#Biomass

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[acti-veg]

“60 per cent of the mass of all mammals are domesticated animals - cattle, swine, sheep, horses, cats and dogs. For birds, it is even more stark. Sixty per cent of birds on Earth are from a single species - domesticated chickens. Taken as a whole, the mass of human produced material is, as of 2020, about equal to the mass of living material on earth.

If we were to sample the planet today in the same way that we sample the fossil record, we would look at the distribution of bones, and conclude that something very strange was going on so that so much of the vertebrate biomass was made up of so few species. We would be talking in terms of catastrophic environmental damage, of mass extinction.

Indeed, the biomass of wildlife has declined at a horrifying rate. The world into which Emilio Marcos was born in 1978 was home to 2.5 times as many wild vertebrates as the one in 2018. In a geological snap of the fingers, we have lost more than half of the living individual vertebrates on the planet.”

-Thomas Halliday, Otherlands

[mapsontheweb]

Forest biomass of North America

Hectares (ha) of Aboveground Forest Biomass Across North America. This comprehensive map combines four independently developed maps of biomass for Canada, Alaska, the conterminous United States, and Mexico (Beaudoin et al., 2014; Blackard et al., 2008; Wilson et al., 2013; MREDD+ Alliance 2013). A common legend, map projection, and spatial resolution of 250 m were applied to the individual maps with no attempt to harmonize the methods used for each of the original map products. Biomass of nonforest areas is masked by including only landcover and land-use categories 1-6 from the North American Land Change Monitoring System (NALCMS 2018). Base years of the original maps are Canada, 2001; Alaska, 2004; conterminous United States, 2000-2009; and Mexico, 2007. [Figure source: Kevin McCullough, U.S. Forest Service. North American Biomass and Disturbance Mapping Working Group, 2014.]

[andmaybegayer]

I'm still amazed by how big the blind spot seemingly everyone important involved in energy policy has on biomass. It's sold as a green technology despite pretty much always being worse than literally burning coal from an emissions perspective. Pure aesthetics. I just read that the EU imports palm oil to make biodiesel! Death! You can eat that!

[probablyasocialecologist]

“The bottom line is you got a lot of emissions coming from wood harvest, and we don’t pay attention to that,” said Tim Searchinger, senior fellow and technical director for agriculture, forestry, and ecosystems at the World Resources Institute and a co-author of the paper.  The emissions associated with timber harvests mainly come from burning logs and pellets for fuel and from rotting branches, leaves, and roots left in the forest or tossed in landfills, where they decompose and release carbon into the air. 

[...]

Searchinger argues that researchers and policymakers haven’t accurately estimated the climate cost of wood use in part because they’ve counted carbon-capturing forest growth as an “offset” — as if new trees compensated for the missing ones — even when that growth would happen naturally. When trees are in the ground, especially when they’re young and growing fast, they absorb carbon. Many of the forests in the Northern Hemisphere were cleared in past centuries and are now regrowing and accumulating carbon on their own, whether or not they’ve been logged recently. Even for older forests that aren’t regrowing as quickly, “you’d be better off” leaving them unharvested, said Houghton, noting that we’ve got a “long way to go” before our use of wood is efficient enough — say, by not burning so much of it — that the emissions from logging could be fully offset by forest regrowth.   Still, Searchinger said there’s a silver lining to the study. His team’s findings don’t mean that more carbon dioxide is getting into the atmosphere than scientists had thought, just that some of those emissions are coming from an activity that hadn’t been accounted for. 

[supplyside]

Drax is a large coal-fired power station in North Yorkshire, England, capable of co-firing biomass and petcoke.

[utilitymonstergirl]

I like the idea that the setting of Biomass has such a loose grasp of Earth culture that restaurant/cuisine styles are shit like "Indo-European" and "Afro-Eurasian"

[solarpunkbusiness]

Husky Energy and Technologies: Transforming coffee husk into biomass

In 2021, mechanical engineers Hoheyat Berhanu and Yohannes Wasihun established Husky Energies & Technologies, driven by the challenges coffee farmers faced in disposing of coffee husks.

The duo developed machines that can transform coffee husks into biofuels—specifically pellets and briquettes—offering an eco-friendly alternative to traditional fuels.

Notably, the production and usage of Husky’s biofuels reduce smoke emissions by an impressive 90%, combating household air pollution, a major health hazard in developing countries.

With an eye on the burgeoning biofuel sector, Husky is expanding its production capacity, aiming to produce 1.6 tons of biofuel daily at a competitive price, thereby offering an affordable alternative to charcoal for households, hotels and restaurants.

source

[samrisoval]

[bumblebeeappletree]

Permaculture instructor Andrew Millison explains the process for repairing a degraded ecosystem. We begin with the metrics for assessing ecosystem health, and then go over the steps to triggering biological activity and ecological succession.

Andrew Millison’s links:

https://www.andrewmillison.com/

https://permaculturedesign.oregonstat...

[nando161mando]

Production of concrete, metal, plastic, bricks and asphalt greater than mass of living matter on planet. The amount of plastic alone is greater in mass than all land animals and marine creatures combined

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/dec/09/human-made-materials-now-outweigh-earths-entire-biomass-study

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[invisiblestation]

Stray. The Slums, rooftops.

[the-off-cuts]

Biomass of the earth!!

Source

[biomassenergionsindia]

Biomass Energeons India stands out as a dynamic business platform, showcasing its ingenuity and commitment to elevating the biofuel industry and engaging stakeholders effectively. With a clear mission to revolutionize the energy sector, it acts as a central nexus, facilitating connections between service providers and consumers in the green energy domain, with a strong emphasis on enhancing accessibility and efficiency.

[reasonsforhope]

“Forest advocates in Australia — the world’s 13th largest economy — say they scored a major environmental victory on December 15 when the ruling Labor Party revised a key regulation, rejecting the renewable energy classification of wood harvested from native forests and burned to make energy. Previously, under the country’s renewable energy policy, woody biomass had been classified as a renewable energy source.

The impact of this regulatory change is perhaps most significant for the setback it may pose to the biomass industry globally, hindering the multibillion-dollar wood pellet industry from getting started Down Under at a time when pellet production is rising in the U.S. Southeast and British Columbia in order to supply growing demand to the EU, UK and Asia.

“The changes [in Australia] mean that native forest biomass is no longer considered an ‘eligible renewable energy source’ for the purposes of [the nation’s] Renewable Energy Target, and electricity it generates cannot be used to create tradable Large-scale Generation Certificates [for replacing coal],” Chris Bowen, Australia’s minister of climate change and energy, said in a statement. “We have listened to the community and acted to address their concerns.”

Australia, by its decision, is taking a very different course than the European Union, where woody biomass — despite growing public opposition — remains defined as a renewable energy source, is heavily government subsidized as a result, and makes up 60% of the EU’s renewable energy mix. Australia is among the few G20 countries without a thriving biomass industry; at present it neither produces nor burns wood pellets at any scale.

But that situation was poised to change, according to Virginia Young, a forest advocate with Wilderness Australia, an NGO.

“Two big power stations in Queensland were on the verge of converting from coal to biomass,” Young told Mongabay in an interview from Montreal, where she was attending the United Nations COP15 biodiversity conference. “There are [coal] plants in Victoria and New South Wales that were looking to convert. They were talking with Drax [the world’s largest consumer of wood pellets for energy based in the United Kingdom] about how to make it happen. All this was about to start.”

But without the renewable designation, biomass development in Australia is all but dead in the water...

“This is a big win for the community, who want the electricity sector decarbonized as quickly as possible and do not want to see native forests logged to enable coal-fired generators to switch to burning forests instead of coal,” Bob Debus, chairman of Wilderness Australia, an NGO, said in a statement.” -via Mongabay, 12/21/22