Much attention is going towards power plants which burn wood and other plant materials for the production of electricity (with, of course, the leftover heat being blown away in cooling towers). It sounds great at first. Wood IS renewable and carbon-neutral, right?
Technically, yes. But things go a little deeper. The use of firewood as fuel for electricity is far different than the use of wood for direct space heating, such as in a wood stove.
When we turn firewood into electricity, it is used far from where the trees were grown. The energy consumers never see the forests, they never handle the wood. They just flip a switch and a light comes on. The energy travels on wires for hundreds of miles to some concrete jungle where it is used to power up PlayStation and XBOX consoles, training our future generations to be soldiers to destroy and fight the resource wars of the future in Call of Duty. We get the smell of overheated electronics amongst the stream of profanity and bigotry streaming from the players' headset earpieces. (I happen to have many friends who play this game OFTEN! More power to them I guess, it is not my cup of tea...)
When we turn firewood into heat, we get an appreciation for the trees and the energy. It is known how heavy the wood is, and how much wood is required to produce a given amount of heat. We get exercise. We learn a little bit about combustion and thermodynamics and what it takes to start a fire and keep it going. We get copious amounts of soothing infrared light. We get a warm, romantic, and even entertaining display of visible light. We are disconnected from the "economy" and paper pushers on Wall Street who buy and sell coal and oil without ever being in a coal mine or on an oil rig. The aroma of various woods and wood smoke linger in the air.
See the difference?
The amounts of wood required to meet the demand for electricity are quite staggering. Upon doing these calculations, it is clear that the reason we even have any forests left is the use of fossil fuels. Had we continued to use wood as the primary source of energy while expanding the industrial society, the world's forests would have been promptly consumed with the industrial society subsequently collapsing.
Fossil fuels aren't necessarily the problem, indiscretionary consumption of high-grade energy is the problem. It can be argued that if we attempted to consume the amounts of high-grade energy that we currently consume today using only "renewable" resources such as wood that the environmental damage would be far greater than had we used fossil fuels.
The environmental and sustainability communities know that large-scale corporo-fascist renewable energy projects are likely to produce little benefit. Multimegawatt wood burners using fuel hauled in from hundreds of miles away to produce electricity at 25% efficiency which will be used hundreds of miles away are hardly a bargain, in a category similar to the corn ethanol program. Small is Beautiful and placing the task of energy production/harvesting in the hands of the energy consumers is seen as a far better path to sustainability. The allies of the corporo-fascist system call this "socialist" and disregard for the "freedoms of the individual". Hmmm...interesting. More realistically, they realize that there is no money to be made in real, decentralized renewable energy production. Make your money selling the jewels (equipment and expertise), not the joules.