Indoor wood burning raises women’s lung cancer risk by 43%
sciencedirect.com
sciencedirect.com
https://www.samharris.org/blog/the-fireplace-delusion
> Once they have exited your chimney, the toxic gases (e.g. benzene) and particles that make up smoke freely pass back into your home and into the homes of others. (Research shows that nearly 70 percent of chimney smoke reenters nearby buildings.) Children who live in homes with active fireplaces or woodstoves, or in areas where wood burning is common, suffer a higher incidence of asthma, cough, bronchitis, nocturnal awakening, and compromised lung function. Among adults, wood burning is associated with more-frequent emergency room visits and hospital admissions for respiratory illness, along with increased mortality from heart attacks. The inhalation of wood smoke, even at relatively low levels, alters pulmonary immune function, leading to a greater susceptibility to colds, flus, and other respiratory infections. All these effects are borne disproportionately by children and the elderly.
I really wish indoor wood burning, especially if not used for heating but luxury, would be banned at least in cities
like wtf. is it legal to harass your neighbors with smell and toxic fumes every day just because you want to feel a bit comfy (to clarify: I mean comfy by having a fancy looking fire place you use additional to your normal heating system because you like how it looks)
sure there are countries and areas in countries where for various sociology economical reasons banning it isn't acceptable at all and should not be done
but a ~4 million city where one of the _most costly ways to heat_ is by burning wood logs it's a bit of a different story ;)
and I know some parts of the city are poor and use very old ovens, but funnily they have less of an smell issue (I can't judge the toxicity) because they tend to burn preprocessed pellets for heating instead of not necessary well suited or fully dry wood for the looks
it's kinda fascinating, some of this ovens are older then 70 years, some where build in when this houses where build ~120 years ago (but update)
they also are all health hazards as in you manually have to control the exhausts when starting them and if you mess that up (e.g. fall asleep) CO will leak into you apartment and might silently kill you ....
The gasoline fumes mixed with small particles that get kicked up are absolutely noxious and can't possibly be good for you.
This is especially egregious in dense suburban areas, where there's landscaping going on _every_ single day of the growing season.
Why only for landscaping? These fucks need to be banned, period. It was a huge mistake to ban them in vehicles while grandfathering all the old crap in. Unfortunately mechanics keep decade-old two-stroke junk alive, and spare parts aren't even banned.
If you ban that, inventory eventually depletes, and people shift to alternatives.
Similar to freon.
I would maintain a carve-out for chainsaws. Low use, specialty requirements, and electric alternatives can't replicate.
Easier said than done. You'd need to impose BATFE-style regulations and measures. You're talking about arresting people for selling partially manufactured parts, parts which they claim are actually for other things, plans for parts paired with uncut sheet metal, etc. Is a clutch illegal to manufacture if it happens to fit on some model of two-stroke motor, even though it could also be used for other things? Have fun getting tangled up in these weeds. And the only way you'd stand a chance of enforcing this is by threatening people with many years in prison for what are non-violent crimes.
People tolerate this sort of thing in the case of the BATFE because nobody really needs a machine gun, very few people have one in the first place, there's little parts commonality with other machines and because machine guns kill people in very visceral and obvious ways. But with two-stroke motors you have a whole ton of people who use these machines to save on huge amounts of labor (you're fucking with the way they put food on their table and pay rent, not just their fun at a gun range) and the alternatives are subpar. You exempt chainsaws from this, but that merely reflects what you are personally familiar with and consider reasonable. And even if the alternatives weren't subpar, you'd still be asking people to purchase new expensive machines instead of performing cheap repairs on machines they already own. Point is, the incentive and willingness to skirt two-stroke spare part bans would be much higher than with machine guns. Your bans would fail without extremely draconian enforcement.
Two stroke engine parts don't have a massive legally protected cult following like guns, nor are they high-cost many-times-repeated consumables like drugs. They're closer to antiques - some will collect them, most won't bother if they're not available.
Ban it and you'll stop major places from selling it, and minor places from widely advertising they have it. You won't stop anyone dead-set on continuing to do so, but you will stop most people because the cost will be higher and it'll be much harder to find.
With respect to the antique analogy, you have it completely backwards. Antiques are things which have outlasted their practical usefulness but are kept around anyway because people have some nostalgic or aesthetic affinity for them. Machine guns fall into this category; they are essentially fetishes (in the traditional nonsexual sense of the word). Virtually nobody is earning their living with machine guns. Two stroke motors on the other hand are in active use by thousands if not millions of people to earn a living. If they were in fact antiques, then they wouldn't be a problem in the first place because antiques aren't put to use. If you banned new production of two-stroke machines, the ones that already exist would gradually become antiques despite the existence of legal spare parts, and eventually the only people keeping them in running order would be the antique geeks who own it because they like it, not because they earn a living with it. The people who are actively earning a living with two stroke motors today are the people you [should] have a gripe with, the lawn care guys who run two-stroke leaf blowers in your neighborhood aren't antique collectors doing it for fun, they're guys trying to feed their children.
Yes they do, they're called dirtbikes and a large part of America enjoys riding them. Other countries use them in the scooter form factor. Could some of the use cases be covered by alternatives like the electric Surron? Sure. Will you successfully pass a law against them in the next 30 years? Not a chance.
Gun ownership is near 50%. It's constitutionally protected. Dirt bikes are neither.
I love the thing. I’ve felled trees that are up to 8 inches in diameter and done some real cleanup work around my property with it.
It might be possible to make something for me but the average heavy chainsaw user needs to be able to trek into the woods and spend significant time away from any power source. Furthermore, I want to be nimble and able to drop everything and run when a tree starts moving. A heavy weight strapped to my back for real tree work is a death trap.
Firefighters have even more stringent requirements for their chainsaws in highly demanding environments. If you want to convince anyone that an electric chainsaw is workable, convince them first. Everyone else will be easier.
I use my bigger chainsaws for bigger trees (just took down a mature Monterey Pine that dropped its last needle) and some Alaskan milling. The latter takes a lot of power for a single pass. I’m already lugging 22lbs just for the power head, making that electric with similar capacity to a tank or two of gas will be completely impractical in terms of weight. That’s especially so in rugged terrain.
Chainsaws are at the very corner of tools that have to be both portable, handheld, and very powerful. This means that their energy source should very dense. Lithium does not come close for the big saws.
Urban tree climbing arborists (that need a small saw to chop limbs while up in a tree) now sometimes use battery powered saws that run off of an "umbilical"- a cable off of the saw runs to a separate (backpack or other container) battery. These saws are among the smaller chainsaws (maybe a 12" bar, sized for chopping limbs). The other extreme is a saw for bucking and felling medium and large trees, which uses a MUCH more powerful motor and a 30" bar or bigger.
I would not recommend this chainsaw to the uninitiated buyer. It’s a lot of chainsaw and you only need money to buy the thing. Seriously, I’ve mentioned it to seasoned loggers and they raise an eyebrow and say as much. If I didn’t do Alaskan milling I wouldn’t have enough acreage to justify it.
Same can be said for car use. Majority of trips are a few miles and could be done by bike or replaced with transit.
because then you often don't even need to take the bus due to places you need to go to (e.g. super market) and places you come from (e.g. home) being much more intermixed/closer to each other
e.g. for me places to buy food, medicine, a doctor, dentist, fast food, train, bus, package station, kiosk, bakery, restaurant, cafe, a park like thing all in ~8min walking distance and I'm somewhat at the outer are of the city
still if you have disabilities and can't properly walk 8min you still need a car
If you live in an European big city where this problem doesn't exist, where women have no problem and especially no fear to use public transport late in the evening all by themselves, then consider yourself (and your SO) lucky.
It doesn’t need to be banned, it just needs stringent regulations to limit the particulate emissions. You can buy wood stoves today that emit less than half a gram per hour (0.5g/hr) of PM2.5 particulates. These modern wood stoves are also very efficient and beautiful to look at, so they provide a bit of luxury to go with their heating performance.
You say harass, I say enhance. I love when I can smell a neighbor burning wood, it's one of the best things in the world. And therein lies the reason why your wish isn't going to come to pass any time soon: we don't all agree that the thing you want to ban is bad.
>your wish isn't going to come to pass any time soon
It is coming to pass: for example, in the Bay Area, woodstoves and fireplaces have been banned in new construction since 2005.
It doesn't make much sense to install it there anyway, the climate isn't cold enough...
So don't assume that your appreciation of woodsmoke is widespread enough prevent its becoming illegal some day.
I mean a good campfire is hot, doesn't produce much smoke, goes quick up and high, usually not that smelly, ok who needs it.. (though we even these are quite toxic, so please a reasonable romantic evening campfire, and not a 5 hour bonfire on a hot and sunny day?) But unfortunately it is always not just that, but I need to smell a lot of carcinogenic smoke, green waste smell, or even worse plastic or other garbage smell, my cloyhes stink, my furniture stinks.. and we are also just past the time to just burn stuff.
(Noone here does this out of poorness bte.)
I pile it up and have a bonfire a few times a year.
I don't think it should be banned entirely though, that seems a bit extreme and likely to stir up controversy, even though it sure would be nice to have less smoke.
I don't quite get the appeal of indoor fires, most houses are so warm all winter I wouldn't want any more heat, but outdoor bonfires are a nice tradition, as long as they're not happening enough to kill people with fumes.
Banning wood stoves is like banning plastic bags. It's a superficial, empty gesture that is a drop in the bucket that makes no meaningful impact.
I'll continue to heat my cabin with wood, thank you.
The thing is more that people don't want to hear it, like at all. These fireplaces are a big status symbol and considered totally green and environment-friendly because it's wood, right, so it's renewable, so has to be good. That they have no filters and terrible firing, resulting in exhaust that would make an 80s diesel tractor blush in shame, nobody cares. It's natural, so it's eco, so it's green, so it's good and it's cozy. So fuck off.
But the coziness, positive emotional affiliation is definitely hard to overcome. Especially since it’s pretty much the smell and sound of bad burning itself that is so desirable.
Try it sometime and be surprised! People round up a bunch of common retorts: the smoke goes up, it smells good, it’s an old tradition, thousands of years, etc.
People think that smoke isn’t that bad for you if it doesn’t make you cough, because it doesn’t feel bad in the lungs.
The fireplace delusion taught me a lot about myself and my own mind, and humans in general. We fucking LOVE to fool ourselves into rationalizing our own preferences.
Keep in mind that modern wood stoves have catalytic combustors that burn the wood, then the smoke, then usually the smoke again.
They extract vastly more heat from the wood, and they emit vastly less toxic gasses out the stovepipe.
Also note they are legally required in many, many places now.
(Older stoves and fireplaces are grandfathered in, but you can't install a new "old" stove in many towns around the world)
I recall seeing some studies about indoor natural gas stoves not being the greatest either.
“And I say this to Kai "Look: We'll shape the handle By checking the handle Of the axe we cut with—" And he sees.”
Are you saying this as an indictment of the commenters or in praise of the progress we’ve made here at HN?
In my experience, we decide to just ignore the information and find other reasons to give higher weight to benefits, in order to resolve the cognitive dissonance without requiring a change of behavior
Add up enough of these cognitive dissonances and you find yourself living in a fantasy land where sugar is "fun!" and burning wood indoors is "cozy."
I know I’ve been advocating a long time since studies have been coming out for the last few decades on this.
I have three kids and have lived in multiple houses that we had to retrofit the chimney /fireplace because we didn’t use it and they are a huge heat sump.
Would be great to have reduced cancer across the population!
Well that put a damper on my desire to attend a bonfire later this month.
Which research ? Has this guy ever been in a village ? When 70% of "smoke reenters nearby buildings" than the chimney from one house gets to the door of the other.
Will be nice a little common sense before making such statements.
It's day and night compared to that same house back when it had a regular open fireplace: smoke would drift inside the house, no matter how cautious I'd be. And the efficiency was terribly bad.
Now I still get to enjoy the view and once the fire is well started and the smoke correctly goes through the chimney, I can even open the enclosed fireplace's for a while and hear the crackling / get the full ambiance.
Lovely. I hope to go there in december. Falling asleep in front of the fireplace is one of my greatest joy in life.
It did cost about 5 K EUR IIRC (to transform the open fireplace into an enclosed one) but then warming the house with wood is super cheap (an enclosed fireplace is much more energy efficient than an open fireplace).
FWIW I warmed the house during the entire summer with five "stères de bois" [1] (an old french unit that isn't used for anything anymore beside wood logs meant to be used as fuel), paid 60 EUR each. So 300 EUR to warm the house (south east of France, mild winter).
BTW: house in the middle of nowhere, hardly any neighbors. So they don't get my smoke and I don't get their.
However keeping the door just a bit open emitted a lot of smoke into the room and gave a completely picture.
So I would recommend measuring the air quality in your home if you run any fire place.
I should probably write a blog post about it sometime.
EDIT: also it's been shocking to check on it while cooking, our vent hood is mediocre to bad so we end up keeping a door open most of the time we are cooking
To put that in perspective, smoking regularly in the same time-span increases your chance of lung cancer by over 20x.
But what if you were to smoke only for the same amount as you mention using the fireplace, around a month per year?
From the evidence I've seen, intensity of smoke exposure is much more problematic than volume. Light smokers still have 5-10x the chance of developing lung cancer than a non-smoker.
That might be a good first estimate for smokers who only smoke one month out of the year.
“Occupational exposure as a firefighter” has been evaluated by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) and classified as “possibly carcinogenic to humans”, with strongest evidence for testicular cancer, prostate cancer and non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
Really?! I just started using a wood fireplace, so this concerns me. I wish I understood things like "Cox regression" and other sciency things so I could trust this study.
If there are old habits and behaviors, like indoor fires in this case, that can be easily avoided (by me) in exchange for a better chance at avoiding lung cancer, I’m surely glad to have that knowledge so I can avoid unwitting cozying up to a serious ailment later in life.
There is so much anecdotal evidence around old habits but a high powered study, followed by more like it, can usually be relied upon.
I hope they do a follow up study that separates fireplace and stove.
Burning wood is a very bad idea. It smells nice and we like it, but it is positively terrible for our health and should not be done.
Traditions, however, are strong.
It’s referred to as double combustion, or secondary combustion.
Norway is top 10 in the world for life expectancy. Compared to all other possible ills, it suggests the danger here is a tad histrionic.
I don’t remember the exact details, but the Oslo municipality has a program that will provide home owners a grant to replace their inefficient wood stoves.
Statistics Norway might have some interesting data on how many households burn wood.
Burning 1-29 days looks statistically insignificant unless I’m reading Table 2 wrong - HR of .88-1.12 with CIs including 1. Suggesting no statistically significant effect observed from incidental or short-term exposure…roasting chestnuts for Christmas in your fireplace seems a fairly safe bet for most.
As a point of public health calibration, women smokers are 13 times more likely to be a lung cancer victim than non-smokers, according to the American Lung Association.
https://www.lung.org/lung-health-diseases/lung-disease-looku...
“Men who smoke are 23 times more likely to develop lung cancer. Women are 13 times more likely, compared to never smokers.” 2004 US HHS Surgeon General report
Wood smoke use for more than 30 days/year is a ~50% increase in lung cancer, according to this one study. Maybe focusing on the order of magnitude greater causal agent would be the wiser public policy choice, in the US at any rate.
I presume the parent commenter is referring to cooking using a gas stovetop, rather than to any particulate emitted by the food itself.
The AQI meter showed that there was no perceptible difference in air quality with the wood stove on versus off. Startup shows some smoke that decreases in an hour, but continuous operation shows no effect. Since we are in a cold climate, we burn essentially 24-7 for the entire winter, and thus startup effects can mostly be ignored.
You are right that there was a tremendous decrease in air quality when cooking, especially anything that was fried. So I agree that you might cut down on pancakes, but my evidence does not back your assertion you will "never use a woodstove again". To the contrary, using the meter tremendously reduced my worries about indoor air quality due to using the woodstove.
Did you actually do this test and find different results? What sort of system were you testing?
It's just not a good idea, period.
No more 'nice cozy smell of neighborhood wood fires', but on every other possible metric, way way better.
Before, I had a teeny Jotul 8. The new one is not only better at making warmth, it's also waaaaay lower emissions :)
The question (and I agree it's open) is what effect dispersed burning has on the larger scale environment. My current belief is that local wood harvesting and burning in a modern efficient stove is better than the alternatives currently available to me. If you have evidence to the contrary, please provide it rather than just making blanket statements.
There are also some times when the wood is a dud and takes a long time to start.
A radon meter is a useful thing to have a home. And a moisture meter.
If there's a correlation between burning wood and radon related health issues, I suspect it's not because of radon coming from the wood but rather smoke from the wood making residents particularly susceptible to injury from radon coming up from the ground. Such an effect is known to exist with tobacco smoke at least.
Underground water can contain radon, and it is an issue when it comes to wells and houses. Trees can suck that radon and when you burn wood a radon meter shows an increase.
I grew up in a house that used wood as its primary means of heat (and two smoking parents but they smoked outside exclusively).
These days I live in a house primarily heated by a heat pump (in a region where it does get below 0F on a normal winter), but it has a wood stove.
I can't imagine a woodstove setup that doesn't leak some level of particulate to the inside. No matter what, you can tell there's wood burning inside. It is a pleasant smell (burning white/red oak), but probably not good for health.
So even though I grew up with a wood stove burning all winter every winter and have one now, I seriously appreciate the heat pump as a clean and efficient means of heat for 90% of the season.
To me, wood is a great emergency form of heat as we have plenty of deadfall where we live. But I would bot recommend it otherwise.
And don't get me started on firewood processing...
And once you can smell smoke the particulate levels are generally very high
When you are burning a fire there is a rule, it's called the stack effect, it is the very point of having a long (and ideally straight) chimney.
Surprisingly I couldn’t find a single study which measured PM 2.5 from fireplaces with chimneys. However, a study on wood stoves (substantially better sealed) found a 30% rise.
Which is actually less than I would have predicted. I’d still expect a fire to be higher, but I’m open to being wrong. If I’m ever going someplace with a chimney and fire I’ll bring a pm 2.5 meter for fun.
* lower fire risk from burning the fuel surrounding my house for the last few years.
* more exercise from cutting, splitting and hauling wood
* an air purifier running next to the wood stove all winter
* about ~$1,200 per year saved on fuel
* more open windows during the day during the winter due to cheaper fuel costs.
Also since heat is cheaper this way, I heat my house more and am more comfortable all winter. This doesn't seem like it would offset the health risks, but it is a hedonic compensation.
An old wood stove is almost nothing (and I literally mean almost nothing) to a modern wood stove in efficiency or air cleanliness. It would almost be like if you did a study about the toxicity of cars but used data from when we had leaded gas. There’s still a toxicity there but your results are going to be a mess.
Research on whether dual burning stoves that reprocess their own exhaust and don’t leak like old ones (the ones you’re referring to) or other systems could be done, but this is baseline research.
You can use the same logic to attack the choice of fuels, or species of wood, or types of seals and whether air is taken from the inside or the outside of the structure, and all of it would also be as valid as your argument. You could also try to invalidate this for only focusing on women. But, while valid arguments (as is yours), it sidesteps the purpose of the study.
It’s simply not the hypothesis of this particular study, which was simply establish a correlation between the presence & use of wood burning fuel in fire burning devices and lung cancer incidence in women.
Don’t throw out the bathwater with the babe.
These kind of studies could indicate some flaw in the way we're creating wood stoves, or some consumer-related failure that needs to be better worked around. Or it could be that consumers are just using older wood stoves. But you gotta start with a baseline.
1. Women reporting more than 30 days of fireplace use per year (smokers and nonsmokers both included) had 68% more lung cancer than women reporting that their home didn't contain a fireplace (again, smokers and nonsmokers both included).
2. Non-smoking women reporting more than 30 days of fireplace use per year had 99% more lung cancer than non-smoking women reporting that their home didn't contain a fireplace.
3. Non-smoking women reporting 1-29 days of fireplace use per year had 64% more lung cancer than non-smoking women reporting that their home didn't contain a fireplace.
Not actually reported, but present by overwhelmingly strong implication:
1b. Women (without regard to ever-smoker status) reporting 1-29 days of fireplace use per year had no significant increase in lung cancer compared to women reporting that they didn't even have a fireplace. (Or else the results summary would have noted that they did.)
These are funny numbers with suspicious lacunae in the reporting of results. I'm not inclined to take them very seriously. At the same time, it is undoubtedly true that inhaling smoke is bad for you.
The study terminology always treats wood-burning stoves and fireplaces as equivalent. I would estimate that of the fixtures in the USA that are either wood-burning stoves or fireplaces, approximately 100% are fireplaces. This makes the study worthless if you want to draw conclusions about stoves, but OK for fireplaces. On the other hand, it doesn't really matter that the study won't let you draw conclusions about stoves, because there would be no point in having such conclusions.
I think I'm also not a fan of the (editorialized) verb (implies causality) used in this headline, for a purely observational study.
I'm not sure what this is suggesting, and I'm curious.
My own grandparents grew up in fairly modest rural settings, where burning wood was literally the only way not to freeze (I am talking about the 1930s here). At least one of their native villages was located in a tight valley where smoke tends to stay.
But lung disease wasn't that much of a problem among them and their neighbors. People typically died of heart attacks, strokes etc., or lived to be fairly old. (Two of my four grandparents made it to 90.)
I would expect a much more prominent data peak there. With other toxic substances, we often have it. With asbestos, even ancient Romans knew that slaves who mined asbestos died early of some weird lung disease etc.; the ancients lacked equipment, but were often good observers anyway.
But yeah all those planet saving heat pumps need some advertising anyway.
Although honestly I kind of still want a heat pump for the shoulder seasons and the times I'm away.
I couldn't at that time find a paper that showed that it was very harmful to humans, just a lot proving that it was harmful to mice, rats, rabbits, and guinea pigs (and a lot of forwards stating the dangers then linking to another animal research paper)—which bothered me—rodents don't have ~2 millions years of woodsmoke in their evolution history. I found papers about forest fires that some showed bad effects other were inconclusive and wouldn't;t draw conclusions as there were too much smoke from other combustable substances mixed into the smoke. I also found a paper about firefighters exposed to woodsmoke that found no ill effects on them.
So I remained unconvinced.
But this paper is different: not animals, large study, evidence. SO I will read it in-depth.
But I am still baffled. How could over a million years of evolution not have bred this out of us? I'm genuinely curious.
Most of the people have been living close to nature up to like a 100 years ago. And today? I have like 8 allergies, and I have no idea about the root cause of 6 of them. I would die in 2 days on a field of random weed, by sneezing myself to death. And I suspect I am far from the record holder in this site.
The ability to start and control fires for warmth and cooking purposes greatly increases the odds of survival for individuals and their offspring.
If I may personify evolution as form of rhetoric: evolution doesn’t care if you limp along through a painful life, or if your genes guarantee a horrific death at the end of it. Evolution only cares about your ability to produce offspring that in turn reach maturity and produce offspring of their own, and so on.
Resources are finite in this world, so sure, the fittest tend to outcompete less fit creatures, and the former will perpetuate its genes while the latter won’t. This is where the notion of “survival of the fittest comes from”. But it is a mistake to interpret that implication the other way around: that is, survival does not necessarily imply greater and greater fitness over time.
Evolution isn’t about species becoming the best they could be, it’s only about being good enough.
There's strong evidence for use of fire going back only .5 million years. More importantly, all existing humans are descended from a population that lived in sub-Saharan Africa till 70,000–50,000 years ago:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_African_origin_of_moder...
Although that population probably used fire before migrating out of Africa, they probably did so only for cooking and to keep wild animals away and almost never used fire indoors.
If we're going to trade Wikipedia articles, the one on control of fire by early humans starts: "Claims for the earliest definitive evidence of control of fire by a member of Homo range from 1.7 to 2.0 million years ago".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_fire_by_early_human...
Also mentioned here, modern double and triple burning stoves are much more efficient, and catalytic combustor stoves leave almost nothing but CO2 and water vapor coming out of the flue pipe. At least for stoves and enclosed fireplaces, if temporary smoke from an initial burn is still a concern, then I'm sure a separate pipe with a fan could be set up to draw air through the flue until a thermometer reaches a certain temperature. A fresh air intake should eliminate smoke leakage during startup. A strong flame used to start the fire, and a draft can also reduce the total smoke produced during this process. Alternative formats like rocket mass heaters may help with this as well.
Rather than draw attention to a real danger, encourage education, and distribution of better technology to help people burn a renewable resource safely, some would rather ban a medium that supports the survival of the poor completely. And some here would condemn all wood burners as ignorant archaic people who poison everyone around them and are too unintelligent to realize it. Sam Harris's post, (https://www.samharris.org/blog/the-fireplace-delusion) also has this air of incredulity that anyone would burn wood since science shows that it produces harmful byproducts. He seems to fail to realize that wood can burn cleanly, and suggests that we burn gas, which we know also often produces harmful levels of benzene; he suggests that we burn nothing at all, while even the electricity we use comes from coal burning, and alternative "green power" still has a large carbon footprint at this point, no? Geothermal seems good, and avoids radon issues, but is a specialized wood-burning system better if geothermal won't be enough? How do we move forward knowing that industry often influences studies? He writes, "The unhappy truth about burning wood has been scientifically established to a moral certainty". This is yet another "scientist" saying, "The science is settled." Unfortunately for him and climate alarmists, no it hasn't been, and posturing himself as correct because he believes in "scientific rationality" while simultaneously missing simple solutions to simple problems seems typical for him. That said, I do think sharing this info with communities who burn wood inefficiently is a good idea, and I see why their arguments about tradition and it being natural are criticized. He seems to see no exception to this "traditional" attitude among those who burn wood. If these communities don't care about inefficient burning, and aren't regulated, move away; stay mobile. Alternatively, perhaps using an air filter with a high MERV rating helps.
Why ban a viable, renewable heat source that can be used to teach people valuable lessons? So that they can become dependent on wind turbines, such as the ones that froze in Texas a year or two ago, leading to the deaths of many who were wholly dependent on electric heat? I'd rather breath some smoke than freeze to death anyway; banning wood burning is worse than imposing regulations to make it almost completely safe, and seeing conclusive opinions before people consider alternative burning systems concerns me, especially when the alternatives posed are often just as dangerous. The most important thing is educating people though. When they know why a safety regulation exists, they're much less likely to hate it and disobey it, as long as it doesn't restrict alternatives and freedoms that it shouldn't.
> Sam Harris's post, (https://www.samharris.org/blog/the-fireplace-delusion) also has this air of incredulity that anyone would burn wood since science shows that it produces harmful byproducts.
This is the last thing I expected to read on the wood burning debate, an arrogant piece for everyone's favorite atheist. I'm sure he doesn't need to think about heating cost in his condo in Hollywood.
It is just an easy, visible target. It will be the easiest thing to demonize too. "What are you a caveman still? You need to burn wood?".
On top of that it is just not going to be a defensible position based on the amount of carbon released.
We are hardly headed towards a future that you have more choice in these matters than you do now.
I would not be terribly shocked if we found out that wood is more dangerous to burn today than it used to be.
Edit: For the downvoters who think it’s unlikely, consider that microplastic and PFAS in rainwater has passed safe levels. What do trees grow from?
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a40859859/rainwater...
it forms minute bits of plastic that are tinier than 5 millimeters long. Their size means they end up everywhere, even in our blood, where they range in size between 700 nanometers and 5,000 nanometers.If you want to argue variables for air particulate's relationship to lung cancer, then more power to you.
Money quote from the abstract:
"The strongest association of exposure to wood dust and development of nasal cancer is observed in those occupations where workers are exposed to hard wood dust and chemical additives are not used."
Note that the strongest association is when chemicals are NOT used - I suspect this might be more due to how people work the wood (less likely to sand particles board, more likely to wear protective gear) than the nature of the chemicals themselves.
It does go on to say that various respiratory cancers are from both untreated and treated wood sawdust, but wood alone is well known to cause cancer.
Unlike others, though, with posts like this, I'm thinking about wood stove use and burn piles in my part of rural America. What does the Census data say about the use of central heat? What is the health of those who live around me and rely on wood stoves? What can be done locally to transition folks off of wood stove use? What positive health impacts will we see? What can be done via public education to reduce the installation of fireplaces in new homes?
if something can kill you just because you used it somewhat wrong it it's somewhat broken in some aspect of ventilation you probably should assume that even a more correct long term usage might have a good chance to have serve long term negative health effects
For instance, another big indoor pollutant is cooking fumes, from both the heat source and to cook, carmelize, burn, etc - the food and vapors of changing temperatures. The range hood required by fire codes to stove sizes is not turning on automatically with pollutant detection.
Another development that personally affects me is that local councils are now able to start enforcing this 'smoke-free' thing on owners of narrowboats[1]. For those that don't know, the UK has a 2000 mile network of inland canals on which thousands of us live, in canal barges of about 7ft beam. In the winter, a lot of these boats' primary method of heating our homes is using multifuel stoves. It's an itinerant lifestyle that can be hard at times but incredibly freeing and requires one to live somewhat more in tune with the seasons. A lot of boaters don't have a ton of money and primarily fuel our stoves with foraged wood at varying levels of seasoning (the process of drying wood to reduce moisture content and make it burn better and cleaner). For instance, this year I got a knock on the roof of my boat by a tree surgeon, informing me we needed to move our boat as they had to chop down an ash tree that had succumbed to ash dieback [2]. I asked if I could take some of the wood and he said no problem, saves them a bit of work getting rid of it. And that's now my wood for the winter. We are, of course, aware of the health hazards of groups of boats burning not the best wood, but a large percentage of live-aboard boaters really don't have any other option.
Sorry, not particularly relevant to the article posted but I thought it worth mentioning that there are cases where not burning things to stay warm in winter is not an option for some groups of people.
Of course some smoke can come inside from the windows or aeration holes.