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Burning wood for power worse for climate than gas equivalent (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 4 days ago by silence7@slrpnk.net to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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The key problem is that they cause deforestation:

Bio-energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) has been touted as a clean way of producing baseload power, substituting for gas and coal, which could even result in “negative emissions” as when replacement forests are grown they take up CO2 from the air.

But such systems could take 150 years to be “carbon negative”, researchers from the US, UK and China have found, in part because of the long time it takes to regrow forests, and because of the damage done when existing savannah, pasture or cropland is converted to grow biomass for burning.

The paper is here

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[-] tyler@programming.dev 17 points 4 days ago

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.

[-] Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 10 points 4 days ago

Plus some of that carbon ends up in the soil where it can be stored for thousands of years.

this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2026
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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.

As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world. About 1C of total warming. Second chart: about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability. Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases. About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

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