Had this email from my mate Hannah the other day:

Last week I went camping in Carmarthenshire, it was -5 degrees C on the first night! I didn’t stay in conventional tent but a Mongolian Yurt, positive luxury in the camping world, which had a wood burning stove and was absolutely essential on the first night.

Top marks to the campsite it was extremely green, they’d thought of everything from a composting toilet, electric generated by wind and solar power and even the washing up liquid and the soap was Ecover.

A green paradox which has bothered me for some time, is that wood is often described as carbon neutral.
Well I’ve never really understood that one, surely the number of trees on the plant has to remain constant or increase, for that to be true?

The neutrality of biomass (like wood) is a bit of a counter-intuitive one, but I disagree with Hannah on that one, as I’ve mentioned before when wittering on about offsetting. Carbon in trees is already in the carbon cycle, it goes round and round being in trees for a bit, then hanging around in the air for a bit when the tree rots, and so on. We had a fairly fixed amount of carbon in the system doing that until the 1850s.

What’s bad is the new carbon we are recycling into the system, the stuff that was “sequestered” underground in coal/oil deposits. That’s the “new” carbon and it’s the new carbon we need to avoid. But burning the carbon in trees is only as bad as the tree rotting itself – on the assumption, of course (as Hannah says) that a different rree grows in its place.