Replacing coal with wood: sustainable, eco-neutral, conservation harvest of natural tree-fall in old-growth forests

Abstract

The beginnings of the industrial revolution and global warming coincide with the replacement of wood by coal. Is it time to reverse this process, as a way of implementing “Biosphere carbon stock management” (Read 2008)? The construction of new, coal-burning plants, utilizing carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), is now favored as a likely avenue to control global warming. However, modifying existing coal-burning plants, where the bulk of coal will continue to be burned for some time, is considered to be uneconomical (Gough and Shackley 2005). Modifications to allow the fueling of existing plants with cleanburning, renewable ‘wood-chips’ and charcoal,1 in place of coal, is a different proposition—technologically, economically (Bergman and Zerbe 2008; Marland and Schlamadinger 1997) and with respect to global warming. But it is not obvious where enough wood, that could be harvested sustainably, might be found to begin to replace coal. Deforestation and degradative land abuse inject about 1.6 gigatonnes of carbon per year (GtC/year)2 into the atmosphere as CO2, a greenhouse gas (GHG), (Alley et al. 2007). Halting deforestation is the principal forest-management tactic proposed to mitigate this contribution to global warming. The position of groups like the World