..... and warm

Now we've gone over to just a log burner to heat the house, I've had to get out my calculator and work out how much wood we need to burn each winter to stay warm. It's shocking reading.

To use the burner to heat a small house takes about 400 YEARS of wood growth each winter - and that's a very conservative estimate.

That's forty, ten year old trees or twenty, twenty year old ones. One four hundred year old tree wouldn't do the job, but as even I don't expect to live long enough to grow one, it doesn't matter :

To be carbon neutral for just my heating, I need approx 160 square yards of land each year, for ten years, just to produce the wood. I also need extra trees to cover the carbon from trips to the land to collect the wood, room to store it a year before it's dry enough to burn, yet more trees planted to cover emissions from cutting tools being made and/or used and fertilizer production.

In short, by my pen and paper calculations, to make a carbon neutral heating system in the UK each house will need a minimum of two acres of woodland, planted a the person's birth and maintained thoughout their life.

I think we're going to need a bigger country if government targets are to be met