The forests and fields are supposed to burn in the dry season, and judging from the wildfires plaguing CA they're going to whether you like it or not. Maybe the sensible thing is actually to cull the fuel regularly and burn it to heat homes/generate energy, and solve the particulates problem head-on which sounds like a relatively minor engineering challenge.
It's sustainable in the sense that it all grows back quickly.
> Calling that "sustainable" is... maybe a sign how meaningless the word sustainable is.
There's a huge difference between burning fossil fuels, with all the logistics that involves, and burning whatever trimmings you're getting from your surroundings.
> Yes, a huge difference. The latter is orders of magnitude worse.
Do you base your personal assertion on any evidence? I'd love to see the basis for this line of reasoning. I mean, carbon emissions-wise the difference between biomass and burning oil/coal is already undisputed.
Net CO2 is one measure of badness, but damage to human health is likely a more relevant one personally. Wood is much worse for locals and better for people on the other side of the planet. Natural gas is almost clean by comparison, fuel oil is worse, and coal is terrible but still better than wood.
> Net CO2 is one measure of badness, but damage to human health is likely a more relevant one personally.
This thread is about deploying thermoelectric generators on stoves which are already in use. Smoke is already been emitted since ever. The value proposition is to seep a bit of the thermal energy already being produced to generate electricity. Thus the options on the table are a) keep a stove burning and use that to generate electricity, b) keep the same stove burning and run a fossil fuel generator on the side.
How can option b) be assumed to be cleaner?
> Natural gas is almost clean by comparison
Does this assumption take into account the environmental impact of bottling and shipping natural gas to these small villages?
Thermoelectric generators convert heat to electricity, but heat is generally the point of these stoves. In the end it’s almost guaranteed to burn more wood either because you get less heat or because you want more electricity. “b)” is therefore cleaner because of thermodynamics Aka a lack of free energy
“environmental impact” is just one of many impacts. If burning wood means you die 20 years sooner that’s likely more relevant to you than just about anything else. Of course other people you don’t know dying 20 years sooner is rarely a concern, thus different priorities.
We have internationally coordinated programmes of work to get people to move away from burnt fuel stoves to just about anything else, because so many people's lives are cut short by indoor air pollution.
In the US there is a lot of talk of "rocket stoves". In theory these should be better because the design causes higher temperatures to burn the wood gases too. Unfortunately, looking around on sites like Youtube (which is where many people get their information from) we see a bunch of things that are called rocket stoves which probably aren't. These are just small pipe stoves that are fed from the base of the fire.
Any CO2 calculation is complicated because the materials used to build stoves, and the way wood is grown and harvested and transported, all make significant differences.
> We have internationally coordinated programmes of work to get people to move away from burnt fuel stoves to just about anything else, because so many people's lives are cut short by indoor air pollution.
I'm not sure you read the doc you quoted.
I mean, it's recommendations are to ditch unprocessed coal and kerosene stoves, not biomass. On solid fuel (wood and biomass) the recommendations are to use better insulated stoves instead of open fires.
Thus, I fail to see the relevance of this in this discussion, given that the use of thermoelectric generators that served as a basis for the proposal already implies that your WHO recommendations are already been followed.
The aim is to eliminate use of these fuels. That's not practical in many areas. Moving from open fires to more efficient enclosed fires is the first step toward elimination, used only in places where cleaner fuels are not available.
Here they're clearly talk about reducing all use of these fuels.
"It is recognized that other types of intervention, including improved ventilation and behaviour changes, may contribute to reducing levels of HAP, or exposure, or both, and are an important part of all interventions. However, reducing emission rates remains central to achieving AQGs because pollutants generated in the home enter the ambient environment, contributing to outdoor air pollution exposures, and re-enter homes, exacerbating indoor pollution. Furthermore, it is important that information, training, support and other measures to ensure best use of new technologies and fuels will be an integral part of any promotion effort, whether these are delivered through public, NGO or private sector initiatives, or – as is often likely to be the case – a mix of these."
This step-wise approach is more clearly defined here:
− behavioural modifications to reduce exposure (e.g. encouraging mothers to keep their young babies away from the fire);
− household changes to improve ventilation (e.g. increasing the number of window openings in the kitchen, providing gaps between the roof and walls, or moving the stove out of the living area);
− improvements to cooking stoves (e.g. ventilation by flues, hoods or chimneys, or increases in combustion efficiency - nearly all pollutants damaging to health are products of incomplete combustion);
− interventions to enable people to use higher-quality, lower-emission liquid or gaseous fuels (e.g. petroleum-based kerosene and liquid petroleum gas, or biomass-based alcohol and bio-gas).
> Programmes can be designed to encourage urban and periurban households that use solid fuels to move up the “energy ladder” to cleaner fuels (such as kerosene or liquid petroleum gas), and do so at lower income levels (i.e. sooner) than would occur without intervention. This approach requires that the availability and affordability of cleaner fuels be enhanced. On the other hand, the poorest rural populations with nearly no cash income, but access to wood and/or agricultural wastes, are unlikely to acquire improved cooking stoves – let alone cleaner fuels – without large subsidies, which are often unsustainable in the long term. There do seem to be large populations between these extremes, however, that can be effectively targeted by efforts to disseminate improved stoves.
When you're talking about people living in an area of medium or high population density, burning tree trimmings for energy is an impractical solution which is grossly inefficient and has multiple disastrous externalities for the environment, even if it's technically carbon neutral.
It's better for the environment to sequester biomass inputs (e.g. tree trimmings) back into the soil and burn more efficient fossil fuels instead. Far from being merely carbon neutral, use of fossil fuels combined with sequestration of biomass could easily be carbon positive.
In the carbon cycle, the impact is obvious. Think about it: one just recycles carbon through photosynthesis with at worse no net change in the amount of carbon in the system, while the other is based on literally digging industrial amounts of carbon out of the ground to introduce it into the system.
I think that the intended meaning of "sustainable" in this case is that it is a form of fuel which is not fossil but renewable, and that it has neutral carbon balance.
Calling that "sustainable" is... maybe a sign how meaningless the word sustainable is. Though it's definitely not something to be recommended.