It’s confession time. I’ve just had a large tree cut down and I am trying to square this with my ambition to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by storing some of it, as carbon, in trees.

It’s the first felled tree for me, but at least my large sycamore is safe as it’s protected by a preservation order.

The problem began in January, 1974, almost 40 years ago, when we took the Christmas tree that had graced the front room, and planted it in the garden. We always buy rooted trees, and normally we have grown them on for a year or so and then replanted them in open spaces in the district. However we forgot about this one, and it got too big to dig up, so it just went on growing.

Once it was more than 50ft high, bulging the dry stone wall that separated us from our neighbours, as well as shading their garden, it was time to act. It had to go. I feared that it would be very expensive to have it cut down, sliced into logs and the waste disposed of. But this wasn’t the case, and the reason for this is encouraging.

It appears that there’s a growing demand for biomass boilers to heat houses and their central heating systems. They generally use wood chips, or pellets, as in City Hall, so any surplus timber, from felling garden trees, or managing local woodlands, can be put to good use, and this is where the clever bit comes in.

The wood from my tree will be sold as fuel for a biomass boiler and so replaces the gas, electricity, or coal that would have been used instead.

This involves just recirculating CO2 already in the atmosphere rather than importing more from millions of years ago and by reducing the amount of fossil fuel used there will be less CO2 to disturb the climate.

Recent governments have recognised the value of this approach and will now pay a subsidy to premises that swap fossil fuels for biofuels.

It’s called the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI), and from 2014, index linked, it will be paid to householders.

The subsidy will be sufficient to cover the 20-year life of the boiler, but will be concentrated in the first seven years, and will more than pay for the cost of the wood pellets for that period.

It’s expected that there will be thousands of applications for wood stove heating systems, leading to the creation of employment to manage woodlands, and produce pellets.

Above all it will mean less ancient CO2 from homes, and that’s another small step in the right direction.