Indeed, the complexity and scale of our predicament(s) is daunting. However, if people are freezing in the winter, it will take more than laws and threats of fines to stop tree felling on private property, even if the motivation is carbon capture, I'm pretty sure coppice management will become an essential community project once people accept we can't burn fossil fuels any longer. No doubt anti-felling laws will only result in a black market trade for illicit wood, with all the negative cost externalisation, poor management of woodland will backfire as far as CCS goes!
@chenda, Ah yes, the humble curtain! DW and I talked about installing one. Sadly the dog would probably rip it down when visitors arrive. I paint him as a terrible beast, but really his only fault is his reaction to the doorbell/postman! I guess I could just train it out of him, but who has time for that
Certainly, wood fuel as a sole source of heat on a macro level is a pipe dream given the UK's population density, if everyone else decides to adopt burning wood fuel in domestic stoves in place of natural gas/electricity we would burn through our remaining woodland in a matter months or years, there has never before been 60+million souls in the UK. In the absence of liquid transportation fuels to move fuel from where it is available to where it is needed, it's will not be economically viable for big cities. This is one of the issues jacob is alluding too. There is also an air quality issue. Our current inner city air pollution problem would pale in comparison if there was a dramatic shift to burning wood in urban environments, greater london would become a smogged hell hole.
Whilst there will in theory always be demand for wood fuel, its impossible to move large quantities of wood large distances without motor transport, except maybe along existing canals and navigable rivers. Wood is also not particularly energy dense compared to coal, gas and petroleum, so shifting it around in trucks would actually increase our CO2 emissions. Unless I relocate my family to an area well endowed with woodland that can be hauled by hand to my stove, wood fuel can only ever be a method of bridging intermittent supplies of electricity and gas. I could maybe store a few cords in my garage, and a bit more in a garden shed, if trucks stop running, I would be then faced with illegally felling trees on someone else's property, or skip diving (or burning the proverbial furniture).
Depletion of wood fuel is the reason we transitioned deep pit mining coal 200 years ago. No one burns dirty coal in their kitchen hearth unless they have no choice. Sadly, we didn't use the ample opportunity between then and now to regrow our great forests with a mind to manage them sustainably going forward. If I were a policy maker, I would start training the next generation in forestry skills, re-prioritising land use outside grains farming for reforrestry. 10 years from now demand for wood will only be increasing as gas prices increase, it takes more than 10 years to grow a forest from degraded soils.
This is exactly why this house of ours cannot be our forever home. One would need to practice coppicing on large scale on a remote homestead to have any sort of chance of relying on wood as a sole source of heat energy. We have been thinking about moving to a rural location more and more lately... but access to good schooling for DD and employment for ERE accumulation seems to trump that dream for the time being. As jacob says, as you become dependant on new systems and infrastructure, you cannot go back easily. We are playing around with damage limitation strategies here, not rebuilding sustainable society solo on a homestead. You can't have complex society at the same time as building truly resilient systems, they are diametrically opposed. At least on a macro scale.
If I do install a wood stove, I will be only firing it up when I can come across free fuel, or in the event the boiler isn't working.
@tonyedgecomb, people will naturally migrate to where the essential resources are available. City folk will have no choice but to disperse into rural areas with adequate supply of water and soil suitable for growing. In any case, there will be a great need for new farm hands in these locations when there are shortages in either liquid fuels for machinery or natural gas for fertilisation, labour intensive small scale horticulture will be necessity if we are to avoid the worst outcomes as far as famine goes. If either supply breaks down, our current model of large scale agriculture and long distance transportation of produce fails. We could theoretically cope with intermittent gas supply from an agricultural perspective by running down the soil fertility, but if the grid goes down due to gas supply failure, all the other dominoes go down with it. I doubt we will see a sophisticated wood fuelled society post collapse, we will be lucky to revert to the bronze age level at the rate we are going.
@cmonkey, thanks for that, I won't bother with the audit then!