Cris Pasto has been participating in a lively, but friendly email debate on natural gas versus other energy sources. Here’s how Cris responded to suggestions by his email correspondent that burning firewood and relying upon renewables are preferable to natural gas development.

Burning Wood in Your Home
Today, I got to thinking more about the idea of everyone burning firewood. Mind you, we burned firewood all of our lives until about year 2000 and I hope to never go back to it. Imagine the truck traffic if everyone did burn firewood on a repetitive basis. Figure one tractor trailer load per household per year. Imagine the number of chimney or exposure fires.

And, what about the health impacts of burning wood? Well, it can be toxic.

“I think it’s a fair comparison to look at wood smoke as similar to burning vegetable matter such as tobacco,” said Melanie Marty, Ph.D., chief of the Air Toxicology and Epidemiology Branch, Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, California Environmental Protection Agency. “I think we need to educate the public … I don’t think they realize how toxic wood smoke is. I don’t think we’ve done a very good job about that,” said L. Gretchen Wooding, MD.

So, they have done health impact studies on wood burning and its been determined to be detrimental, yet we have not banned it. I do not favor any ban on burning firewood, but I find it very interesting that some push for a ban on a cleaner fuel such as natural gas.

What about impacts on wildlife? Bird nests and habitat are destroyed. Land impact? Logging for firewood purposes can be quite messy and it irritates me when the land is not cleaned up after a job the way I expected.

http://eidmarcellus.org/marcellus-shale/everything-has-risks-natura...