coal saved the forests, oil saved the whales

And if it wasn't for slavery all those poor African-Americans would've starved to death. Thank God we have all these selfless individuals out there, doing the right thing.

 

I have also asserted here that oil drilling saved whales and coal mining saved forests. But if someone is going to make a movie about it, then the thesis deserves a bit of attention. Besides it’s almost Earth Day.

The energy produced now from global coal combustion is more than the energy that could be produced by burning all the world’s forests. I am going to skip that calculation for now, but we could get into it. Essentially, you need to take at least half the trees in one year, and the regrowth rate of wood in the harvested areas would be relatively slow. Seedling trees do not bulk up as fast as big trees. So, it a matter of a few years, in that hypothetical world, you’d have a global forest not producing wood at a rate equal to the energy demand.

So, a different way of describing the situation is that current global energy demand could not be sustainably supported by global photosynthesis. By that I mean a large fraction of the total, and we have other uses for much of the global photosynthate. We use it as food, and feed it to food animals.

To continue at the current energy scale, we need mining, nuclear, or solar/wind/water renewables. All of them, probably, in some mix. It would be a separate discussion whether all of those are sustainable.

But you cannot operate a wood-burning based world with 7+ billion people where about a third of them are quite high energy consumers. So, another way to make the initial statement is that if we had stayed with wood, production realities would have not allowed us to reach the current situation.

Meanwhile, we are using wood (burning, construction, making paper) at an unprecedented rate. I have read recently that is 3.5 petagrams of carbon per year, and that is much higher than I had thought. Global forest clearing for agriculture over 100s-1000s years was not nearly that fast. At the current rate, forests are doing OK (more or less) but a large portion of them are managed as industrial forests. Didn’t say that is entirely bad, but they are not old-growth and they do not provide all the services that old-growth forests do.

It would not be correct to say that we are now saving the forest. We are squeezing quite a lot out of it. Further squeezing would not necessarily be wise.

So, here’s your news link:

Indonesia moves towards approving deforestation plan

Indonesia, already famous for world-leading deforestation rates, is going to kick it up a notch.

I’ll be much briefer about petroleum, whales, and the global vehicle fleet. I completely lack the data here on how much blubber the global ‘whale fleet’ produces in a year. But I am quite confident that it is not enough to power 400 million vehicles (or however many there are). The same sort of problem also presents itself. If you over-harvest whales, maybe you get enough biofuel this year, but next year there are many fewer (smaller) whales. Soon, you are out of gas.

Now, no one is planning such a thing. But it is the same deal: Starting with marine-mammal fat as your source of fuel, a world with 400 million cars would never have developed in the first place.

I think these are more realistic ways to approach the notions of coal/forest and petroleum/whale. We have found mineable alternatives to annual biological productivity. Used those to change the world in a way that appears irreversible. Good choice? Well, I suppose we will get around to addressing that question eventually.

It is good news, though, that we still have forests and whales.
PS: I haven't seen the video, and such things are usually unavailable to me.

 

In part, the northeast US was deforested for fuel. It was also deforested for materials, or just to clear land for other uses. The idea that the rest of the US would have been deforested w/o coal otoh, isn't derivative of the first. We have plenty of coal, natural gas, oil, etc... Yet we still engage in deforestation today at a rate of ~100k square km/year worldwide. So even with coal, plenty of deforestation takes place.

On the flip side, there are also hard physical limits to how far we could move wood back then. Relatively new steam locamotives from the 50s were only ~6% efficient, so I imagine that anything from the 1850s would be far more inefficient than that. The problem was that wood also has relatively poor energy density, worse than coal. These two factors place a limit of how far wood could be transported, which is probably what happened in terms of the deforestation that occurred prior to widespread coal use.

I find the assertion that coal saved forests in the U.S. hard to believe. It sounds like greenwashing more than anything realistic. I agree with the assertion that we need to transition to renewables. Natural gas doesn't have a place outside of dispatchables in a low GHG energy mix.

 

Romans, Europeans (and maybe Mayans) grew beyond their wood-supply network. Books about those have been published. When Europeans feasted their eyes on the eastern N Amer. forest, they got really excited. And commenced to cutting. The best Pinus strobus were marked with the sign of the British crown. Those were to be masts for sailing ships. And so they became.

Current 'repurposing' of primary tropical forests is unparalleled (although mid-1990s might have been the peak). I am perhaps less interested in the km2, and more that some of the current targets (as in Indo) are really, absurdly species rich. Are we really so profoundly poor that we need to kill all that off?

The NE US forests were 'saved' by westward (coal-fired) railroads that opened up much better farmland. Better to say 'allowed to recover' than 'saved'. They were +/- all cut. They grew back. Forests do that, given a chance.

Welcome roflwaffle to our fulminations here

 

The whales are still hunted and near extinction and the forests destroyed. Coal use, acid rain helps destroy the forests which were denuded for timber much more than for fuel.

Wacky phony history.

 

Wow, buddy. Forest area are now 40 million km2 (per FAO) or 60 per Matthews or others who include 'woodlands' (with fractional tree coverage). They may have been 70, 5000 years ago, but that is quite difficult to know.

Without a doubt, forests are much diminished. Not so much by areal loss, but by function. A lot of the areal loss has been in the last century. Very little of the areal loss has come from acid deposition; low-order streams are most affected by that, along with very thin or heavily eroded soils.

Currently, wood harvest is mostly burned. At least half. I wish we were all so interested in the subject so as to make accurate estimates! But burned or 'other' doesn't matter to me as much as the status of the cut forests. They will grow back given a chance.

For whales, I'll accede to your deeper knowledge yet to be demonstrated. But, did you have a point?

 

The facts did make a point that coal did not save the forests and oil did not save the whales.

 

Except the choice never was coal or wood. The forests were chopped down mostly for farmland and timber and that is still true today in age of nuclear power.

One could make the same "thought provoking perspective" that "nuclear power saved forests". Its weak thinking at best if it even rises to that level.

 

Globally, forests that haven't been cut represent about 35% of total forest area per FAO in 2010. Their protection against harvest varies greatly among regions. In some regions we know how fast that cut is proceeding, but in others, not well at all.

Yude Pan (et al.) asserted in Science (magazine) in 2011 that the global forest was net trapping 2 petagrams of carbon per year. That has been contested in the literature by others suggesting that 1 Pg C is closer. Whether it's 1 or 2, a large fraction is happening in regrowing, previous cut forests. That's simply how forests conduct themselves through time. The best habitat for many animals (and other groovy aspects) are in the old growth though.

Cutting followed by forest regrowth results in carbon release not just from the earlier trees, but from soil C as well. Lacking on-site data, 10% soil C loss would probably be a good guess. In light of that it may be surprising that the global forest is net trapping C at all. But it is. Forests are pretty darned good at what they do, given half a chance.

My post #4 here may have been too long for some of our participants here to read. If so, I apologize.

 

Here's a forest link

Intact Forest Landscapes

suggesting 56 million km2, of which 23.5% haven't been cut yet. Less than FAO's 35%. I am not surprised by that range of estimates. Hope the map there is of some use.

 

Down to 30% today and, according to National Geo and Union of Concerned Scientists, the world is losing 30,000 square miles of a forest every year.

World is on a steep decline in forests.

The idea that "coal saved forests" is simply preposterous and downright dangerous since the opposite is true. We need to be acting on the facts, not engaging in a fantasy.

 

iClaudius, if you still cannot be bothered to read what I wrote at #4, just say so. I could try to make it more succinct.

Forests are doing what they can. If there were more (better) forests, they would surely to more.

You have offered us here 'wacky phony history, weak thinking, and fantasy' as descriptions of...well, I'm not really sure of what.

PC is a place where any member gets to say anything. I would value your perspectives on how (if) the biosphere is now being mis-handled, and how it could be done better. We might both agree that restoring 10 million km2 of forest would be carbon-cycle-good, but the agricultural requirements of 7 billion humans stands in the way.

 

The forests are 70% gone and losing 30,000 square miles per year.

Nothing the forests can do about it except continue their demise...apparently coal burning did not save them as was originally posited.

 

Have no fear. When mankinds reign ends, the forests will reclaim everything on the land.

DBCassidy

 

Greenwashing is the false assertion of any sort of environmental benefit, or lack of externalized cost, due to something. Someone could say coal isn't all bad because it helps people with asthma around power plants, and that would be just as false and greenwashing to boot.

In terms of the specifics, I'd say that picture pretty much refutes the idea that coal saved anything.

According to wikipedia, coal replaced wood as the preferred fuel in cities around 1850, when we still had most of America's forests intact. As coal use expanded, so did the deforestation of the eastern part of the US, and to a lesser extent the west, probably due to land use/materials, like iClaudius mentioned.

This is probably because the use of wood as a fuel to facilitate forest clearing was self limiting due to the factors I described in my previous post. Coal, otoh, was much more plentiful and energy dense, and allowed for much more land to be cleared and wood to be harvested.

If anything, at best, coal had no impact on the rate of deforestation in America. However, given your link, it appears that the use of coal accelerated deforestation in the US. So, not only is the assertion of the video incorrect, it's possibly the opposite of what actually transpired.

Comparing coal to wood in that context is a false analogy. Wood did not have the same characteristics as coal, and as such, as a fuel it's ability to facilitate the clearing of forests in the US was self-limiting. Coal, otoh, didn't have the same characteristics, and could, and probably was used to clear most forests in the Eastern US.

 

As Tom and Ray would say...booooogus.

You posted a statement that was outrageously false and would elicit a response from eco minded Prius drivers, that coal mining saved forests.

Telling people who respond to the bait that they are "closed minded" for pointing out the Fox News phoniness of your headline has it a bit backwards.