Yesterday, Stella reminded me of one of the many trade-offs associated with climate change and environmental policies, generally. Montreal is considering a ban on new wood-burning appliances, on account of the local air pollution they cause. Wood certainly isn’t the cleanest burning stuff, especially when it is used in stoves that fail to achieve an ideal temperature and fuel-air mixture. That being said, burning sustainably harvested wood does not add greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere. This is because the trees being grown to supply the wood absorb as much carbon as the stoves are emitting.
In the long run, only biomass and renewables offer the prospect of unending energy. Encouraging the development of both is thus critical to making the transition to a zero-carbon global society. At the same time, other drawbacks do need to be considered: whether it’s the land and water use associated with biofuel production, the air pollution from biomass burning, or the damage caused by dams. These trade-offs illustrate how technology is never really a self-sufficient answer to environmental problems.
There are also further complexities on the climate side. What is the source of the wood? Is logging altering the albedo of the area, leading to greater or lesser absorption of solar radiation? Are the trees being felled absorbing atmospheric carbon at the same rate as the trees that will replace them? What are the climatic impacts of the physical cutting and transportation of the wood? What effect will the aerosols from the wood burning have on climate?
In the specific case of Montreal’s wood-burning stoves, I don’t know enough about the trade-offs involved to make a sensible suggestion. Perhaps it would be better to mandate that any wood-burning appliances meet emissions standards, rather than banning them completely, or perhaps that is infeasible for some reason and only a ban will work. For instance, it might just be too costly and impractical to create and enforce emissions standards for wood-fired devices. In the end, the business of living together in a finite world is inevitably one of compromise and politics.