Cutting, dividing, stacking and fire – the big hobby on the stove

All combustion processes in which the fuel has a carbon content result in the emission of carbon dioxide. Many in the environmental debate believe that we should eliminate fossil fuels from the way we live, work and produce. However, I believe that all types of combustion that can be replaced by other energy that does not have carbon content should be significantly reduced.

Examples include all private villas and farms whose main heating is done by burning wood in their own boilers. There are modern wood-burning boilers that can provide good combustion with automation and control, but many older wood-burning boilers lack this control.

If you take your electric car for a drive across the countryside in Sweden, you will understand how amazing this hobby is. Well, you cut, split, stack and burn wood in many places along the roads.

A typical villa heated with wood as its sole energy source for a year generates as much carbon dioxide emissions as a car driving approximately 4,000 miles during that year. In addition, a lot of gases, particulates, and other odors come out of a wood-burning smoker.

The community should support the switch from wood burning to other heating methods through contributions, for example, to heat pumps. Large-scale firing in district heating plants will likely be permitted once the problem of separating greenhouse gases from smoke and storing them safely under the seabed is solved. Wood should be used mainly as a building material.

The other problem is that in the EPA's statistics for various emissions sources, there is no information at all about what the country's wood generators generate in terms of emissions.

When it comes to driving, I think the big question mark is driving on ethanol or gasoline and diesel with rapeseed oil additives or similar. CO2 comes out of the tailpipe anyway, as long as it's an internal combustion engine. It may be less than that, but it is not enough to save us from the climate crisis. Rapeseed oil is best used for baking or cooking. So the switch to electricity for vehicles is also something that society must support in some way. Electric vehicle subsidies must of course be reintroduced to increase the use of electric vehicles.

Another phenomenon that is happening completely out of control is forest fires all over the world. Here, a lot of greenhouse gases are released into the atmosphere, and therefore there is a need for a monitoring system and rapid interventions to extinguish and reduce them. There should be no scope for controlled burning of forests to make any seeds germinate, as fire is required for this purpose. These people may have access to wildfires that are still occurring.