How do you heat your home in the winter.? In my experience the choices are electricity, gas and wood, but there may be others. Wood is more pleasant and both electricity and gas have heaters that imitate wood fires. There’s no need to pretend you have a wood fire when the real thing is available.
Electricity can heat your home through heaters or air conditioning, both a trifle expensive, and unless you have solar on your roof and enough battery capacity it uses electricity from the grid, which may not be ideal. Gas is pretty good but is presently demonised a tad, mainly in Victoria, but if you are a true believer you don’t want to go there for the moment.
Trees soak up carbon dioxide and no doubt other gases during their growing period; sadly nearly all trees have a finite life. The beautiful gum trees we look at have a lifetime all too short. They die and as they rot on the ground they give up all the gases they soaked up in their lifetime.
Not some of the gases, ALL. Maybe it’s better to use those gases to warm your home.
Clearly we need to find a use for the wood before it rots. It is a renewable resource. One solution is to cut down trees when they have finished growing and use the wood in building homes, reducing the imports of wood. Planting replacement trees would be good. Oddly that is not a popular solution, as there seems to be a preference to use other people’s wood and leave the benefits of harvesting wood to other countries.
Another use of dead wood is to burn it in fires to keep the house warm; this does not reduce or increase the gases released back into the environment, but is does reduce the demands of the electricity grid – a lot to be said for a wood fire as it will burn through the night. You can run your electric heater all night too if you have a long purse. It is not clear how much longer electricity will be available.24/7.
One can pile up the dead wood and burn it in the paddock. There is a mass of dead wood as a result of the last bushfire which kills trees but does not consume them while they are green. This does no more than tidy the paddocks and reduce the impact of the next bushfire as the gases are unavoidably back in the atmosphere. One of the plusses of having the burning-off season in the winter is that the smoke heads out to sea and we don’t see it again until it has done a full circuit around the pole.
One can just let wood rot in the bush, but as that is a waste of a renewable product it’s the least desirable. The next bushfire will remove much of it. But that does not warm your house nor help the planet.
One could argue that old forests yield no net benefit to anyone if allowed to live and die unmolested. As rotting trees give out exactly the same amount of gases they soaked up in their lifetime, that is a sound argument but not popular with many. There seems to be an ingrained view that trees soak up undesirable gases, and when they die the gases have just disappeared.
CSIRO had a website covering the benefits of wood as a fuel to warm homes. It is not logical to expect otherwise.
The Lions Club will probably still send a party of volunteers to provide wood to keep you warm if you are really unable to manage yourself.
We live in an environment with wood rotting all round us. It seems silly not to use more of it.
