One step closer to permanent wood heat ban in California?

[ultrarunner]

New homes don't have wood fireplaces and you will almost never find a multiunit with a wood burning fireplace... leaving only single family homes for a certain era.

Many that remodel opt to covert to gas because they receive credits when doing so...

Then many chimneys were damaged in Loma Prieta Earthquake and removed... other were rebuilt to stringent earthquake standards and now the owners are being told to remove them... sheer madness...

Again... a chimney is nothing without a fire... no crime has been committed or violation and if this is about smoke that would be the end of it... the mere fact chimney destruction/ban is happening is all about control...

Guilt by association is wrong in so many ways...

 

[dave1949]

New homes don't have wood fireplaces and you will almost never find a multiunit with a wood burning fireplace... leaving only single family homes for a certain era.

Many that remodel opt to covert to gas because they receive credits when doing so...

Then many chimneys were damaged in Loma Prieta Earthquake and removed... other were rebuilt to stringent earthquake standards and now the owners are being told to remove them... sheer madness...

Again... a chimney is nothing without a fire... no crime has been committed or violation and if this is about smoke that would be the end of it... the mere fact chimney destruction/ban is happening is all about control...

Guilt by association is wrong in so many ways...

I see two options.
1) Get your neighborhood declared as a Historic or Culturally Significant District. Then every architectural detail is sacred.
2) Get going on a grass root's revolt against the Air District. Save the Hearths might be a good slogan.

I dunno, it seems like you have to fight politics with politics even while resenting the need to do so.

 

[KubotaOwner]

Jesus Christ! :thumbdown:
Its difficult to understand how gun control legislation never gets any traction in the US yet these crazy proposed controls seem to get all kinds of traction...
Whats next!
Cheers,
Jon

We have more than enough gun control laws here already. Absurd gun control laws are stymied by a little thing called the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

 

[ultrarunner]

I see two options.
1) Get your neighborhood declared as a Historic or Culturally Significant District. Then every architectural detail is sacred.
2) Get going on a grass root's revolt against the Air District. Save the Hearths might be a good slogan.

I dunno, it seems like you have to fight politics with politics even while resenting the need to do so.

I wonder if there could be a new class called conscientious objector?

 

[Oldpath05]

So what's the main heating source in California if one wants to take the chill off, and what's main source of generating electricity to get the chill on in the summer, what ever the power souse is, I bet it's causing a lot more environmental damage then firewood in fire place's/wood stove's across the whole country, and no one cares about environmental damage or pollution, as long as it's not in their own back yard where they mow the lawn and have barbecue's. The way I see it, burning wood causes no more long lasting pollution than a blank hole in a snow bank, wet, dry or covered with ice and my definition of long lasting pollution is Japan's Fukushima power plant.

One bit of good news near me, a business man in Searsport is going to start a bio-mass woodchip facility, for to export the woodchips to Europe, I guess they have a lot of wood fired powered plants there. If that takes off, it could create a lot of local jobs, everything from planting trees to cutting them down.

 

[ultrarunner]

Natural Gas is the preferred method to heat and is touted as being very green...

California electricity is a mixed bag... hydro (When there is enough water), gas fired generation, oil fired, 5% solar in the state, wind turbine and geothermal with some nuclear although some of the plants have been decommissioned.

There is a biomass steam electrical plant and maybe more...

The thing with hydro is no new dams and some are actually being removed... just about every large hydro project is dead on arrival.

 

[KennyG]

An interesting problem has been developing in the California Electricity market - too much renewable power. Although many "experts" have been telling us we can go to almost all renewables, the intermittency of the renewables is causing problems with the grid and the conventional power plants that now become the backup for the renewables. One of the reasons it's so hard to justify a nuclear plant in many parts of the US is that the renewables get priority, making high cost base load plants less economic, driving us to use more natural gas.

California's shift toward renewables makes energy harder to manage - San Jose Mercury News

 

[3930dave]

Natural Gas is the preferred method to heat and is touted as being very green...

California electricity is a mixed bag... hydro (When there is enough water), gas fired generation, oil fired, 5% solar in the state, wind turbine and geothermal with some nuclear although some of the plants have been decommissioned.

There is a biomass steam electrical plant and maybe more...

The thing with hydro is no new dams and some are actually being removed... just about every large hydro project is dead on arrival.

I like natgas myself. Furnace and hot water are on it here. Many rural folks don't have that option.

Worth considering:

With Natgas the cleanest hydrocarbon we have, why aren't more cars running it ?

Hydro projects being stalled or removed, while 39% of USA electricity still comes from coal ?

Parts of Cali effectively still uses lots of electricity from coal:

California’s Dirty Secret: The Five Coal Plants Supplying Our Electricity | KQED's Climate Watch

The "optics" and "eco" voting-block is what matters.

Stewart Brand's last book is worth a read. Amongst his points - The Greenies need to get a grip/get real. He says it much more eloquently, backed by good reasoning.

Coming from one of the founders of the movement, his points are worth considering.

If we were really serious about air quality, we'd ban imports from China. It's a small planet; in exchange for the cheap trinkets we get from there, we are mostly why they burn so much coal.

Rgds, D.

 

[Oldpath05]

Natural Gas is the preferred method to heat and is touted as being very green...

California electricity is a mixed bag... hydro (When there is enough water), gas fired generation, oil fired, 5% solar in the state, wind turbine and geothermal with some nuclear although some of the plants have been decommissioned.

There is a biomass steam electrical plant and maybe more...

The thing with hydro is no new dams and some are actually being removed... just about every large hydro project is dead on arrival.

The only problem with a mix bag heat source is it always creates pollution or environmental damage somewhere else. I heard natural gas is extracted by fracking the ground with a big danger of polluting ground water, in my mind at all cost don't screw up drinking water.

Hydro sounds good for electric heat, if the fish can get up stream and the rafting people can go down stream, but every week I here on the news California is going dry, every year it's on fire burning up, and everyone is waiting for the big one to happen.

Oil, if everyone stopped using oil for heat, there would a lot less stress in the Middle East and a lot less money to buy bullets to shoot back at us, and the best part, gas/diesel would be a lot cheaper, I'm from time of $.29/gal. gas when people would go hunting for food and up from the ground comes a bubbling crude....

Wind power turbines are being built here, with a lot issues with them, nobody wants them in there back yard because they give off a low noise hum all the time and they block the view and some think the birds that need eye glasses might fly into them.

This is why with just these 4 top issues, I like wood for a heat source, and bio mass, wood pellets for generating electricity, in 50 year we have a tree ready to harvest for heat, 100 years logs ready to build a house with, 1000 years you have a giant redwood, ready to build many house's, so the only real problem with wood is that it burns, but the good thing about wood is that it burns.

 

[RoyJackson]

People do speak well of Quadrafire.

Where are these stoves built? Imports?