Reducing Carbon Emissions: The Case Against Wood Burning for Heating and the Push for Alternative Energy Solutions

All combustion where the fuel contains carbon creates CO2 emissions. Many in the debate about the environment believe that we must be free of fossils in the way we live, work and produce. However, I believe that there should be a significant reduction in all types of combustion that can be replaced by other energy without carbon content.

An example is all private villas and farms that have their main heating with wood burning in their own boiler. There are modern wood burning boilers that can provide good combustion with automation and control, but many old wood burning boilers do not have this control.

If you take your electric car for a drive through the countryside in Sweden, you will understand that it is a good pastime. Well, you cut, split, stack and burn wood in many places on the roads.

A typical town that is heated with wood as its only energy source for a year will generate as many CO2 emissions as a car that is driven nearly 4,000 miles during this year. In addition to this, a lot of gases, particles and other odors come out of the chimney of the wood burner.

The association should support the transition from wood burning to alternative heating by, for example, heat pumps. Large-scale burning in district heating plants could be allowed as soon as a solution is found to sequester greenhouse gases in the smoke and store them safely under the seabed. Wood should mainly be used as a building material.

Another problem is that in the Environmental Protection Agency’s statistics for various emission sources, there is no information about what the country’s wood generators generate in terms of emissions.

When it comes to driving, the big question mark, I think, is driving on ethanol or petrol and diesel with additives of cane seed oil or similar. CO2 comes out of the tailpipe anyway, while it’s an internal combustion engine. Something less, perhaps, but barely enough to save us from the climate crisis. The hemp seed oil is best used for baking or cooking. So the move to electricity for vehicles is also something that society needs to support in some way. The electric car subsidy needs to be reintroduced to increase the use of electric cars.

Another phenomenon that happens completely uncontrollably is the forest fires of the world. Here, a lot of greenhouse gases are released into the atmosphere, so a monitoring system and rapid interventions are needed for elimination and limitation. There must be no place for controlled burning of a forest to allow any seeds to germinate, where fire is necessary for this. These people may have access to the forest fires that are still happening.