[Stoves] The Economist: Wood-burning stoves, the picturesque polluters

[Andrew Heggie]

On Wed, 29 Aug 2018 at 22:41, Nikhil Desai <pienergy2008 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> This suggests a way forward - taxing wood stoves.  Wood-burners must "go back out of fashion", meaning if not stoves, the people in whose name.
>
> Nikhil
>
> https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/08/27/wood-burning-stoves-the-picturesque-polluters


I'm hardly surprised there has been no interest on [stoves] about this
as it is too UK centric, it also relates to a wealthy nation's
lifestyle choices rather than an absolute need for wood burning. Most
people using wood for cooking have no choice. BTW I operate a wood
burner in winter and it wouldn't impact on my finances greatly if I
used natural gas instead.


There is a graphic in the article which I find interesting as it shows
an overall halving of particulates in the period 1990 to present and
I'm sure I lived through much worse before that.

It shows a drastic  reduction in particulates from agriculture in the
period 1990 to 95 which must reflect the ban on cereal straw burning
post harvest.

Again whilst the non specific "other" sources of particulates has
declined similarly  I note it contributes about a third so if it were
possible to reduce all particulates from domestic and industrial
combustion and road transport to zero the background would still be
30% of the current total.

This reflects a bit on what we discussed in the Malawi study you
cannot expect biomass cooking being replaced by "clean" cookers to
have any effect unless you also eliminate other sources in the local
environment.

Andrew