"... you are still emitting generating the most polluted air you can legally breath in Europe."
Dispersion is a thing. Do you understand the rationale for chimneys, beyond avoiding carbon monoxide poisoning?
Dispersion is a thing. Do you understand the rationale for chimneys, beyond avoiding carbon monoxide poisoning?
> During the cooler winter months, more than one-third of particulate pollution comes from wood smoke. On some days, in certain areas, wood smoke can account for up to 90 percent of particulate pollution.
> On cold, calm days, wood smoke can become trapped close to the ground by an inversion layer, typically formed when a layer of warm air acts as a lid over a layer of cooler air. Inversions prevent the air below from rising, which causes pollutants to build up.
Also, frequency and volume counter dispersion pretty well. That's why cities are smoggy: all the pollution from cars and cooking (lots of tailpipes, vents, or "chimneys") adds up. These cities are far worse environments for people specifically because of the air quality, which leads to higher rates of asthma, general respiratory disease, cardiovascular disease, developmental issues in children, and cognitive impairment.
There's a lot of defense of wood-burning stoves in this thread, from "get a catalytic stove" to "it's natural", but there's been a lot of research on this. It's bad, it's always been bad. I get the appeal: you can buy a piece of property, get off the grid, heat your home totally self-sufficiently. I've watched a lot of off-the-grid YouTube, I'm into it haha.
But heat's a really inconvenient problem if you face the fact that burning wood is very unhealthy, and very bad for society/climate change at scale. Maybe you can do geothermal, but not everywhere--plus you can't DIY, and getting a crew to come out isn't 100%.
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Overall I agree with the sentiment that nuclear should have been the solution. I buy into the indictment of the greens; they got most things right, but it really does seem that they've succeeded in categorizing nuclear as a dirty fuel, and that will cost us significantly in the short term as we experience the dip between titrating off of fossil/nuclear fuels and ramping up our wind/solar/geo/tidal power.
That seems wild to me. I know alternate histories are hard, maybe we avoided a nuclear apocalypse by not converting all of our power generation to nuclear and I'm Monday-morning-quarterbacking the whole thing from an alternate timeline where humanity still exists to the degree where we still have things like internet forums. But a lot of things would be a lot better if we'd done that--and not blown up Earth.
[0]: https://cfpub.epa.gov/oarweb/woodstove/index.cfm?fuseaction=...