This is your future
Get used to it (unless we start building some new nuclear plant PDQ).
Pagan gods traditionally required human sacrifices – preferably of children – and a West Country academy school appears to be leading the way. To give pupils a lesson in "sustainability" they'll never forget, headmaster Rob Benzie of Ansford Academy in Castle Cary, Somerset, ordered a "No Power Day ... as an experiment to see if …
Shirley it depends on what you decide the boundary conditions are: if you start with the CO2 that was absorbed by the growing tree then you are already in a CO2 deficit situation (something put it there to start with - perhaps on early geek burning his pre-cambrian copy of El Reg). The subsequent 'grow/burn' cycle still leaves you with a deficit balance, doesn't it?
By extension to the limits of boredom, we have to blame it all on the Big Bang.
Its called the carbon cycle, its released and repackaged all the time. Kinda funny how this whole 'renewable' thing is silly. Most energy sources are renewable over time, what they really are looking for is how clean and abundant a resource is and what the environmental impact is.
Then again, sitting one day in the cold wont hurt these kids and show them that nothing is granted.
"What's puzzling is why,[...] barmy dogma"
I think you're struggling a bit with your spin here.
You might well call it "barmy dogma" if they'd kept the heating off for a month, but a day makes the point about taking energy for granted quite well. And at least the students might learn to take energy security seriously, even if there is no particular reason for a lack of heating to turn one green.
If you want to teach kids about energy security, take them to a windfarm during a typical UK cold snap caused by a high pressure system. We have several each year. Show them how much energy is being generated. For a month last year, it was almost zero.
Then show them a shale gas installation. Make sure they see both a) the capital costs and b) the operational costs.
Schoolchildren need to learn as much about the Greens as they can. I agree.
Use of charcoal is more-or-less carbon-neutral, because as any reasonably well-educated person knows, charcoal is, in essence, heat-treated wood. You build a big pile of logs, branches, and twigs, cover it mostly in earth, and then burn it in not enough air. This drives off the water and other contaminants, leaving behind what is essentially pure carbon. But this carbon, when burned, goes back into the atmosphere, where the tree got it from in the first place.
I don't generally have a lot of time for environmental activists and their activities, but they should not be criticised for this particular thing, as it isn't inconsistent with the general theme. We could argue about whether it would be better to use the wood directly rather than via charcoal, but it's worth noting that wood isn't all that great a fuel - it's better than the dung used in large portions of the Third World, but significantly worse than coal, oil, or even charcoal - because it contains way too much water (simultaneously non-combustible and energy-absorbing).
you condition the wood over 6-12 months. You keep in a nice dry log shed and a few days / weeks before before it's needed, bring it in, ideally sticking ti next to your wood burner.
You'd be amazed how much heat a modern burner can kick out, far more than a gas fire or radiator. Ahhh how I miss mine (no where to put it in current house)
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We have one and burn only 'scrap' wood - fallen limbs, dead trees - and that one that we had someone cut down because it was leaning WAY too far towards the house. It's a nice, dry heat and the furnace doesn't kick on. If it does, it pulls in the heat through a cold-air return and pumps it all through the house. Give me a roaring fire, an unending glass of Guinness, and a day of NFL football, and I am one happy ape.
Renewable energy such as wind and solar barely break even and cause other problems (such as toxic production waste in the case of solar), we'll end up with shortages of other elements such as helium (cold storage) and lithium (batteries) ......
But some energy harvests (such as water heating in countries with good full sun), work (and have worked well for decades).
Hydro generators on islands with a reservoir (where desalinated water is used as an energy store for wind turbines) can be the difference between a society surviving or not, for them fuel costs are elevated because of their location.
As fossil fuel runs out, and it doesn't matter if that's 10, 100 or even 1000 years from now we must have an alternative, and an efficient one, easy to build, maintain and cost effective, the way that we get there is by trying to get there, this means that our "infancy of knowledge" has to be got through, yes renewables isn't delivering (at the moment), but it will, and it HAS to, we're standing in the street and a steamroller is driving at us, we probably have plenty of time to get out of the way, perhaps we have better things to do at the moment, but at some point we're going to have to address this issue, but perhaps we should at least plan how to get off the street.
"We also learn that food and water were heated over high-CO2 emission charcoal – regrettably, not a very climate-friendly choice."
Surely using a product made from a tree that may well have sucked all it's carbon from the atmosphere when a tree in the recent past and probably replaced with new saplings already to recover that carbon, is better than using energy derived from 400 million year old buried trees that'll never be replaced unless we geo-engineer some new rainforest?
Though, presumably the latter option will become more feasible if we DO release all that wasted carbon stuck in the ground...
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The dogma seems pretty balanced on either side to me.
It won't do kids any harm at all to spend a day without heating. In fact it may help them. Many people in this country are facing fuel poverty, old people are particularly vulnerable. For people in less prosperous countries it's a fact of life.
Where is the harm in getting kids to understand this ?
Of course, because It's being done under the banner of environmentalism. Therefore we get a Daily Mail/Guardian type horror story (choose your own hysteria peddler). I somehow expect more of the register.
Small point - charcoal is produced from trees which capture the CO2 while growing, so the CO2 produced by burning the charcoal is effectively 'carbon neutral'.
Apart from that, the guy is obviously bonkers! An ideal role model for teaching the yoof of today. It never did us any harm being taught by nutters!
The energy comes pretty much exclusively from the wood that's being turned into charcoal, but charcoal burns hotter and cleaner than wood, hence why it's used. Wood does make a much better carbon sink if just left alone, but you have to make sure that it doesn't rot in any way because if it rots it produces methane, which you really don't want.
IANACB (I am not a charcoal-burner), so my knowledge of charcoal-burning is largely third-hand, but...
I think the energy used to convert the wood into charcoal actually comes from the wood itself - there's no external input. And I believe the process involves very slow combustion to drive off volatile components of the wood while retaining as much of its carbon as possible.
On the other hand, it could be that industrial charcoal-burning is done in huge gas-fired furnaces. I have to admit my information comes from Swallows and Amazons, c1955.
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The heating was ancient and ineffective, the windows were huge, single glazed sash and not even slightly airtight, and the ceilings were amazingly high. So at desk level, it was usually freezing. Jar of water left on windowsill would freeze and break overnight. No econutterdom to blame back then, or even lack of money (a very well off fee-paying public school), just "the way things were". Yoof of today, never had it so lucky! ;-)
Sounds like my primary school in the 80s. Admittedly I think it was a 60s 'new build', with the single pane draughty windows and ridiculously tall rooms. Strangely, the doors were made of metal for some reason.
The buses too and from school were also freezing, 60s leftover Bedfords and Leyland Leopards with rain streaming down the inside of the windows and cold hard plastic seats.
And another strange thing, while the rooms were freezing, the breaktime 1/4 bottle of milk was always lukewarm.
PE was an excuse to get a bit of warmth, which in primary school was mostly jumping about, unlike the high school sadistic teamsports/cross country in freezing temperatures.
Of course nowadays everything is double glazed and insulated and they just use their Macbook pros on their lap and fire up a full screen flash video, and instant heat!
Nuke icon, as it looked warm.
Same experience here, albeit just nudging into the 90s. Our culprit was a 'temporary' and mostly wooden prefab that the school had acquired secondhand and which decided to use as a permanent classroom. Memorable aspects, other than the cold, included an exploding lightbulb and someone falling through the floor, presumably both related to the damp.
They had a proper classroom built somewhere in the mid-90s, I think.
Here in the States, specifically in North Carolina where I live, our school always had heat. But we didn't always have air conditioning. It matters here because highs in 90's and 100's (Fahrenheit of course) are common. The cold and the heat each bring their own problems. Our schools weren't designed to let the heat out either. You try listening to the teacher when you are covered in sweat. And then knowing you have to put up with that heat the next day. Given a choice between the two, I rather put up with near freezing temps than being too hot.
And then, the year I graduated, our school was installing air conditioning.