[Stoves] The Economist

[Norbert Senf]

One example comes to mind that I am personally familiar with, although not
with quantitative data.
Here in Quebec, we had a disastrous ice storm about 20 years ago that took
out much of the power grid, and got very close to requiring the evacuation
of Montreal in the dead of winter. The worst hit areas south of Montreal
were without power for 6 weeks and more. Prior to that, the power had been
so reliable that, for example, farmers did not have matches in the house,
and there were commercial poultry barns that could not sustain chickens for
more than 30 minutes without powered ventilation.

Many people were forced to move into shelters. Whether you could stay in
your house or not depended on whether you had wood heat, since oil and gas
furnaces require electricity. There were a number of house fires because
masonry fireplaces, never intended for serious heating, were burned day and
night and ignited adjacent combustible framing that did not have the
code-specified clearances.

The most interesting thing was that firewood became THE strategic
commodity, overnight. Local volunteers from our region trucked dump-truck
loads of firewood to the worst affected areas. The firewood would be gone
before the dump trucks were even fully emptied.

After the ice storm, many people in Montreal installed cheap sheet metal
zero-clearance wood burning fireplaces into their condos and apartments. As
a result, Montreal now has a pretty bad air quality problem in the winter,
that it did not have before. To the point that they have banned all new
wood burning installations except for pellet stoves and EPA Phase II
certified woodstoves. And require the removal of old uncertified burners.
.......... Norbert

On Fri, Sep 7, 2018 at 4:05 PM, Nikhil Desai <pienergy2008 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Crispin:
>
> I am glad I quit my decades-long addiction to the Economist. With
> economists like these, who needs zealots of environmental health?
>
> I had begun a thread on this article a few days ago, mentioning the
> proposal to tax $1,150 per wood stove per year in "inner London."
>
> If UK had a legal system similar to that in the US, I would say, "Bring it
> on!!" I would challenge the Mayor of London or the UK government to produce
> air circulation models taking wood stove ventilation at particular times a
> day, month and year, to produce evidence of incremental ingestion of
> chemicals causally linked to a particular disease profile, and justify the
> tax in terms of avoided public health care costs. (If there are private
> costs of ingestion, I would be prepared to fight a tort case.)
>
> I am not saying pollutants don't affect health; rather, that in fact is
> the definition of pollution. It is ridiculous to equate emissions to
> pollution, as the graph copied below from the Economist supposedly implies.
>
> Even taking the graph as a beginning point of argument - there is no
> pollution without emission, after all, whether from natural sources or fuel
> combustion, two questions arise: a) Which emissions affect whom? (London
> wood heating stoves versus road transport versus "other"), and b) how does
> the proposed tax cover just the right amount of externalized costs,
> compared to other means of controlling emissions, concentrations, and
> ingestion, or for that matter, treating the purported disease?
>
> I tried to find the BMJ "article" arguing for the $1,150/yr/stove tax on
> the basis of "polluter pays", neglecting the temerity of such claims. (The
> real-life application of "polluter pays" is rare; it is a fashionable
> hoity-toity phrase among self-styled planners of the world.)
> From what I can tell, there was no "article", just an editorial opinion -
> at Air pollution almost as bad as everyone smoking a cigarette a day
> <https://www.bmj.com/content/360/bmj.k167/rr-3> BMJ 2018; 360 doi: https:/
> /doi.org/10.1136/bmj.k167 (Published 24 January 2018)
> This irrational exuberance - say, health hysteria - is based on dubious
> economics, BUT the claims on science cannot be dismissed easily. What if
> all of the following claims are valid?
>
>
> "That leaves air pollution, which is much deadlier than previously
> thought[3]. In Launceston, Tasmania, wintertime deaths from respiratory
> disease fell by 28% and cardiovascular disease by 20% when woodsmoke
> pollution was reduced by 17 ug/m3 PM2.5 in winter. Year round, for men, the
> reductions were 23% (respiratory) and 18% (cardiovascular)[4].
>
> In Canada, deaths from ischemic heart disease increased by 30% when annual
> PM2.5 exposure increased by just 10 ug/m3[5]. The increase in hospital
> admissions for heart attacks in another Canadian study was greatest when
> the particles came from winter wood heating. On such days, a 10 ug/m3
> increase 3-day mean PM2.5 increased hospital admissions for heart attacks
> by 38% in those aged 65+[6]. In Hong Kong, a 10 ug/m3 increase annual PM2.5
> exposure increased the risk of cancer by 22%, including a 42% increase for
> upper digestive tract cancers and 80% for breast caners in women[7].
>
> Population exposure of 10 ug/m3 PM2.5 above background could therefore
> cause twice the health damage of current UK smoking levels. The damage from
> London’s average of 13.7 ug/m3 PM2.5 above background[8] is expected to be
> even worse. London had extraordinary levels of health-hazardous pollution -
> 3-day mean PM2.5 of 78 ug/m3 in Kensington and 74 ug/m3 at the Sir John
> Cass School- on 22-24 January 2017, when about half the pollution was
> attributed to domestic wood burning[9].
>
> Many people do not realize that the UK’s largest single source of PM2.5 -
> 37,200 tonnes - is domestic wood burning, representing 2.7 times the 13,900
> tonnes emitted by road transport[10]. An eco-labelled wood stove is allowed
> to pollute as much as 25 ten-year-old diesel trucks. When measured under
> ideal conditions (good air intake and small pieces of dry wood), real-life
> emissions of an eco-labelled wood stove were 600 times worse than a small
> diesel truck[11]. Despite this, Defra’s consultation on domestic burning
> (open until 27/2/2018) “is not seeking to prevent” the use or installation
> of new stoves, simply “encourage consumers to switch to cleaner wood
> burning”[12].
>
> Such strategies have not worked in other countries. Despite extremely
> strict regulations, and substantial public education on how to burn
> cleanly, real-life emissions of 5 stoves in Christchurch, NZ, averaged 9.7
> g/kg, 12 times worse than the lab test results averaging 0.82 g/kg[13].
>
> Despite the mild climate in Sydney, Australia, the average new wood stove
> emits more PM2.5 per year than 1,000 petrol cars. Only 5% of households use
> wood as the main form of heating, yet chemical fingerprinting of
> particulate pollution showed that 25% of Sydney’s premature deaths from air
> pollution were from domestic wood heating. Estimated health costs amount to
> thousands of dollars per stove per year[14].
>
> A New Scientist review in 2017 concluded that “log-burning stoves are
> harming our health and speeding up global warming”. As well as strokes and
> heart attacks, the mixture of PM2.5 and toxic chemicals emitted by wood
> stoves increases the risk of lung diseases, cancers, cot deaths, asthma,
> Alzheimer's, genetic damage in babies and reduced IQ, anxiety and attention
> deficit when children start school[15]."
>
>
> My objection to Kirk Smith/IHME/WHO HAP GBD work is two-fold: i) There is
> no there there (meaning, no measurements, nor a tested theory) AND ii)
> illegitimate policy opinions about "truly health protective", "no
> stacking":, etc.
>
> By contrast, the BMJ editorial claims real evidence of deaths by cause
> (Tasmania, Canada). I am prepared to read and if necessary debunk this
> purported "evidence" (mono-causality, PM2.5 equitoxicity,
> cohort-specificity), but you can tell that the British medical
> establishment - Lancet or BMJ - is ready, able, and willing to shut down
> wood stoves by fiat.
>
> As usual, damn the poor. After all, this is the Economist.
>
> The Economist sometimes finances Lancet projects. I am aware of the Lancet
> Commission on Planetary Health, and perhaps also the Lancet Commission on
> Health Finance.
>
> The UK NHS has bought into the GBD method while the US NIH has not. Not
> that it means all that much in actual decision-making; recall the
> philosophy article I shared here on social dis-value of premature death.
>
> The core intellectual issue is the assumption of PM2.5 equitoxicity. PM2.5
> concentration is only an INDICATOR of pollution, it is not pollution per
> se, which is a matter of specific chemical composition and of course, of
> ingestion.
>
> IEA Coal, which grew out of UKAEA I believe, has remarkable work on
> cleaner combustion and related siting, controls, etc. for coal-fired power
> plants. There is no reason that similar technological advancement of the
> last 80 years or so cannot be applied for small-scale residential,
> commercial, and industrial uses.
>
> The ideological issue is the public belief that things do not and cannot
> change. and must not be allowed to change; to wit, coal is a dirty fuel.
>
> The only way USEPA got around to justifying its NSPS for residential wood
> heaters, or the Clean Power Plan order of Obama, or for that matter the
> MATS rule for coal-fired power plants, is by computing "avoided premature
> deaths". (aDALYs are not yet accepted in US regulatory decision-making as
> far as I know. EPA and Kirk Smith were too ready to dump intellectual
> deceit on poor countries and particularly poorer people.)
>
> Nikhil
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Nikhil Desai
> (US +1) 202 568 5831
> *Skype: nikhildesai888*
>
>
> On Fri, Sep 7, 2018 at 12:33 PM, Crispin Pemberton-Pigott <
> crispinpigott at outlook.com> wrote:
>
>> Dear Friends
>>
>> This article was linked from the Alliance for Green Heat to the Economist:
>>
>> https://www.economist.com/britain/2018/08/25/wood-burning-st
>> oves-the-picturesque-polluters
>>
>> The last line is interesting:
>>
>> "The black smoke will continue to waft from the chimneys of well-to-do
>> homes until wood-burners go back out of fashion."
>>
>> It is this type of ignorance about what smoke is, what products are
>> available on the market and what "fashion" means that produces such a
>> comment. The author apparently believes that wood "contains smoke".
>>
>> Because of the massive rise in the cost of heating a home (due to
>> misbegotten energy policies) many people are installing a wood burning
>> stove. That is not a "fashion" it is survival.  The fuel is attacked as the
>> problem, not the poorly designed stoves.
>>
>> Anyone want to write an article for the Economist?
>>
>> Regards
>> Crispin
>>
>
>


-- 
Norbert Senf
Masonry Stove Builders
25 Brouse Road, RR 5
Shawville Québec J0X 2Y0
819.647.5092
www.heatkit.com
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