A Bloomberg feature begins “In the dark, chilly winter months, it’s not uncommon to walk down one of London’s more affluent residential streets without noticing the smell of wood smoke. Bittersweet and pungent, the odor typically comes from an appliance that has become the epitome of British middle-class aspiration: the wood-burning stove.” Ah, right out of Dickens? Well, perhaps Bleak House or some such, because it turns out that while wood fires are charming and indeed carbon neutral for those who care about such things, the activists are saying wood smoke will kill us and the government is thinking of banning them. Along with gas stoves, gas furnaces, water heaters that work and other frivolous upper-middle-class status symbols. But the killjoys aren’t done yet. Just as the heat goes off, (h/t David Blackmon) Euractiv snarls that “Your ugly Christmas jumper is part of an environmental disaster”. There really is no pleasing some people.
Admittedly you could recruit us to the killjoy club with a certain line of sales chatter. Bloomberg Green notes that:
“Stoves have become popular partly because they meet a very contemporary hunger for cozy domesticity during troubled times. ‘Wood burners are just one of those aspirational middle-class things nowadays,’ says Tabitha Tew of north London fireplace and stove merchants Amazing Grates. ‘It’s like only eating red meat once a week, and having a crossbreed dog that doesn’t molt,’ she says.”
Frankly we have no idea what breed our dog is, because it’s not a status symbol. And we eat red meat more than once a week, because it is food. But even if we turn up our noses at the upturned noses of these particular clients of upscale fireplace stores, the key point is that it’s all about the bogus PM2.5 scare. And a battle of snobberies that we doubt anyone can win, or should.
The piece ends up saying it’s hard to know whether wood stoves are killing Tiny Tim or not because, one doctor explains:
“In the UK, people who tend to burn wood are often wealthier and therefore healthier, which makes showing the impact of wood burning challenging”.
Or maybe there isn’t an effect because like so many other appliances, modern wood stoves are so much cleaner and more efficient. But eventually they have to admit it’s not really about evidence:
“Ultimately, the real discomfort may not come from the smoke drifting across London’s streets, but from the realization that pleasures people once framed as responsible were never quite as clean as they hoped. In the age of climate anxiety, even coziness has a cost.”
And it’s not even about climate. It’s about you. And you are bad. You are an aesthetic and ecological disaster and the sooner you’re gone the better. And they must find some way to stop Christmas from coming, or if it does come keep it from being as fun as it used to be. As the sweater piece admits:
“Nasty jumpers may be just one of many soon-to-be-trashed items that proliferate during the festive season – think Christmas trees, tinsel, crackers, polyester Santa hats, not to mention the millions of unwanted gifts, the plastic and cardboard packaging and the carbon footprint of shopping centres and delivery vans. But they are as good a scapegoat as any other for the broader seasonal consumerist excess.”
Exactly. If you hate Christmas, and are looking for a scapegoat when people are partying and spending time with family and giving one another things and it makes your blood boil.
There really is no pleasing some people… and it’s a mug’s game to try.
Wood stoves are not carbon neutral. However, the EU, and presumably the UK as well, do indulge the fiction that wood stoves are carbon neutral by assuming , when wood is burned in a stove, the carbon dioxide thereby released is immediately taken up by trees growing in the forest where the wood that has been burned came from. That is, of course, by no means clear. Moreover, in terms of heating efficiency, wood stoves are much less efficient than oil or gas stoves.
Woodstoves may not be as efficiently in warming the environment as underfloor electric heating, but they are highly efficient in warming the soul on a cold winter's night.
Forget the stoves, the traitorous middle class trying to escape winter by flying to some warming threatened hell hole from Heathrow, will make use of the wood fired T2 Energy Centre which partly powers it. The fuel is "sustainably gathered" within 100 miles, although whether by "yonder peasants" using electric vehicles is not disclosed.
The riddle of Simon Fraser University now using their $33 million wood burning power plant conversion to warm the student protesters plotting their next logging sabotage is fuel for winter contemplation...as long as not by a now prohibited Vancouver fireplace. Add in the EU mandated burning of live trees shipped from the other side of the planet, instead of the long dead in the ground, next to which UK's Drax power plant was thoughtfully located 40 years ago, now seems to have fallen out of favor with the Greens as the fickle winds of protest weather change direction.