Gentle Decline 2/5: Warming & Weirding
In which the writer regrets the impracticality of wood fires for everyone.
Hello. Time is doing that thing again where it goes a bit non-linear, and several people with a better sense of it than I have noted that it’s been March for a whole year now. But there are definitely seasons happening, so paying attention to those keeps me rooted in at least the right bit of the year, if not the day of the week. This issue centers on a reader question from Claudia about heating.
[Gentle Decline is an occasional newsletter about climate crisis, and - more to the point - how to cope with it. You can support the newsletter via Patreon, Ko-fi, or by buying some of the seriously classy merchandise. The spotlighted product for this issue is the repeatedly requested & somewhat sinister Chicken Thing T-Shirt.]
Claudia’s question goes:
“In the Independent article, the Chief Executive of the national grid operator EirGrid, Mark Foley, says that in a low-carbon world, homeowners are likely to be more self-sufficient in relation to their power supply. "In a future world where your home is heated with electricity, and your car is electric, you're likely to have more self-sufficiency like a solar panel or battery technology which one could argue would have you in a better place than when you are today," he says.
Is electricity that much of a safer and reliable option for heating etc. than gas or solar? Especially for heating, we only have gas at the moment. We have the fireplace but haven`t had the chimney checked yet since we moved in. I am toying with the thought of putting a stove into the fireplace in order to avoid the whole ash in the living room issue. But that would need supplies of burnable material which in the long term might be limited goods? So, would it be better to really go for solar?”
The answer to this is long, complicated, and made a little more interesting by what happened in Texas in the last couple of weeks. If you’re not aware of that, I’ll refer you to Christopher Brown’s excellent rendition in his own newsletter, Field Notes. Obviously, that was very unusual for Texas. It would be unusual for Ireland, too, but literally around this time three years ago, we were in the tail end of a cold snap that had me shovelling about 70cm of snow so I could get out of the house. And there are other, longer term concerns for cold weather in Ireland, of which more anon. But basically: houses need heating; houses that aren’t made to handle cold weather need more heating, and the heat has to come from somewhere.
There are three strands to my thinking on heating: immediate practicality, longer-term convenience, and environmental friendliness.
For immediate practicality, you cannot beat a pile of firewood and a fireplace in which to burn it. There is no disaster, no slow decline, nothing at all that will prevent wood from burning and giving off heat. It is humanity’s oldest and most reliable technology. Firewood is generally relatively cheap (and you can get it delivered), and fireplaces are not complicated. Lighting a fire is a skill, but there are ways to cheat, and as long as you’re prepared to either learn or lay in a stock of firelighters, you’re sorted. Further, in most circumstances, your pile of bits of timber does not decay over a few years, and may even be higher quality from sitting around for year or two drying out. Burning firewood is pretty good in environmental terms; you’re not releasing carbon dioxide that was otherwise locked up in fossil fuels, and what was there would release itself as the wood rotted in nature anyway. Wood smoke isn’t nearly as harmful as coal smoke, and it smells pretty pleasant in and of itself.
However, it’s not practical as a long term solution in a city or indeed, anything bigger than a large-ish town. After that, the volume of smoke produced becomes overpowering on some days, no matter what source it’s from, and the difficulty of getting a sufficient volume of firewood into the area for distribution and burning becomes an issue. Also, Ireland doesn’t have anything like enough land area in comparison to its population to supply that amount of timber on an ongoing basis. Much as I love wood fires, they’re not a practical solution for urban life in anything but the short term.
On chimney cleaning, if you’ve never used your fireplace, get the chimney looked at before you need it. Use some common sense when determining how often it needs to be cleaned thereafter; a fire that’s lit six or eight times a year simply doesn’t need annual chimney cleaning. And make sure birds aren’t - and preferably can’t - nest in or on it.
For longer-term convenience, electricity is the best source. Gas and oil will eventually run out, and well before that happens, they’ll increase in price. The pipes that supply gas will need to be closed off or removed when that happens, and the boilers and tanks that are used for oil likewise. Electrical power comes in on wires, and it can be generated in a wide variety of ways - burning things, including waste; nuclear power; geothermal sources, wind power on hilltops and in shallow sea water; water power at dams; tidal power near the sea and solar power anywhere a panel can be put up. Parenthetically, the attempt by conservative loons in the US to blame the issues the Texan power grid had on wind and solar power are outright lies to cover their own desperate asses, and if there were actual justice, they’d be pulled up for it pretty sharply. Electricity is the main way we’re going to be moving energy around for a few centuries yet, barring some completely out-of-the-blue scientific discoveries.
Electrical power grids can fail, though, at which point you’re back to the short-term emergency measure of wood in the fireplace, and the possibility of in-house power generation and/or batteries. Batteries are only going to be installed if power cuts become very frequent, or if the house is generating power locally and needs to store it.
I’ll also refer you to the excellent guide from the Old Farmer’s Almanac on how to deal with power cuts. It’s written for a more extreme climate than we currently have in Ireland, but, y’know, stuff’s getting weird.
That local power generation, though, can happen in a few ways - not quite as many as in centralised power stations, since nuclear, tidal and water power are unlikely to ever be available to the average householder - but there are still small-scale wind-vanes, solar panels, and in some specific locations, geothermal power. And of course you can have a fossil-fuel powered generator. We’re getting toward a situation now where householders who have solar panels (or, eventually any method of power generation) can feed power back into the grid and get paid for it. It will also be possible to use something like an exercise machine to top up the batteries on kinetic energy. This is something from which I get a fair bit of amusement, as we’ve steadily moved away from physical labour, to the point where we need to “do exercise” to stay healthy, and we’ll soon be able to channel that exercise into… physical labour.
So, overall: have a fireplace and a stock of firewood for emergencies. Make sure your chimney is in working order. Move toward electricity and away from gas and oil for your day-to-day heating needs, and consider installing local power generation (solar, for now) and batteries, in order to have that option and the possibility of feeding power back into the grid.
If you live in an apartment, your options are far more limited, and some newer houses may not have fireplaces or chimneys at all. In this case, all you can do is move toward electrical heating where you can, and hope the grid stays working. Apartments, unfortunately, depend far more than houses on infrastructure continuing to work well.
I mentioned the possibility of Ireland experiencing more cold weather; there’s a new study out in recent weeks which examines the ongoing possibility of the Gulf Stream shutting down. There’s an excellent New York Times article about it, which is understandably more readable than the study itself, and has some excellent graphics. A salient quotes from that:
The consequences could include faster sea level rise along parts of the Eastern United States and parts of Europe, stronger hurricanes barreling into the Southeastern United States, and perhaps most ominously, reduced rainfall across the Sahel, a semi-arid swath of land running the width of Africa that is already a geopolitical tinderbox.
However, the impact on Ireland and near parts of Europe could be weirder: we might get the kind of weather we “should” have at this latitude. which could involve much colder winters, or possibly even a period like the Younger Dryas, which was effectively, in the Northern Hemisphere, an ice age in miniature. I’ve written about that before, in Vol 1, Issue 23, so I won’t repeat all of it here - but the basic idea is that the kind of cold snap which struck Texas would become far more likely here. So-called “Global Warming” might be better described as “Global Weirding”.
A few other links and things, to wind up: of all the media I’d expect to cover sea level rise truthfully, the Irish Mirror would be low on the list. However, they did:
I did say nice things about the Green Party last issue, but now we’re back to a situation where one of the sitting Green TDs, Patrick Costello, is bringing a High Court case that the Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement (CETA), which is supposed to be voted on soon, is unconstitutional - against the government of which his own party is the main enabler. Given that CETA allows “allows for multinational companies to sue a state for damages if it introduces new laws or policies that the company thinks will reduce its future profits”, I think it’s an absolutely terrible instrument in any case; it literally puts corporate profits above everything else. Of course, before the current unholy alliance with the Urban and Rural Fascist parties, the Green Party campaigned against this.
And in connection, again, with the winter storms in the US, you have the inutterably bizarre phenomenon of police preventing people from removing good food from a dumpster. This overlaps multiple interests of mine; climate, infrastructure, food supply chains, and the ways in which capitalism goes weird. The lesson from this isn’t so much that these things are happening, but that in emergencies, the authorities are not necessarily your friends, and it may often be necessary to disobey them for the greater - or even local - good. Nobody at all benefited from that situation, and yet the police were there, with guns.
This issue brought to you by heavy fog (picture below), excellent salmon ramen, and lengthy walks. I've given up on trying to say what the next issue will be in advance, but I'm taking requests and questions. If you hit reply, you can send stuff straight to me!
Gentle Decline is on Twitter as @gentledecline, which I’m using more these days.
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