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Why are wood pellets a renewable resource?

Wood Pellets are recognized by the Kyoto Protocol and by renewable energy policies in the United States as a renewable resource.

Why is this? It is because all above ground carbon returns to the atmosphere through decomposition if not through combustions. In other words, if the proverbial ‘tree falls in the forest’, normal decomposition of the log will return the carbon from the log to the atmosphere. When wood pellets are burned in a pellet stove, pellet boiler or pellet furnace, the same carbon returns to the atmosphere. But unlike a propane, electric or oil heating system, no fossil fuels are brought up from underground to accelerate climate change.

In fact, it is actually true that combustion in a modern pellet appliance is cleaner than organic decomposition in a forest, in that normally rotting wood gives off significant amounts of methane, which is more than 25 times as potent as carbon dioxide, from the perspective of global warming.