By wrecking the US coal industry, and making electricity prices skyrocket, the White House has convinced people to burn trees and increase air pollution and CO2.
Americans living in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic U.S. are increasingly turning to a source of heat favored by humans for thousands of years: wood.
More and more people are using wood as their main source of heat as opposed to heating oil and kerosene.
The Energy Information Administration reports that, “All nine states in the New England and the Middle Atlantic Census divisions saw at least a 50% jump from 2005 to 2012 in the number of households that rely on wood as the main heating source.”
Those who switched to wood burning were spared high fuel oil and kerosene prices during this year’s harsh winter.
About 2.5 million households across the country now use wood as the main source of heat in their homes, up from 1.9 million households in 2005. And another 9 million households burn wood as a secondary fuel source for heating.
Millions of families faced skyrocketing energy prices as record low temperatures and snowfall hit much of the country. The U.S.’s constrained pipeline system could not keep up with the demand for propane and natural gas, causing prices to surge and utilities to burn oil and coal for power.
Northeasterners turn to burning wood for power | The Daily Caller
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlTxGHn4sH4]
Of course, I hear that wood-burning stoves are being banned.
Regulated to death.
That was just the EPA. (The states also have regs and in some cities wood stoves are outlawed completely along with fireplaces.
The insurance companies are also getting into the act.
Wood is not an option for the country as a whole. Some people can heat with wood, but not everybody. We already know that in the 1800’s when everybody did, we cleared all the forests. Only when we switched to coal did the forests grow back. Out west in prairie land there are no forests at all.
Wood was produced on every farm in New England. It was an acre of land called the “wood lot.”
The reason New England was once 90% treeless was nit because trees were cut down to heat homes, but rather because, first, sheep grazed much land, producing wool for the mills, and second, vehicles did not run on gasoline; they ran on hay because they were drawn by horses. A farmer could make good money just growing hay for export to NYC, where they had many horses and no farms.
It was the movement of mills to the south, because labor was cheaper, and the creation of the automobile, that led to forests invading the old fields. Now New England is 90% forest, and a lot of that wood goes to waste, falling and rotting.
It is possible to build a wood-stove that burns cleanly, without the wires needed for a pellet stove. However pellet stoves do use wood and do produce minimal pollution.
Even if the woods were poorly managed and became fields, it is possible to grow a hay called “switchgrass.” It requires little fertilizer or irrigation, and can produce up to nine tons of biomass per acre, and the straw can be made into pellets for pellet stoves, with the pellets 90% as productive as pellets made of wood. Stupidly, most research has been in how to use switchgrass to produce ethanol for gasoline, rather than pellets for home heating.
While grow-your-own might not work for our big cities, I do think it could cover the home-heating needs of a large part of our rural areas.
By the way, I raised five kids in cold New Hampshire in a house heated by 4 wood stoves. As a landscaper I got a lot of my wood for free, simply cleaning up other people’s property. I was lucky, for I lived in a time when people didn’t appreciate the value of wood.
New York could be the next Macchu Picchu on all the trees are cut.
Then they’ll go back to coal burning stoves. What a mad mad world.
… once all the trees are cut.
From the land of “unintended consequences”.
My cousin has worked in a burn center for decades. She tells me that every time energy prices spike up, they get a surge in kids burned by wood stove accidents.
That’s OK just turn the wood to pulped wood pellets and ship them to the UK to burn instead of coal because that is ‘envirnomentally friendly’. Believe that and I got a bridge to sell to you!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22630815
It’s really cold around here in winter but the upside is the air is so clean and crisp. Great for taking the daily walk. Until someone in the neighborhood cranks up their fireplace or wood burner. Pollutes the whole neighborhood and when you go out it burns your lungs and you gag on the crap. So much for the invigorating walk. We’re only talking one or two people here so I can just imagine what it was like in the old days when everyone burnt wood. Walk around town and you can tell if someone in a neighborhood is using one. In this case the government is right to regulate these things. Fireplaces and wood burners are a major source of home fires. That’s why the insurance companies get involved. If your insurance knows you have one expect your insurance to skyrocket.
If you have a modern wood stove and know how to lay a fire, there shouldn’t be smoke. Smoke is unburned fuel. Ben Franklin devised an afterburner for his wood stove in the 1700’s to make sure he utilized the potential in smoke. Native Americans sought to have smoke-free fires in order to avoid being detected. (If you saw smoke, it was intentional, and a “smoke signal.”
Sounds to me like your two neighbors with wood stoves are novices.
You are quite right about insurance companies, but they only care about their own wallets, and not about ordinary people. They want to outlaw swings on playgrounds, and claim they are doing it “for the children.” What a joke. What is a childhood without a awing, and what is a home without a hearth?
Don’t you realize you have to destroy the forest in order to save the planet?
It ain’t the fireplace, it’s the fuel. Well cured hardwoods make very little smoke, but when the demand spikes, the percentages of pines and “green” woods go up and more smoke and dirtier chimneys.