I also did. Another ridiculous thing was that the article initially claimed no fossil fuels, but the one thing they couldn't live without was wood-burning fireplaces. I mean don't they both generate large amounts of carbon dioxide?
I understand wood is not a fossil fuel. But doesn't burning wood have the same environmental effect as burning fossil fuel? They both produce large amounts of CO2 and generate heat. If you didn't burn that wood, those would still be trees capturing CO2 from the atmosphere. So they didn't really achieve anything, did they?
(This is way outside of my expertise so I appreciate if you tell me what's wrong with my logic.)
If there is a tree, it is composed of carbon it extracted from the atmosphere using sunlight. For that tree to exist, -1 tree worth of carbon (roughly) was removed.
If you chop it down and burn it, or it dies and rots, +1 tree of carbon goes back. But the total carbon in the system hasn’t changed, and on average (if this happens a lot everywhere), the amount of carbon in the atmosphere is pretty much the same.
nothing lives forever, and most things stop growing quickly pretty fast. Unless there is a huge disaster, forests turn over in a stable way generally - new trees always growing, old trees always dying and rotting.
So unless you had chopped down massive forests and stopped new trees from growing, or stockpiled half a continents worth of wood for a century and then decided to burn it all at once, it’s hard to meaningfully change the average amount of carbon in the atmosphere, because it never really stops ‘moving’ or gets out of the cycle.
Fossil fuel is carbon that got pulled out of the system a long time ago - those trees or ferns or peat or whatever got stuck underground, where they couldn’t rot or burn, and on a scale that IS continents worth of trees, for millions of years. We don’t know what it is like having that amount of carbon in the system, because the last time it was in the system was millions of years before we existed.
Once those fossil fuels get burned, even if you plant trees, it doesn’t really reduce the amount of carbon back to where it was, because those trees will die and rot or burn or whatever, and on average, the total amount of carbon in circulation is now higher.
