With Oil Prices Rising, Wood Makes a Comeback

[phantom power]

phantom power says "uh oh." And speaks in 3rd person.

NEWPORT, Vt. — As a child, Brian Cook remembers hurling wood into the big orange boiler his father bought during the oil crisis of the late 1970s, helping feed the fire that provided heat and hot water to his family.

Thirty years later, Mr. Cook dragged the boiler out of his childhood home and hooked it up in the house that he and his wife, Jennifer, own to cut their oil bills.

“I did not want to pay $3,000 to heat this house,” Mr. Cook said in his garage here in Vermont’s heavily wooded Northeast Kingdom. “I see a lot more people burning wood this year.”

After years of steep decline, wood heat is back, with people flocking to dealers to buy new wood stoves, wood boilers and stoves that burn pellets made of wood byproducts. Others like Mr. Cook, to the dismay of environmentalists, are dusting off old wood-burning devices that are less efficient and more polluting.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/19/us/19woodstove.html?ei=5087&em=&en=e3c0714d22516cf2&ex=1203570000&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1203427970-jEE3YSVJQ5L0sfSBNiJrRw

[all.of.me]

1. I've been burning wood for 30 years.

No comeback here! I agree, though, that the newer more efficient stoves and furnaces need to be used. Up until this year, I had 2 stoves, one old, one new. The chimney in the old one had to be cleaned twice a year for creosote build-up. The new one gets cleaned once a year, but barely needs that. I got rid of the old one when I added my solar greenhouse.

[phantom power]

2. A macro-trend toward burning wood scares me.

Think Britain, just prior to the discovery of coal. The last time a majority of Americans burned wood for anything except entertainment, the continent's population was a small fraction of our current 300 million people.

[all.of.me]

3. When we harvest wood, we are only allowed to take 'dead and down.'

If more people used wood, we would also be thinning the forests to reduce fire danger. There's a lot of clean-up to do, though! When the forest service does it, you can get the wood for free at their office. You just have to be able to haul away 4' lengths. I'd like to see more of this. Wood is still controversial, but if harvested properly, it is sustainable. If you have wooded property, I think 1 cord per acre per year is the sustainable amount.

[phantom power]

4. I have absolutely no faith that it will be harvested sustainably.

There is nothing in human history to suggest that it will be harvested sustainably. The discovery of coal, and then eventually oil and NG, basically came just in time to save the forests of the northern hemisphere. And they've still declined, due to the world's appetite for housing, furniture and paper.

[all.of.me]

5. I agree. nt

[jpak]

6. I'm sorry, Britain's forests were cleared for agriculture - not for firewood.

and a modern US home today would burn far less wood per year than a 17th Century English farm house.

Furthermore, the only cheap alternative to residential wood fuel is coal.

In the Northeastern US, much more wood is harvested for paper each year than firewood (3-5x) - and those markets are changing rapidly. Hardly a week goes by without news of another paper mill closing or shutting down paper machines. That is freeing up lots of wood for fuel...

[phantom power]

7. I'm sure a lot of it was cleared for agriculture, however...

This is the kind of history I've read on the subject: shipbuilding, metal-working, construction, heating, etc, were huge drivers of deforestation prior to the use of coal:

http://fubini.swarthmore.edu/~ENVS2/S2003/jessiewhit/deforestation.html

This one has an interesting bit on deforestation to fuel vodka distillation in Estonia:
http://www.wrm.org.uy/deforestation/Europe/annex.html

[jpak]

8. Currently, 70% of UK land area is under agriculture - only 10% is woodland

http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/statistics/land/kf/ldkf08.htm

At the end of the last glacial period (~10,000 BP), the British Isles were generally devoid of forests, cereal production and pastoralism initiated the decline of the original UK forests around 6-7000 yr BP which continued into the 20th century...

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/105558828/ABSTRACT?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0

During WW1 the UK was cut off from foreign timber supplies and forested land shrank to an all-time low of 5% total land area...

http://www.eh-resources.org/biblio_scot.html

Yes, they harvested firewood, but timber harvesting and clearing for agriculture were the main culprits in the decline of the original UK forests.