I got decentralized wood

For the last couple weeks, we haven't lit the fire too often, nor have we had many saunas, as we have had to buy our wood retail, which comes in a 40 liter sack (not much) and costs between 6 and 8 euros each. However, today we are getting a trailer load, for about 50 euros from family friends. We don't heat our house with wood, but the sauna is wood-fired - although it doesn't take that much to get it up to temperate, a few logs and some time is enough - it takes about an hour and a half to heat up well.

I am in two minds about burning wood at all, but at the same time it is a sustainable resource that can be regrown. In Finland which has a large paper industry, more wood is grown than is cut down and if you fly over, all you essentially see is forest and lake. Not only that, the forest industry is actually a pretty good model of decentralization and distribution.

Pretty much, all of the forestry land is privately held by individuals and families. They tend to the forests and keep them healthy and then the paper companies pay to harvest them every few decades and what they pay is good. This means that there is an incentive to look after the forests, optimize growth and when harvested, regrow quickly and start the cycle again. This gives the families who hold forest land a significant cash injection every few decades - and also means that the paper companies aren't responsible for the regrowth, something they would likely skimp on if they could.

A few hundred years ago, the forests were almost completely gone in Finland, and it is why the country has the oldest environmental laws in the world. Once they incentivized the regrowth of forests rather than just the cutting down, things changed rapidly. Over the centuries, this has also aided in the "equality" of distribution, which while not exactly equal, does spread wealth more widely.

The process in Finland for sustainability of the industry has been found by decentralizing the ownership of the resources needed and it has other factors. Generally, people own their forest in places that they live, like surrounding their farms and the lakes where they fish - which means that they do not want pollution to affect the habitat either. This has led to some pretty awesome forestry machines being created that do as little damage to the surrounds as possible. Ponsse is probably one of the most famous companies that does this in the world.

While it is still burning trees, I think that it has to be better than many of the current alternatives being used around the world, including oil, coal and natural gas. Our house is currently heated by oil, which burns around 4000 liters a year, or like I did the calculation compared to my car - my house drives 320 kilometers (about 200 miles) a day - and that oil gets shipped in, it is not local. Once we change in a few weeks to a air/water heat exchanger, the energy our house consumes goes downward considerably - with the electricity it uses to run the pumps in the system and to pump it around the house.

I am hoping that one day we will also be able to put on a solar roof and push what we generate into the grid. While Finland has a lot of darkness, in the summer, there is a hell of a lot of light - and if there was an affordable solar roof system that everyone installed, I think at least for part of the year, most of the housing energy needs would be covered and just like the forests, what isn't used can be sold - distributing energy wealth a little through the population.

While a lot of people (especially now) are looking to be self-sufficient, I think that a lot of the future will be where the self sufficiency is through a decentralized separation and pooling of resources. What this would do is also drive for a lot more innovation from a great deal more players at local levels where instead of maximizing the growth and harvesting of trees, they will advance energy generation.

This would decentralize energy to some degree and remove the weaknesses of a centralized system, plus add the stability that comes with distribution. Maybe in the future this would become part of the method of carrying costs through the community, where households passively add their surplus energy for the needs of others at a local level. Local energy is much, much better than imported, plus it is cheaper and generates jobs and pushes for innovation locally, as there is not the reliance on massive conglomerates that hold the world's natural resources hostage.

Last time I checked, Finland imports about 6 billion euros worth of oil a year - but once electric cars take over, the energy has to come from somewhere. There has to be an evolution and revolution in the energy industry as we become more reliant on electricity to serve our needs.

I think that at least at some level, each household should take responsibility to not only reducing their consumption, but also add to the generation. While the technology might not be overly effective or efficient at this yet, the way decentralized communities work is that the more who use it, the faster it develops as there is incentive to do so. Development is expensive and therefore powerful centralized organizations will not evolve unless there is an economic incentive to do so - and when the power is in a few hands and the masses are at their mercy, that incentive doesn't exist.

For a centralized authority, there is more profit in staying the same than changing, even if the change is what is better for those it serves. With the current state of he economy, business and the way individuals are living their lives - more focus is going to be pushed onto distributed networks and how decentralization can provide a better and more stable experience for all of us.

What is cool in all of this "new trend" is, we have been here doing it for years already and have a lot of the technological infrastructure needed to start driving the change at scale.

Taraz
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