Tiresia

I don't see how you're not getting this.

Yes, when you burn the trees you get electricity, but you also release as much carbon dioxide per kWh into the atmosphere as if you were to burn coal instead.

The climate does not care about where your carbon emissions come from. All carbon emissions are getting us further away from the holocene climate.

Maybe you're acting under the assumption that the trees wouldn't have grown or that they wouldn't have been cut down to make place for new trees if they hadn't been planned to be burned. Maybe that is even true under our fucked up capitalist economy. But that is just capitalism being stupid. If it is worth it to cut down trees to capture carbon, then we should fund that without also requiring the trees to be burned so all that progress is undone.

And sure, once the fossil fuel industry lies dead and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations are back below 280 ppm, then you can start burning biomass to keep the concentration stable. But that's a century from now. Before then, either bury the trees or don't cut them down in the first place.

Do you mean Canada, which is increasingly on fire? Or do you mean Scandinavia, which will become a glacier once the atlantic current shuts down next decade? Or do you mean Siberia, which currently has a record high temperature of 38C and everything is turning into a molten swamp? Or do you mean Arkhangelsk where the ecosystem will collapse because everything expects permafrost?

Do you mean any coastal city, which will flood? Do you mean places supplied by the international trade network? Do you mean places that expect the sea to contain living creatures? Do you mean places that are dependent on crops that expect temperatures to swing less than 25C back and forth in a week? Do you mean places that are open to the sky and aren't prepared for hurricane winds?

And if there is a place you've found that can weather the storm - do you mean the places where 8 billion people will try to get to but that only have room for less than 200 million total?

But once you put the trees underground, they're not going to get out without human intervention either...

When you've cut down the trees, they've "left the system". What does it matter whether the carbon you add to the system from the outside comes from trees that left the system 6 months ago or ones that left the system 400 million years ago?

That justification holds for coal just as much as it does for the act of throwing the biofuel into the power plant. Why is it irresponsible to burn trees that died 400 million years ago but okay to burn trees that died 6 months ago?

Whether you've "offset the emissions" of burning the trees by growing them yourself doesn't matter for the decision of burning the biofuel. You might as well call coal burning carbon neutral if you bury some trees underground in the place you mined the coal.

So don't build your nuclear reactors in a place that doesn't have shit tons of water?

Solar and wind can't handle peak consumption without obscene amounts of heavily polluting storage. They should definitely get the majority of the attention and budget, but nuclear is still important and will still be faster to scale up faster in many specific locations. Get as much solar in the subtropics and tropics as possible, get wind in windy locations, get geothermal and tidal where that is viable, but get nuclear in places with plenty of water that are further than 45 degrees/5000 km from the equator in areas with little wind, and for peak consumption in places without hydroelectric or other power that isn't best to keep at the max 24/7, and for quick response to fluctuations in wind and solar in places where other regulators aren't available.

The articles you link are about experimental or niche tech, expensive or inefficient or both. Rare earths are still used in pretty much all solar panels that are actually being built. They're also not the only form of pollution from solar panel manufacturing, transportation, installation, and recycling/disposal.

but if you give people the opporturnity to do something that is convenient for them and fucks over others, far too many will do it.

That's called kleptomania, and it's actually pretty rare.

Normally, people are far too considerate of others and far too scared of even a slight possibility of losing someone's friendship or being marked as a thief to do things that fuck over others just because it is to their best judgment convenient for them.

Where it goes wrong is that people are placed in an artificial position where they are shielded from any such consequences. Where the best thieves hold the places of highest honor and wealth, where thieves have legal and physical protection if they steal the right way (including during scientific experiments, where the defectors are shielded from others through anonymity and the legal and social authority of the scientist), where people are forced to steal under contract under pain of homelessness. When there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, what more is defecting on the commons?

A mentally healthy person seeing the opportunity to screw someone over for personal gain warns that person that they've got a vulnerability so they can address it. They tell people when they drop their wallet. They look away from people typing their passwords. They give food to the hungry if they have enough to spare. They don't bother to lock their doors because to them locks are less binding than suggestions. Capitalism isn't the only force that get people to act like kleptomaniacs or xenophobes, but it is the first ideology that has managed to saturate the entire society with those modes of thought.

Fissile nuclear is clean enough. It has been smeared and misregulated through lobbying, propaganda, and donations to genuine believers among environmentalists by the fossil fuel industry. But even today uranium fuel cycle power plants produce less lifetime pollution per kWh than solar panels. Solar panel technology will improve, but so would nuclear with thorium or more technical improvements in reactor design.

Once solar panels don't require rare earths anymore and once some new technology is developed to store electricity between peak production and peak consumption without massive pollution in quantities sufficient to meet everyone's needs, it makes sense to phase out fission. But we're still pretty far from that.

If you're okay with using forests for carbon capture, then you can just bury the wood underground. There is no justification for setting the wood on fire to generate electricity.

I mean, where can you move that isn't a future disaster zone?

With thunderous applause?

Clearly your country's immigration system isn't labyrinthine and bureaucratic enough. Add enough systematic hatred and anyone can be turned into a burden to society.

Here in the Netherlands, immigrants are not allowed to work, so everything has to be provided to them by the state. The construction industry has been regulated and defunded so that building houses for the lower class is never profitable and is only built through quotas that are too low to meet demand, leading to immigrants competing with locals for extremely rare housing, leading to abuse victims being forced to stay with their abusers or go homeless. They are not taught the local language and children have to go to segregated schools to prevent them from forming attachments. There is an army of bureaucrats, cops, lawyers, judges, and public defenders involved in determining whether they have the right to stay, regulating how they live, enforcing how they live, litigating how they live, appealing litigation, and going after immigrants who are required to leave.