Grow it, burn it, recycle it, to save our planet

Technology can be a very green thing. In redesigning wood stoves, engineers have labored to make them both more efficient and more green, both good for the environment. Municipalities, faced with a tidal wave of new environmental rules and standards, are switching to wood burning furnaces, complete with 10 to 20 filters in place to catch any soot. How can this be green, you ask? First you have to understand a little chemistry.

Carbon is an element that is at the core of all fuels that we burn. Carbon is in coal (fossilized oil). Carbon is in oil (matured plant matter); carbon is in wood and plants (taken out of the air, releasing oxygen). It all starts with the sun and plants. The sun caused a leaf to absorb carbon dioxide (that’s one carbon atom coupled with two oxygen atoms; CO2). The leaf took it in and kept the carbon and discarded the oxygen. Oxygen released back into the air helps you breathe better. The carbon the leaf kept stays in the plant or tree until it falls off or the plant gets cut (or falls) down.

Do this with a primeval forest over hundreds of thousands of years and you get a rotting swamp of carbon. Cover it over (in time), cook it in the earth’s mantle over the next few million years and you get oil. Do it even longer and you get coal. Do it even longer and deeper (more pressure) and you get diamonds.

All that oil and coal trapped underground is a carbon one-way ticket. Burn it and you use oxygen from the air we need to breathe and — presto — you’ve made carbon dioxide again. The problem is, burning that trapped carbon is a one-way street — it doesn’t make oxygen again. There is an added problem of the sun’s rays which makes the earth heat more effectively – or put another way, all that extra-burnt oil and coal carbon dioxide upsets the natural balance going on, on the surface with plants and us living creatures.

At best, the balance is upset in a way that changes weather patterns (more storms, more droughts, more rain, more wind, more calamity, more stress for the living plants). At worst it can upset the whole of the earth’s weather system and our living environment.

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That’s the problem with taking stuff from underground. It was deposited there when the Earth had 16 percent more oxygen or more. That was at the time of and before the dinosaurs. Doctors will tell you that we have the perfect balance of oxygen now for humans to thrive. Less and we’ll get sluggish and fail. More and we’ll burn out our lung tissue. It is a fine balance. Just ask the nurses who administer oxygen to patients… they have to monitor oxygen blood levels all the time.

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Trees and plants balance out things for us pretty well (along with the algae in the seas). But we’re upsetting the balance on the surface of earth by releasing all that trapped carbon from down there, carbon we then set fire to, consuming more oxygen and making CO2. Hey, plants are not sorry to have a little more CO2. All over the world roadway eco-systems and plant life thrive at 10 to 20 percent greater activity. Why? You’d think the stink of the car fumes would kill all that plant life. It’s just the opposite, all that carbon dioxide is feeding the plants, and the plants are feeding the insects and the insects are feeding the rodents and birds, and so forth. Even driving down the Taconic, haven’t you been amazed at the abundance of deer, turkeys and other small animals?

So what can you do to change your consumption of this trapped carbon? To be green you have to balance out your usage. Use less petroleum products where you can, make sure you recycle plastic and other petroleum products. Where you can, use plants and firewood from growing trees. Burning them won’t hurt the environmental balance of CO2 because they grew and made oxygen and – here’s the trick – they cannot release more CO2 than the carbon they were made from which, in turn, released the exact same amount of oxygen when the plant was growing. In short, a wood burning fireplace is in balance with nature – but only as far as the carbon balance is concerned.

Burn in an open fireplace and you let lose all sorts of chemicals that the plants took from the ground. When collected in clouds as fine soot, they can — and do — fall back to earth as acid rain — killing the very ground you need to replenish your oxygen balance. So, back to those modern furnaces.

Prepare now for next winter. Start saving to buy a super-efficient, multi-filtered modern wood burning stove. Install it and get ready to be part of the solution and less a part of the problem. You can choose a stove online; just make sure it’s 80 percent or more efficient. Topolino is one of the best.

The EPA has loads of information.See  epa.gov/woodstoves/healthier.html. Happy green heating!

Peter Riva now lives in New Mexico.

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