Why is wood seen as a climate-neutral fuel, but coal and oil are not? All these fuels are based on composed organism that collected carbons over their lifetimes, that are now used as a fuel. The only difference is the cycle time.
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The only people who ‘see’ wood as climate-neutral are people who don’t know much about power generation.
In theory, the cycle time you’re talking about could be important. Burning coal/oil means you’re putting carbon that has been sequestered for millions of years back into the atmosphere and doing so on a much shorter time scale.
However, in practice, the cycle time is meaningless because the real issue is that burning wood is energy-negative on an industrial scale. That’s why we transitioned away from it in the first place – it just doesn’t generate enough energy to offset the energy it takes to harvest/transport/process it.
So when you burn wood, you’re not really getting energy from the wood. You’re getting energy from the coal/oil it took to put the wood into the furnace in the first place.
Ultimately this means you might as well skip dickering around with wood and just directly burn the coal/oil to power your civilization – it’s a lot more efficient.
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