Essay by Eric Worrall
As British energy prices and home heating spiral out of the reach of ordinary people, affluent greens are campaigning for their poorer neighbours to be forbidden from staying warm by burning wood.
Log burner ban warning as ‘harmful’ impacts pinpointed: ‘Like 750 HGV exhausts!’
ENVIRONMENTAL campaigners are calling on Britons to “protect your neighbours” and stop using log burners as using them is like having 750 diesel trucks pumping their exhaust into your living room – including those marketed as “eco-friendly”.
11:00, Sun, Jun 26, 2022 | UPDATED: 12:38, Sun, Jun 26, 2022
Only stoves that meet the ecodesign standard can be legally sold as of this year in the UK and EU, but experts said that the PM2.5 pollution – which comes from wood-burning – hasn’t been reduced.
According to the Forum of International Respiratory Societies’ Environmental Committee, PM2.5 is especially harmful to health as it can pass through the lungs into the bloodstream and then be carried around the body and lodge in organs.
Statistics also show that there are at least 40,000 early deaths a year attributed to wood burning in Europe.
The source of the original HGV figure is a report by the European Environmental Bureau, which looked at the amount of PM2.5 emissions given off by the wood stove compared to the amount generated by HGVs.
…
A Defra spokesperson said: “Air pollution has reduced significantly since 2010, with nitrogen oxide levels down by 44 percent and PM2.5 down 18 percent since 2010.”
In response to the statement, Ms Hartshorn said that the Governmental department “always say that” but the findings from the “National Audit Office (NAO) report said nitrogen oxide, which is from cars, has dropped but pollution from PM2.5, including from wood-burning stoves hasn’t”.
…
Read more: https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1629751/log-burner-ban-wood-smoke-air-pollution-mums-for-lungs-defra
The UK already has a powerful clean air act which could be used to stop wood burning, but enforcement is less than universal.
I used to burn lots of wood when I lived in Britain, we didn’t have gas and the electricity was ridiculously expensive. The wood was delivered by a guy who was referred by one of my neighbours. I somehow always forgot to ask for a receipt, I was grateful for affordable home heating.
The British Government admits fuel poverty rates are unacceptably high, a situation which will only get worse in the light of recent price hikes. The UK also suffers a substantial excess winter deaths, 17,280 excess winter deaths in 2018-19. 2019-2020 was a horror year, 28,300, and 2020-21 even worse, at 63,000.
Obviously Covid was the big issue after 2019, and its difficult to separate poor indoor air quality from other factors in previous years. But everyone who has experienced cold weather knows severe cold would be more of a problem for people’s health, than a little smoke. There is a reason our ancestors have been using fire to stay warm, for at least the last few million years.
If greens get their way, and the last affordable form of home heating is further restricted, I suspect a lot more people are going to die from cold than the number who currently die from wood smoke pollution.
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Burn wood for making electricity, good.
Burn wood for heating the house, bad.
Ignorant idiots: They think that
wood -> heath + loss1 -> mecanical work + loss2 -> electricity -> heath
is better than
wood -> heath…
Modern Wood stoves are efficient, and burn many of the toxins that used to be exhausted straight into the air. Makes me wonder if someone could build a clean, for a measure of clean, coal burning furnace.
If everyone burned wood the forests would dispear in one winter, but there is ample coal, if only some way can be devised to burn it more or less cleanly.
And even as I type this I fully understand that even if you actually figured out a way to strip out everything but co2, it would not be allowed.
Let’s keep it simple, folks. “Greens = communists”. Total control of everything, everyone is all they ask for. I say let them set the example by living without the modern conveniences supplied by the evil fossil fuels.
Like that will ever happen. Pfffft.
The EPA tried to show PM2.5 to be deadly. When their tests on human volunteers, not telling them that they expected them to die, failed, with only on woman withdrawing due to asthma, they buried the finding. There were no other symptoms although they exposed the subject to many times the environmental PM2.5 that they claimed to Congress was lethal.
This is all about created a new boogeyman to worry about in order to impose more oppressive and wrong regulations. Bringing down the poorer people is the goal.
Not only the high exposure, but selected for the study those that already were cardio-vascular compromised. THEY INTENDED TO KILL THOSE PEOPLE!!
An interesting thread. I live in the north of England, and have been thinking of getting a wood burner; perhaps I should do so before the inevitable ban. Charles, do you have a reference or link for the EPA story on PM2.5?
The Daily Express is not a reliable news source… they were among UK tabloids who recently reported a non existent fat Russian general
They get more right than the Graun.
We’re still looking for those 50 million climate refugees that the Graun told us would be roaming the globe by 2010.
Thats a really intelligent argument : attack the publisher and not the veracity of the content….. If fright-bat toff Jemima Hartshorn and the green cult ‘ Mum’s for Lung’s have been misquoted or misrepresented by the Daily Express then why are there no complaints Todd Huffman ….Sorry – ‘Griff ” …I must have you confused with someone else …Shouldn’t they be spending their time campaigning to ban the millions of tons of polluting woodchip biomass shipped from the United States each year to be incinerated in United Kingdom power stations only to be classified as a ‘carbon offsets ‘ ? Or like all fascist bullies do they just prefer to control private citizens personal choices hiding behind a cause ?
Nice photograph of a traditional suburban open fireplace, from Montreal. These are now banned there, ostensibly to reduce smog. It is claimed that wood burning contributes 39% of particulates whereas transportation is responsible for 45%.
https://montreal.ca/en/topics/solid-fuel-burning-stoves-and-fireplaces
You have to have a low particulate emissions insert, and it has be to be registered etc., so there is a whole bureaucracy set up for this. You can’t burn it at all if a smog warning is declared. Remember Montreal has inspectors who measure lettering on signs to make sure English lettering is half the size of French.
My fireplace insert out here on the bald prairie works great even at –40.
I hope the funeral homes are stocking up on coffins.
Look! Even more good paying union jobs—making coffins!
Only for burials comrade – cremations is banned!
I think that the mayor of Paris tried to ban wood burning home heaters in around 2014. But decided discretion was the better part of valour and did not implement it. Diesel cars were an easier target when it came to Parisian pollution.
Us Brits let fonctionnaires walk all over us.
YES BUT …… They cut down trees in the USA …… make pellets from the wood ….. move the pellets to a SHIP …… move that ship to the UK ……. move those pellets to a BRITISH power station …… THEN BURN THOSE WOOD PELLETS …… to make electricity for British homes ……. Yes and they say this is GREEN and Environmentally sound ….. MADNESS !!!
The main question is what causes more excess deaths, the smoke from a wood fire or the lack of heat caused by not having a wood fire? This is a simple optimization problem.
The top photo of a fireplace may be the description of a “log burner”. But it is not a good way to heat a room.
A modern wood burning heater is closed (there may be a window, if you want to see flames) and in a tightly closed house may need an intake from the outside for the oxygen supply.
It will also have a catalytic burner (sometimes called a converter or combustor) that will consume most of the objectionable particles from wood burning. Such a unit is a useful modern appliance, where possible. With the UK’s Drax Power Station burning wood, such units should be acceptable.
There is a place called “Yorkshire Stoves’ and others that offer these in the UK. In Washington State, I have a Blaze King, made in the state.
You mean like this one.
For the sake of a Green. inequitable, and exclusive world (GIE comparable to DIE), it is imperative to mitigate greening, as well as renewable/reliable/efficient/hydrocarbon and nuclear-derived energy. Say no to trees, no to CO2, and all your carbon-based entities, too.
So, comparing the particulates output from the particulate filter on a HGV exhaust to that of a woodburning stove is comparing virtually nothing to virtually nothing, but the bigger virtually nothing is many times bigger than the smaller virtually nothing? According to the Ecoloons, the emissions from each wildfire we survive should have been lethal to vast numbers. The only practical solution to eliminate wildfires is to burn as much wood as possible in efficient, and extremely low emission stoves. Cut down the forests to prevent smoke from wild forest fires from finishing us all off! Better eliminate the grass too – grass fires are awfully smoky. The Northern Ireland RHI which paid farmers to burn off woodchips (to heat empty barns) might just be a practice run for the lunatics running the asylum. Bunkum, the lot of it!
PM2.5 has not been studied in any meaningful way.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/06/04/the-epas-unethical-pm2-5-air-pollution-experiments/
I suspect it is linear thinking from the fact that cigarette smoke is about that size – 2 microns. Humans, and I suppose all creatures evolved during a few million years of repeating continental glacial cycles. The grinding action of moving ice over rock created an abundance of fine detritus that was windblown after ice retreat, creating loess (silt) deposits 10s of metres thick over 100s of thousands of sq km on every continent. Up to 20% of these deposits is in the 2.5micron size
The lungs and bronchia have fine motile ‘hairs’ called cilia that move such fine particles in a mucous layer upwards to the throat where it can be coughed up. This is the reason that it takes 30yrs or more before smoking overcomes you. In fact, constant taxing of the lungs in smoking eventually stills the cilia and the mucous simply collects in
the lungs – this is emphysema.
We also evolved with smoke from grass and forest fires. We handle this with no problem in intermittent haze. Soluble particles like fine silica are dangerous, though. The gov research is about the same on this as climate non-science (probably the source of the word nonsense).
Is this before or after banning Drax and the clear cutting of North America? Griff, we need some clarification here.
Import the heat via large steam pipes from Norway. /s
It’s only a matter of time before the lunatics start a campaign for us all to wear noxious gas meters in our underwear. We could get ahead of the curve and insist all ecofabulists wear bullshit detectors on their faces.
The way wood heating has been attacked in Canada is by making any place with a woodstove uninsurable unless all sorts of conditions were met. This means that most of those who heat with wood are the poor who do not carry insurance. Unfortunately they are also the ones most likely to have seriously unsafe arrangements. There have been 3 house fires in our small community of 1200 this year.
After 9/11, insurance companies really, really clamped down on stoves & chimneys. Putting the
stove in a separate small shed & piping the heat into the house was one way around that, if you
had the space.
<i>If greens get their way, and the last affordable form of home heating is further restricted, I suspect a lot more people are going to die from cold</i>
A quick look at the comments over at places such as the Gruniad will demonstrate that, for many, this is a feature not a bug.
‘Statistics also show that there are at least 40,000 early deaths a year attributed to wood burning in Europe.’
But statistics also show that 87.5% of statiticians are liars and just twist the data to show what they want it to show.
It is useful to know that wood fires make smoke particles with a median aerodynamic diameter of 0.6 microns. Wood makes nearly no particles larger than 1.0 microns. The comment about wood smoke “getting into the blood stream” is true to an extent, but not nearly as true for wood as for diesel which makes vast clouds of nanoparticles in the 10-20 nanometre range. Believe it or not, very little is known about the health effects of such nanoparticles. There are lots of claims, assertions and talk, but little actual data.
One of the green energy claims is that burning “solid fuels” is harmful, as if the fuel contains particles waiting to be released; that the stove has nothing to do with it.
Why then are there EPA 2022 rated stoves? The fuel is the same, the emissions are different. They can’t have it both ways. Smoke is unburned fuel. Good stoves/fireplaces burn the smoke. The problem is reduced.
Energy poverty is very real in the UK. The excess deaths numbers due to cold and chronic underheating cited as well below those one usually sees. Let’s watch that space.
For those interested there is a new version of CSA B415.1 – the test method and calculations for wood burning appliances. It is used in the USA and Canada.
Some in the UK want to ban wood burning. Does that include pellets? Briquettes? Seasoned hardwood? Why not ban polluting appliances instead? You don’t ban dogs because one dog barks.
PM2.5 refers to pretty tiny particles, generated in a variety of ways. They are so small they get everywhere. To trace movements, scientists have used gold particles, as you can identify them, even when so tiny.
Naturally, any good scientist who finds these “alien” particles in practically every part of the body has to believe they are doing harm. Hence the WHO proclaims huge numbers of deaths each year – or at least reduced QALYs.
There is one flaw in the argument: no-one has ever shown that the presence of these tiny particles does any harm at all to anyone. Presence does not mean damage. It appears to me to be an almighty scam. Now why is that familiar?
This is exactly what the WEF want in the UN’s Agenda 2030 plan. And Farmer Gates & his cohorts won’t be planting trees on their massive land acquisitions for the masses either. Then what??
Burn good Welsh coal in your fireplace or stove, but open a window.
The term ” Got wood? ” may make a return to common parlance.
Welsh gold.