4 ms·
There's no debating that inhaling (any kind of) smoke is pretty bad. For the rest of the article i'm gonna have to call bs. 1. Outside air: We're not talking a
by lapinot 6y ago
There's no debating that inhaling (any kind of) smoke is pretty bad. For the rest of the article i'm gonna have to call bs.
1. Outside air: We're not talking about cities. Burning stuff in dense habitation zones is stupid. Sibling comments have hinted at atmospheric inversion, which is a localized and largely exceptional effect. Also: it's not too hard to take that into account and have a fire at nights and during winter, periods during which people aren't too much out.
2. Inside air: Any well designed and well tended fire-place (and its associated well-dried wood) generates no smoke in the room. If it does you're doing in wrong. If you intend to heat your home you should go for a closed stove, if you intend to cook you should have a well ventilated open-furnace and learn to use it right. Source: my childhood home at the country-side heated exclusively (hot water was electric) with a stove in the living room and an open furnace in the kitchen.
3. Deforestation: we have too much wood. Apart from rain-forests, at "occidental latitudes" most forests are growing (at least i know for sure in france). In my country-side some farmer neighbor always had spare wood to sell, from cutting trees around their fields (of course you have to do it intelligently: not cut the younger ones, etc). A farm of a half a dozen hectares can be self-sufficient in heating wood (source: neighbors).
- dredmorbius 6y ago"Too much wood" is only an artefact of recent industrialised use of coal, oil, and nuclear energy. Through the 19th century, deforestation was rampant in Europe and North America, and remains a problem throughout much the rest of the world. Largely driven my small-scale fuelwood use. Industrial-scale charcoal-fired bronze, iron, and glass-smelting use prodigious amounts of wood fuel, multiples of the yielded product mass.
- lapinot 6y agoAren't you contradicting yourself with the industrial uses point? I don't have any strong refs but my understanding is that 19th c. deforestation was driven by growing population, which isn't a problem in europe for much of the foreseeable future. Btw there have been big advances in forest management and forest-compatible agriculture (agroforestry and intercropping in general).
- dredmorbius 6y agoDeforestation well-predated the 19th century, and increased at rates greater than population growth, strongly driven by novel or expanded uses. See Vaclav Smil, Energy and Civilization, on energy use generally. Jed O. Kaplan; Kristen M. Krumhardt; Niklaus Zimmermann, "The prehistoric and preindustrial deforestation of Europe' (10.1016/j.quascirev.2009.09.028 http://gen.lib.rus.ec/scimag/10.1016%2Fj.quascirev.2009.09.028 http://gen.lib.rus.ec/scimag/10.1016%2Fj.quascirev.2009.09.0...) gives an overview of trends and some uses. Wikipedia has a generally accurate though poorly sourced article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_forest_in_Central_Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_forest_in_Centr...
- lapinot 6y agoThanks, i'll look into that.
- swiley 6y agoI grew up with wood heat, lots of people just burn wood in the open after clearing it and often will pay you to take it. No other energy source is so cheap, but it’s quite a niche thing. As many other commenters note you should never burn wood in a populated area but there’s an incredible amount of space in the US that’s very sparsely populated.
- 7952 6y agoSurely the effect on health is mostly the same regardless of population density (if you ignore building size). A wood burner in a small village is still having a negative health effect. Just with fewer people than a dense suburb. Does that make it OK? If you are just damaging the health of 50 people or ten, or just your own family does that make it OK? Also, in my area you can smell the wood smoke outside. That means that it is also getting into peoples houses. A chimney on the top of your house is still very low to the ground. It doesn't just go away when it exits the chimney.