Hello, good morning. Time for another, frankly, this week's commentary is on the global

situation with forests and using firewood for home heating in the winter. I originally was going

to call this post the Lorax. I also considered calling it the TDE, the terminal deforestation

event, which is a little gloomy, but possible. I decided to call it the sixth pool, as in the

sixth pool of terrestrial carbon that humans access to add to our economies.

So this week, the European Commission just voted to remove subsidies on using pellets, sawdust,

etc. for home heating because of growing recognition that there are limits

to forest biomass in Europe. As many of you are aware, since early this summer, firewood

is virtually sold out across Northern Europe. You cannot buy firewood at any price in Germany.

And this is because people are anticipating even a normal winter that there won't be the

natural gas available to provide home heating.

So in this brief overview, I'm going to talk about the relationship between humans and

forests. the relationship,

at least in the United States, between the amount of fossil fields we use and the forest biomass,

and the fact that there are virtually no models in climate space or in governmental forecast

looking at humans returning to biomass in a large way.

So let's start with the history of forest. Humans and even our pre-Homo sapiens ancestors

have been accessing forest or wood for hundreds of thousands of years. The standing forest we have today is around

a third smaller than it was when we started the agricultural revolution. So there are five

pools of terrestrial carbon. The first pool is soil, which is at the agricultural revolutions, humans started to

en masse access the chemical bonds in the soil, not directly for carbon reasons, but for nutrients,

phosphorus, potassium, et cetera. And this thus released the carbon embedded in the soil.

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