Some of it is useful, some of it is useless nonsense, perpetuating other myths.
If you want to learn how negligible the effect of turning off your lightbulbs or converting to a gas heated kettle is, read "without the Hot Air" by David McKay: http://www.withouthotair.com/ It's transport and domestic heating that are the major energy consumers in the west. It's barely worth focusing on anything else.
"wood is a green fuel because the CO2 released when it gets burned will be sucked from the air by the trees planted to replace the felled ones"
What? No. Wood is a green fuel because all the CO2 released when burned was previously captured by the plant itself! What you replace it with is irrelevant.
The "Buy local" section is very good though. Local purchases will in general be a lot more wasteful than purchase of mass produced food which takes advantage of economies of scale.
It's a bit more complicated than that. Wood can be both green and non-green. Burning a full grown tree could release hundreds of years worth of carbon in an instant. Replanting that tree won't offset the effect of that CO2 within the 50-100 years in which global warming is expected.
Same for buying local. Buying mass produced grain from Brazil might be more efficient, but worse for the environment because of the deforestation that's driven by high food export prices.
We won't really know for sure until we have a comprehensive way of accounting for all the different factors on a case-by-case basis.
What? No. Wood is a green fuel because all the CO2 released when burned was previously captured by the plant itself! What you replace it with is irrelevant.
So burning oil into the atmosphere is green because the CO2 and other dangerous substances were previously captured by the oil itself? (though it takes a bit more for an oil deposit to form than for a tree to grow)
You're right: the duration over which the CO2 was captured is important. The argument doesn't apply to burning the whole of the amazon at once! But burning growth which has happened since we started caring about CO2 has no net effect.
If you want to learn how negligible the effect of turning off your lightbulbs or converting to a gas heated kettle is, read "without the Hot Air" by David McKay: http://www.withouthotair.com/ It's transport and domestic heating that are the major energy consumers in the west. It's barely worth focusing on anything else.
"wood is a green fuel because the CO2 released when it gets burned will be sucked from the air by the trees planted to replace the felled ones"
What? No. Wood is a green fuel because all the CO2 released when burned was previously captured by the plant itself! What you replace it with is irrelevant.
The "Buy local" section is very good though. Local purchases will in general be a lot more wasteful than purchase of mass produced food which takes advantage of economies of scale.