Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
At this rate our six million hectares of woodland would heat six million family sized
homes, or 24 million people - or 40 per cent of the population - provided they were living
in reasonably well insulated homes (or alternatively not very demanding about the degree
of heat they required); and providing they lived fairly close to the source of the wood. If a
vegan society decided that it wanted to convert as much as possible of our grazing land to
natural woodland, it could probably heat most of the population on this basis.
Since residential heating currently accounts for 17 per cent of the UK's total greenhouse
gas emissions, this would represent a reduction of 6.8 per cent in the UK's emissions, of
which about 2.5 per cent would be attributable to fuel wood and the rest to insulation.
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In addition, the creation of about three million hectares of new forest would sequester a
considerable volume of CO
2
per year, though the amount would depend on how much was
taken for firewood and how much harvested for long lasting timber products. The Read Re-
port gives estimates of the CO
2
savings achieved by different kinds of woodland, through
a combination of sequestration and fuel use. The average for productive and multipurpose
woodland is around 12.5 tonnes of CO
2
per hectare per year, which suggests that three mil-
lion extra hectares of woodland would represent a reduction of around 6 per cent of our
current GHG emissions.
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It has taken a lot of figures to arrive at these calculations, but there is more to life than
calories and carbon budgets. Firewood, the old adage tells us, is the fuel which heats you
twice - which is another way of saying that people who do physical work get less cold than
people who sit at a computer and turn on the heat with a flick of the switch. Scientists who
leap to explain how most of the heat from an open fire goes up the chimney, rarely account
for the fact that a fire with a living flame offers a spiritual warmth that cannot be obtained
from central heating. This is evident from the fact that people in homes and pubs frequently
light open fires even when they have central heating, that people who have no fireplace
often buy a fire with an imitation living flame, and that people at parties and barbecues
do not congregate outside warming their hands around a bank of electric storage heaters.
There is a sizeable minority of people who find the fug of central heating debilitating and
prefer the thermodynamics of a cool house where, when human energy runs low, the hearth
springs into life, quickening the flagging brain with its flames and warming the blood with
its coals. SRC on the other hand is likely to be delivered to the consumer, either via an
electricity generating station, or else minced up and moulded into pellets. The difference
between gas or wood-pellet fuelled central heating and an open fire or wood burner is like
the difference between a spoonful of sugar and a shot of malt whiskey - same calories, dif-
ferent effect.
Restoring the Mosaic
