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EPA Makes Most Wood Stoves Illegal
First time accepted submitter Jody Bruchon writes "The Environment Protection Agency has lowered the amount of fine-particle matter per cubic meter that new wood stoves are allowed to release into the atmosphere by 20%. Most wood stoves in use today are of the type that is now illegal to manufacture or sell, and old stoves traded in for credit towards new ones must be scrapped out. This shouldn't be much of a surprise since more and more local governments are banning wood-burning stoves and fireplaces entirely, citing smog and air pollution concerns."
Or maybe you see huge swaths of people in the northern states use them just to stay warm. Get out of you bubble much?
I have lived in Fairbanks, Alaska, which has roughly 100,000 people in and around it, and is basically isolated other than that. During the winter, particulate pollution is insanely bad, and even worse when you consider how small the city is. This is due, mainly, to the amount of wood burning stoves that are used to heat houses. Now, it's exacerbated by the valley that the town is in and the extreme cold, but most of it's terribleness comes from the wood burning in the area. After seeing that, I want to support stronger regulations or even bans on wood burning. On the other hand, many of the people in Fairbanks that burn wood do so because it's the cheapest method they can use to heat their houses, and they can't afford other methods (natural gas is not available in Fairbanks for heating, or at least not cheaply). I don't know what they're supposed to do if these regulations increase the cost associated with wood burning very much... not heating your house when it's -50 out is just not an option.
I'm not entirely against this rule, but I think it should be a local law not a national one. Someone in the middle of the city burning things is a pretty big asshole; someone living in a cabin in the woods isn't causing local problems and could possibly have circumstances that make the usage more understandable -- e.g., using wood that otherwise would go to waste, or using it as a back-up fuel source in case something goes wrong in the middle of winter.
Not to mention that the fairest thing would be to judge each person's energy usage rather than ban particular uses of energy. Piecemeal laws like this are why we end up with absurdities such as the government often giving "green" incentives to wasteful people because they waste through sheer mass of usage (e.g., having a gigantic home) while each particular element in the massive waste is efficient.
I would love to know which gas / propane / electric company bought this rule....
Yeah it's another bullshit EPA rule. Did you know that there are cars that emit about half the pollutants into the atmosphere that current EPA-certified cars do by volume? But they're illegal to sell here because the percentage of certain emissions is too high. In other words, we could do less environmental damage per car with (some) imports, but they're illegal because they won't spend a fortune fitting rare-earth metal infested catalytic converters and other emissions systems that, in reality, don't help the environment much -- but they're super expensive and only a few companies sell them here.
Burning wood is a very efficient way to heat a home. A small home within the arctic circle can keep warming with just a few logs a day; A chord of wood can last them the entire winter; Which is maybe about half of what a single decently mature tree will yield. I used to live on a 30 acre plot of woods growing up in a rural area. We had a furnace to keep the pipes from freezing when we were away for long periods, but the house itself was the size of a barn and was poorly insulated. Even at that, we only needed about 8 logs a day to keep it nice and toasty at 80F. The roof almost never had snow on it unless it was fresh.
We'd go out in the winter with out little plastic sleds (I was 12) and I'd haul down about 20 logs at a time to the truck and load it up... Then help cut it up and leave it out on a tarp to dry in the sun. Two, maybe three dead trees in the winter was all we needed to keep our massive and poorly insulated house cooking all winter. And up here in the northern midwest of the United States, we're at the same latitude as Moscow. It gets cold.
By comparison, to heat our house with propane, we'd need to fill our giant tank up about 5 times during the winter, at the cost of a few thousand dollars. As opposed to the gas and oil for the chainsaw... which cost about $20, and the excercise, which I suppose you could say was paid for in pancakes.
You think about that for a minute now -- all the pollutants we have to burn off, all the electricity we spend, all the labor, and all the extra pollution from transporting it all over the country, to get that propane into the tank... as opposed to just going outside, walking a few hundred feet, and going chop-chop. Those few acres of woods could provide for about ten homes' worth of nearly free heat, and the only pollutant would be carbon. Now think of the average forest fire in California; Think of the hundreds of thousands of trees that go up in flames. California could provide heat for next to nothing to all those homes up along the mountains and keep the ferocity of those forest fires down, by logging the dead trees. Not clear-cut logging like the environmentalists like to showcase... but just the dead trees; Move in on foot, haul them out on sleds.
But they'd rather you buy the dry heat from a propane or natural gas tap... because it's more environmentally friendly?
Dude, if you believe that bullshit cover story, you're smoking the cheap $3 crack. Raw oil comes to us on supertankers, and there are no environmental restrictions on the oil those things burn. They are so dirty you can't bring them up-wind less than fifty miles of a major city because you'd have people hospitalized for asthma attacks. A significant portion of our environmental pollution is from these supertankers, powered by the most unrefined, shitty oil you can imagine... it's black like the night and you can see chunks of particulate floating in the tanks, so big you can grab them with your bare hands.
Environmentalism is a joke... it's just an excuse to let some people get rich at the expense of the rest of us, while making some appeal to the planet that'll fend off the opposition.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
An overblown story on a website with headlines like "How To Turn Your Home Into A Fortress!" and "Obama Ex-Bodyguard Says Scandals 'Worse Than People Know'"? An overblown story based on an editorial from the Washington Times? An overblown story that defends woodsmoke air pollution by saying it's not as bad as being in a car with a cigarette smoker? Impossible!
Seriously, this article screams "CRANK!". Actual fact: EPA tightens pollution regulations on new wood stoves. Crank interpretation: Obama wants people to freeze to death.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
As a Washington State resident, there are many counties that are wood only heating. Pierce and Tacoma have large suburbs and are not exactly off the grid living. They are bigger and can force the smaller population to upgrade. The counties like Stevens, Ferry and Okanogan are mostly wood heated homes. I have no real numbers but out of the 39 counties in Washington, I'd say at least 1/2 have majority of wood only heated homes, we still are a big wild state.
My mothers county has many people that are wood only, and if they went around giving $1000 dollar fines for people burning, they would tar and feather and hold a recall election. Those urban counties are gray haired monsters who know each other and would put pressure to any elected official.
Those poor gray haired women are the Majority of voters, tell them they cant heat their homes. Most of these people live in urban areas that dont have fire departments, police or or trash pick up. Tacoma I'd say is much different, its urban sprawl.
Lots of people who need to replace this old stuff don't need a tax break, they don't pay enough in taxes (the kind that you can use such breaks for anyway) to make it help.
I would provide low interest loans, secured by a lien against the house, for people to buy such things. Many people can't get credit, or it is very expensive, but if the goal is to get people to replace old and very inefficient appliances, HVAC systems, etc. then instead of tax breaks, provide the money in the form of a loan.
Frankly, most people replacing a 20 year old HVAC system with a new 16 SEER unit would probably find that a 10 year low interest loan would cost the same or less than the reduction in their monthly electric bill, making it a "free" upgrade.
Huge benefit to society, creates jobs, lowers our energy use, saves people money.
Win-Win-Win
Come on, give me a break. It's not all about instant death, it's more often about about quality of life.
A few years ago I inexplicably developed asthma in Northern California (I have never had a single allergy, etc in 40 years). The doctor said she had seen a huge number of the same cases due to major fires south of San Jose that year (so bad some days you could see a haze in the air 50+ miles away). And I have never had the symptoms since (well, actually - one time - hanging out in a bar in IL before they instituted the smoking ban... so it's pretty clear what triggers it...)