Most of this is unrelated to the recent natural gas price increases…. “Europe Is Sacrificing Its Ancient Forests for Energy” (New York Times, today):
Burning wood was never supposed to be the cornerstone of the European Union’s green energy strategy.
When the bloc began subsidizing wood burning over a decade ago, it was seen as a quick boost for renewable fuel and an incentive to move homes and power plants away from coal and gas. Chips and pellets were marketed as a way to turn sawdust waste into green power.
Those subsidies gave rise to a booming market, to the point that wood is now Europe’s largest renewable energy source, far ahead of wind and solar.
Some of this falls into the “what’s old is new” category, I think. When people from England invaded North America in the 17th and 18th centuries they expressed amazement at how much forest was available for the cutting. More or less everything in England that could be cut already had been cut.
Forests in Finland and Estonia, for example, once seen as key assets for reducing carbon from the air, are now the source of so much logging that government scientists consider them carbon emitters. In Hungary, the government waived conservation rules last month to allow increased logging in old-growth forests.
And while European nations can count wood power toward their clean-energy targets, the E.U. scientific research agency said last year that burning wood released more carbon dioxide than would have been emitted had that energy come from fossil fuels.
Let’s have a look at a forest that has already been cut quite a bit… Vigeland Park in Oslo.
The peace that comes from being a parent is depicted:
How about riding a horse through the forest?
Experience the joy of interacting with wildlife in the forest:
How about these gates for your back yard?
Need some ideas for your next Cirque du Soleil show?
There were a fair number of Norwegians in convivial groups of 2-10 enjoying the park at 4 pm on a Tuesday. Apparently, if a country has a small population of humans and a large population of oil and gas wells not everyone will have to work long hours in the dreary office.
Local port has a brisk trade in wood pellets for Europe.
There was a hype about wood pellets being a clean solution that dates back to at least a decade ago. More recently the method came under criticism for emitting fine dust.
It is somewhat like the ethanol story.
Now we are debating whether opening Nord Stream 2 is evil as opposed to running Nord Stream 1 at 100%. The latter would be no issue for politicians, same as buying Russian LNG through China at a huge markup.
North Stream 1 or 2 are no longer issues as the Russians have played their trump cards and shut NS1 down. There is nothing the EU can do (as it’ll not make peace with Russia until the US agrees, which won’t happen soon)
Sounds like there will be increased demand for asthma inhalers in Europe this winter.
“Wood burning in homes produces more small particle pollution than all road traffic in the UK, according to revised government data.
“Lots of people live closer to home chimneys than they do to industrial sources and major motorways. This leads to greater exposure to wood burning pollution than we find for many other sources.”
“My in-box is filled with people who are concerned about the wood smoke that is filling the bedroom of their asthmatic child or ill elderly relative.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/15/wood-burners-emit-more-particle-pollution-than-traffic-uk-data-shows
Paul: Another advantage for South Florida… there is no way to run an air conditioner by burning wood and the heating season is about two weeks per year. I don’t remember ever seeing a wood stove in a house here.
Wood stoves are common in the Deplorable Zone of MA where I live. Most of them are pellet based and people that I know use them and love them particularly on really cold days and nights. I expect them to become more so this year, especially since we are going to be using one. My father and I are working on a system that uses a heat exchanger in addition to the wood stove – so we can place it outside the building, pump the heat in, recirculate the water, etc. Our normal heat is all baseboard grid electric, which is expensive here and becoming more so, and since Massachusetts refuses to do anything sensible like building a new nuclear power plant, it’s one of our priorities for this winter.
I think the United States should engage in a kind of “Energy Marshall Plan” to help Europe this winter. It entails a lot of risks, but I think we should at least be talking about it. Why don’t we offer to ship them a lot of natural gas, for example? What is Putin going to do about it? Start blowing up our natural gas ships in transit across the Atlantic?
I feel worst for the people in Europe who I think are going to suffer through a vastly diminshed quality of life this winter and a lot of businesses there are going to go belly-up in the next six months.
Europe is going to surrender to Putin without a fight. It is the only way they don’t freeze and starve.
How’s that fancy globalization looking now?
@GB: You may be right. What the European governments want is stability and the simplest way to get that back in terms of Nordstream is to capitulate. Germany has essentially put all its natural gas eggs in Putin’s Basket and I don’t think they know whether to shit or go blind, hence my “Energy Marshall Plan” idea.
I know they screwed themselves. Putin does too. Well, when you have no place else to turn, what do you do? Ask America for help!
GB: I will go on record here as saying that I don’t think anything will change in the near term, other than the Europeans being colder and partially shutting down energy-intensive industries. From what I know (which is to say almost nothing, since my only sources of information are western media), people on both sides of the war in Ukraine are dug in both literally and emotionally.
@GB, @philg: My only source of information is also the western media, but this is some pretty draconian stuff. If JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank are doing it, what does it mean for the average Johann?
“JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, and other major European banks are turning off hot water, stopping fountains, and preparing diesel generators as Russia chokes the energy supply”
https://www.yahoo.com/now/jpmorgan-deutsche-bank-other-major-104232247.html
Germany stops decommissioning two nuclear plants and keeps them on stand-by to its coal – powered plants. Coal is “hot” again. Really glad for US coal miners, “green” left politicians’ crony “entrepreneurs”, US coal speculators and Chinese Russia-originated natural gas speculators under guise of economic slowdown demand drop . Pity myself and other consumers.
https://www.breitbart.com/news/germany-puts-two-nuclear-plants-on-standby-in-energy-u-turn/
I agree with philg that nothing is going to change near term.
France and Germany are run by technocrat governments. The “Social” Democrat / Green party coalition in Germany was ideologically stubborn on COVID-19 until it was impossible to ignore the population.
Macron was largely the same. They have found their next ideological goal, and they love the fact that everyone (except for the rich) has to use less energy. Like during COVID-19, some of their cronies will get rich. Insider information and good contacts work best during periods of instability.
The only thing that scares them are events like the Canadian Trucker Protests.
@Alex, big banks started fighting global warming and cutting emissions 🙂 under Obama administration. They are experienced in that BS field. Back than some people I knew got themselves work from home arrangement after complaining to HR that management made them drive to work and pollute despite bank newly formulated environmental policy 🙂 Fight BS with BS
@perplexed: I know that you can’t throw a spitball across the boardroom table of a bank in the US or elsewhere and not hit someome who is committed to fighting climate change, it’s impossible. They all are now, and it’s baked into their economies, particularly in Germany, but also in the UK.
On NPR this past weekend, I listened to a couple of variously desparate business owners in Britain talking about the coming winter and how they were trying to cope with all the rising energy prices: they’re basically being strangled to death and they know it. One woman said that she’s going to try to keep her pub open for another six months and then “see where the land is” – meaning, I presume, that she’s getting ready to give up and sell it off, then get the heck out.
Well, if Europe and Britain want to screw themselves that way, I guess there’s nothing anyone can do to change their minds.
But this isn’t climate change: it’s choking an entire continent into submission by cutting off its energy supply. As tough as it might sound to their elites, there’s a time to temporarily shelve the high ideal goals and focus instead on making sure your own people don’t freeze to death, lose their livelihoods, and then – what they’re really afraid of – vote you out of office after all the frozen bodies have been counted. Germany has been planning for social instability due to energy policy choices at the highest levels for at least a decade now, and here’s their chance to see what they’ll do. Merkel was very well aware that the next 10-20 years of life in Europe could very well result in much greater social instability.
I think Europe is facing that reckoning moment courtesy of Vlad Putin and their own terrible decisionmaking, and I see no signs of him letting up; I expect it to get much worse. He’s a very determined man. We are nowhere near seeing all the “shoes drop.”
I think really Hard times are coming, much faster than they anticipated.