I had a similar realisation recently when comparing the house building industry in the US to that from here in Europe.
Because the US builds most of its residential housing out of wood it means that the Sun does most of the heavy lifting when it comes to "creating" the building materials out of which most of the US residential houses are built. The biggest cost related to energy when it comes to the US residential market is the opportunity cost of not having those trees back in the forrest still producing oxygen, plus the loss of forrest habitat as a result of ever-expending suburbias.
Meanwhile, in Europe most of the residential houses are built using cement, concrete and even bricks, all of these activities very energy intensive, you can't rely on the Sun's goodwill as the Americans do. Granted, you don't incur the opportunity costs of having to cut down trees/forests, but I have a gut feeling that the energy (and pollution) costs of building a house based on cement/concrete/bricks are a lot bigger than the opportunity costs you gain from not cutting down some trees in order to build the same house.
There's also a discussion to be made about costs related to house insulation and the loss of energy, where, I agree, European houses perform much better compared to the US houses made of wood.
All in all I think we need to "rediscover" economists like Georgescu-Roegen [1], people who had built almost all of their intellectual careers talking about this sort of stuff.
> I have a gut feeling that the energy (and pollution) costs of building a house based on cement/concrete/bricks are a lot bigger than the opportunity costs you gain from not cutting down some trees in order to build the same house
You've overlooked the cost of shipping the wood from the Americas.
Wood construction isn't used as much in Europe because it's much more expensive. Apart from a few pockets of environmentally important old growth forest, centuries of industry and warfare depleted European forest.
Huh, is this why the timber framing with clay brick or wattle and daub infill is so classically (old) European? Less wood needed, but unnecessary in the US with its plentiful trees?
Possibly. I know Scotland's traditional "bothy" construction style developed to need only one piece of structural lumber - the roof beam. The walls would be stone (available everywhere), and around the single beam on the roof was thatch or slate.
On the other hand, places like Estonia, Norway, and Romania have museums of traditional wooden construction including all-wood "stave churches". Europe was an extremely non-homogenous place until the late 20th century.
The typical European brick & mortar home is much sturdier than your typical US wooden frame construction. Houses aged 100 or more years are no rarity. The US median age of 37 years or so is still relatively young on, e.g., the German market.
Interestingly, though, European wood-based construction companies (wooden houses are usually prefab here) distinguish themselves with their energy efficient wall construction techniques. A brick-and-mortar company can achieve the same level of efficiency by choosing the best available bricks but they will typically offer cheaper bricks with add-on insulation. It's definitely not the case that new wooden construction is less energy efficient - but of course that comes with a price.
> Houses aged 100 or more years are no rarity. The US median age of 37 years or so is still relatively young on, e.g., the German market.
Eh, there are plenty of old houses where people have been living for more than a couple of centuries; most of the new houses are people deciding to build new cities and suburbs in new places rather than churn on existing stock (not that there isn't some churn on existing stock).
Also, 100 years old isn't really that impressive. I've got a 100 year old house; it was build in the 1920s. Aside from a stone foundation rather than a cinderblock foundation and a few oddities (like a patch on the chimney where the kitchen stove used to vent), it's a boringly basic, familiarly modern house. It's even got original sheetrock (albeit with instructions printed on the back telling the installers how to use it).
Hell, the Empire State Building is almost 100 years old.
It's worth noting here that the root system of the tree remains and also that different trees/plantation systems have different carbon uptake profiles. There are ways to tune a production forest to have a lot of carbon uptake while allowing you to remove trees for production continuously, even to the extend where managed land is takes up more carbon than unmanaged land. Deserts are technically unmanaged land but they don't store more carbon and similarly a forest will stop being a carbon sink when the trees start decaying or the big trees stop growing while still outcompeting all the smaller, still growing, trees
I say this as someone living in Northern Europe in a wooden house: there’s a fairly good reason that the building industry uses brick rather than lumber here. The combination of humidity, temperature, and often densely-packed housing created both a skills base and a supply chain that has, over time, made it needlessly costly to build with lumber. And, a lot of our historic architectural styles prioritise brick, which is a huge pull factor when people are deciding on styles for new buildings.
When it comes to leaving the trees in the forest, you have to take into account the fact that mature trees will produce less oxygen than growing trees, and if nobody cuts the old trees down, when they do fall themselves and succumb to decay, all of the captured CO2 will be consumed by aerobic organisms and thus released back into the atmosphere.
Because the US builds most of its residential housing out of wood it means that the Sun does most of the heavy lifting when it comes to "creating" the building materials out of which most of the US residential houses are built. The biggest cost related to energy when it comes to the US residential market is the opportunity cost of not having those trees back in the forrest still producing oxygen, plus the loss of forrest habitat as a result of ever-expending suburbias.
Meanwhile, in Europe most of the residential houses are built using cement, concrete and even bricks, all of these activities very energy intensive, you can't rely on the Sun's goodwill as the Americans do. Granted, you don't incur the opportunity costs of having to cut down trees/forests, but I have a gut feeling that the energy (and pollution) costs of building a house based on cement/concrete/bricks are a lot bigger than the opportunity costs you gain from not cutting down some trees in order to build the same house.
There's also a discussion to be made about costs related to house insulation and the loss of energy, where, I agree, European houses perform much better compared to the US houses made of wood.
All in all I think we need to "rediscover" economists like Georgescu-Roegen [1], people who had built almost all of their intellectual careers talking about this sort of stuff.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Georgescu-Roegen