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I really wish indoor wood burning, especially if not used for heating but luxury, would be banned at least in cities

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.

The testing of many wood stoves was called into question a few years ago. https://energynews.us/2021/03/18/report-finds-systemic-failu...

The problem with filters is they have a lower limit. PM2.5 cuts out much of the smell, but none of the carcinogenicity (PM0.1 or so). The only filter that really works is a sealed cap. Burning biomatter is just not worth the health impact or the cost and effort to mitigate. It's like capturing CO2: a stupid idea.

While we're doing that, can we please also ban 2-stroke engines used for landscaping.

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.

> While we're doing that, can we please also ban 2-stroke engines used for landscaping.

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.

How exactly would you propose spare parts get banned?

Spare parts are manufactured and supplied into channels.

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.

> Spare parts are manufactured and supplied into channels. If you ban that [...]

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.

If you're aiming for perfection, sure.

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.

If you're not shooting for perfectionism and won't bother to enforce a spar parts ban, then why propose a spare parts ban in the first place? Just ban the production/sale of new two-stroke machines, not the spare parts. As old machines wear the cost and effort of keeping them in service will eventually exceed the activation energy for buying a new machine. An unenforced ban of spare parts would accomplish nothing productive; it would waste your political capital and train a new group of people to have contemptuous disregard for laws.

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.

>Two stroke engine parts don't have a massive legally protected cult following like guns

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.

I think you're massively over-estimating how many dirt bikes there are in America, and/or massively underestimating how many gun owners there are.

Gun ownership is near 50%. It's constitutionally protected. Dirt bikes are neither.

California just did this

Yeah, but my Stihl MS880 is still legal here in California… and likely will be for some time. Good luck getting a usable, heavy-duty chainsaw to work on any tech besides a two-stroke motor of some kind.

What’s the barrier to making a li-ion powered electric and “usable heavy-duty chainsaw”?

I have a Stihl combi-system which includes a polesaw attachment. It’s electric with a lithium ion battery backpack that weighs at least 20 lbs.

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.

If you want it to last longer than 20 minutes it would weight about 250 pounds.

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.

Are you using heavy-duty chainsaw for urban landscaping?

I have 16-ish acres in the Santa Cruz mountains. Between my property and the aging neighbors who I share a driveway, there is plenty of opportunity for different sizes of chainsaw. I also live in a redwood log cabin with more redwood and other large diameter trees on the property. I originally purchased the bigger chainsaw for some Alaskan milling but it has come in handy elsewhere.

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.

> like wtf. is it legal to harass your neighbors with smell and toxic fumes every day

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.

Strange, I just hate it.. I'm fine with loud parties, your loud stupid music, don't care how you run your garden, but nothing is more hatable than someone harassing me with smoke or other headache creating smells, and going for my health. I go into kind of half nature, to enjoy the fresh air, and then there is someone making a fire out of some mix of pure laziness, ignorance, unnecessity and pyromania, despite it being also illegal here.

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 burn all my yard waste as my locality has regulated all other means of disposal to the point of it being time- and cost-prohibitive.

I pile it up and have a bonfire a few times a year.

They've regulated chipping mulching and composting?

No, but I don't own a wood chipper, and renting one is costly and time-consuming.

I got the largest electric one I could find. It's pretty good, entirely metal housing so it won't fall apart, and no gas or oil to deal with. I don't know if 120v vs 240v makes a difference in that regard for Americans who want more powerful electric gear, we're 240v.

The US is 240V.

You know that's not the general-purpose outlets. Most houses have a few 240V circuits that are wholly devoted to large appliances.

It doesn't change the fact if you're in the US and you really want 240V you can (usually) get it. Just about everyone has 240V service at their home. And I think we should normalize offering 240V outlets in garages.

Yep, I agree about the garage outlets.

wtf, where do you live so I can avoid it?

The PM2.5 not only gets in your lungs, it enters your bloodstream and gets everywhere including your brain. Peter Attia MD says there is no doubt it will shorten lifespan and healthspan.

>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 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...

Dude, the Bay area is quite possibly the most atypical culture you could ask for compared to the rest of the nation. That isn't exactly a compelling argument.

Back when vaping was still legal, a vaper surfaced on this site asserting that there was no way vaping would ever be banned, obviously, at least outdoors, e.g., while waiting for a bus, and guess what? At least where I live (Bay Area) vaping is illegal while standing outside waiting for a bus.

So don't assume that your appreciation of woodsmoke is widespread enough prevent its becoming illegal some day.

I didn't assume it. But for right now, enough people enjoy wood fires that you're not going to see it banned everywhere in the country any time soon. Obviously, it could happen some day. But I'm only making predictions about the near future (say the next 5-10 years), not for all eternity.

If Peter Attia says it, it must be true.

If some people get coughing fits from it it really stops mattering weather you like it or not.

It actually doesn't stop mattering. I'm not unsympathetic to your point, but in a democratic form of government you do in fact need to get over the barrier of "other people like this and don't want to stop".

Big disagree there - it exacerbates Asthma in sufferers, that alone makes it bad.

> very old ovens

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 ....

Have you ever used that oven?

Meanwhile Seattle is under a perpetual cloud of choking smoke for like 2 months out of every year because WA and Canada are incompetent when it comes to forest management, and the best people can do to pretend to care is tell you to rubber band a furnace filter to a box fan and wear N95 masks to work.

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.

Making general statements is superficial and empty. I live in a cold climate where wood and coal powered stoves are responsible for more than 90%+ of particulate pollution. The difference between warm and cold months is quite significant: around 20 µg/m³ daily average in the middle of summer vs 300-400 µg/m³ in the middle of winter. Maximum values are somewhere around 1000-1500 µg/m³, with short-term spikes up to more than 3000+ µg/m³ due to temperature inversions.

If we care about the climate and want to spend money on it, subsidizing cleaner tech for those countries that need it seems like a great way to start, because even if you don't believe in climate change you're still preventing poverty and unhealthy air for people.

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.

I live on a street of single family homes in Palo Alto and my next door neighbor smokes weed every day starting around 10am and it's totally legal for that stench to drift into my backyard shed and harass me where I'm trying to work.

If state is not capable bring cheap energy for heating, what can we do? Let people freeze by regulations and ideology of clean CO2 free environment?

> 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

Same can be said for car use. Majority of trips are a few miles and could be done by bike or replaced with transit.

Only if you live in urban areas where you don’t have to wait longer than 15 minutes for the bus to come, and, most importantly, where it is safe (especially for women) to take said bus late in the evening/at night. I hope that that recent and horrific stabbing in NYC made many people aware of the security aspect.

so if you life in any arbitrary urban area in most of the EU

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

I'm saying that, as a man, if you have to wait for your SO at the bus/train station late in the evening when she comes back from work then maybe public transport is not for everyone, in this case for almost 50% of the population (i.e. women). Been there, done that.

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.