliment. They're citing this article from Nature Sustainability that I doubt you even read the abstract to. Both The Guardian and Nature discuss why this is a relevant comparison.
Get off your own dick for a second and just read, will ya?
This is such an idiotic take. This knowledge isn’t new. Decaying trees are eaten by other plants and animals, their CO2 doesn’t return to the atmosphere completely. On top of that, decaying takes DECADES, not minutes. That slow release matters, as it’s the entire problem with how humans have released CO2 to the atmosphere in the first place.
Plus some of that carbon ends up in the soil where it can be stored for thousands of years.
(This is unrelated to the argument discrediting I'm about to do: usually journal entries like this are called "articles"; manuscripts are hand- or typewritten. This does not detract from your argument; I just wanted you to know.)
I'm going to trust four expert researchers writing in 2026 for one of the most academically prestigious journals on Earth over some random social media user who can't even spell "CO2" and categorically did not read the article (it's closed-access, and you're offering no specific critiques). I'd doubt you even read the abstract given how generic this half-baked critique is. Sorry to say that I only read a preprint which isn't exactly reflective of the full, closed-access article, but you're just authoritatively spouting made-up bullshit about a field you clearly have zero understanding of and probably haven't ever read a single peer-reviewed paper in.
And literally what the fuck do you mean "especially at that journal"? That journal is one of the best ones there is.
I love you science guys. But as a media person, I chose to note 'how it was presented' not whether some fact is accurate.
"As a media guy, it was beyond me to read the second and third paragraph explaining why this comparison is being drawn."
Is your middle name "Illiterate", Media Guy?
The problem is that a huge chunk of the online audience only ever sees the headline. Click-through rates hover around 2% and of those who vote or comment, only about one in four has clicked the link.
It's not a crazy concern, but definitely should be expressed more clearly.
There is a reason I quoted the key paragraphs in the post.
When it's even in the subheader ("Research casts doubt on plans by UK government to offer subsidies for carbon capture attached to the power source"), I'm not going to blame news outlets. I'm going to blame people who treat the news like a series of disconnected headlines that they extrapolate their own fantasy version of and react to on social media (or, for the more cromulent and sophisticated, in their RSS feed). Even just reading this headline, I'd wonder why they're comparing the two and quickly check in (literally five seconds) before rushing to the comments accusing them of mispresentation; if that makes me different, that's not the news outlet's fault.
I'm really growing sick of the expectation that news be dumbed way the hell down for absolute morons who have 4th-grade-level media literacy and zero interest in reading news except to stoke their own emotions. It's just a race to the bottom of expectations getting progressively dumber; the chronically willfully stupid will never be satisfied. "If you don't want to read the news, don't read the news."
How people treat the news is a result of how the UI on reddit, lemmy, and social media is designed. It's not appropriate to blame people who don't have control over that
Social media UI facilitates that behavior, I agree. It trivializes the pipeline of reading a headline and then broadcasting one's stupid, uninformed, baselessly authoritative thoughts about it. Nevertheless, everyone has a choice; the UI is not making exercising basic responsibility any harder than it was before. When I fail to do that, that's my fault.
UI design sharply increases the probability of behaving in this way; it takes a real fundamental rethink of the UI in order to change that. For what it's worth, commercial platforms are increasingly pushing people away from providing a link, either by banning links like Instagram, or by having a feed ranking algorithm which discourages their inclusion (X, Facebook, others)
I don't blame individual choices for something that's largely a result of platform design.
i mean:
news outlets turning their pages into ad-riddled hellscapes that make the user feel as if they entered the dirtiest back alley they've ever seen could, possibly have something to do with the vast majority only reading the headlines...but sure, blaming the users works too!
honestly news sites are simply commonitng a slow suicide with the advertising based financial model...the whole internet is.
(yes, the UI on social media makes this problem worse, but it didn't create the problem)
I see your point. Educated elites like you can take their time reading, and realized that the governmentz plan to subsidize sustainable energy production is, scientifically speaking, a load of shit. Go figure.
Please imagine someone taking their 10-minute lunch break at the Amazon Warehouse. They want to be an informed voter, but they dont have the time to do deep research. They are just going to read the headline.
I chose to comment on the effect of this The Guardian article. The Guardian spins simplistic narratives for the majority of readers. In this case, the easiest takeaway is Gas isnt that bad.. This headline is intended to hurt the Green party at the polls.
???????????????? What the fuck are you talking about????? Yeah, I took several minutes to read some of the preprint because I care about climate action and wanted to be more informed generally, but the level of due diligence you had to do before writing – literally just reading the subheader – would've taken at most a third of the time it took to write your stupid, bullshit comment in the first place. I'm not saying you should've been fucked to specifically read the study; I'm saying you should've been fucked to read anything besides a 10-word headline.
If you're trawling around on Lemmy, you have the time and means to do what I did, but I don't even care about that; I care that you did nothing and thought that qualified you to smear the article you didn't even try to read.
"Anti-intellectualism is sticking it to those snobby elites!" I think you'd get along really well with Trump supporters, because you clearly both accidentally fell into your ideologies by being proudly and willfully ignorant.
I did, matter of fact, take the time to read the paragraphs quoted by OP. Did you bother to take the time to read the point I made, or do you prefer to take out your anger about anti-intellectualism on me?