The EPA has recently banned the production and sale of 80 percent of America’s current wood-burning stoves, the oldest heating method known to mankind and mainstay of rural homes and many of our nation’s poorest residents. The agency’s stringent one-size-fits-all rules apply equally to heavily air-polluted cities and far cleaner plus typically colder off-grid wilderness areas such as large regions of Alaska and the American West.
Don’t ever give up your guns.
Useless EPA ‘laws’ will continue to be ignored by people who know better.
Hilarious!
I’m picturing some poor schmuck feeling totally vulnerable as he walks through a seedy neighborhood with a trench coat and a fedora pulled down over his eyes. Soon enough, his progress is stopped by a group of locals. The obvious leader of the group, a large blonde man with arms like tree trunks, tweeks his shoulder. “Who are you and what do you want around here?”
“I want to buy a heater….”
Seriously though, won’t this push the stove manufacturing industry underground? Isn’t that normally the reason for the leftards to avoid legislation? I hate to think of all those vulnerable people heating their homes with stoves purchased in a back alley.
Meanwhile, back at the Keystone Ranch.
Keystone XL gets environmental OK from U.S. State Dept.
more. . .
In other news there’s a shortage of clean-burning propane fuel because of… reasons.
Today I have the stove going. EPA can bite me.
Apropos of guns, it seems in Brazil people make their own.
http://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2014/01/22/common-illicitly-homemade-submachine-guns-brazil/
This is a favorite subject of mine, and anti-gunners hate it when I mention it. Poor people in Brazil can make MAC-10 copies with sheet metal, a hammer and a welding torch. Upgrade to a MIG welder and a simple sheet metal brake, you can make much finer guns in mass production numbers. And in Brazil, they are.
One can easily foresee a day when illicit workshops are turning out illegal wood stoves in the USA, made out of stolen road signs and firebrick.
Let the rural western bas tards freeze in the dark ?
This just infuriates me! We live in the bush in SE Manitoba,and went thru a 5 day power outage few yrs back because of freezing rain and heavy wet snow.This destroyed the forest around us..spent wks doing cleanup of fallen trees that we are now burning in not one,but 2 woodstoves (home and workshop)..only reason we were able to remain in our home thru all this,was having a damn woodstove.We cooked on it,heated our home..melted snow to wash etc.This is just lunacy.I love the heat of the stove,and the reduction of heating costs,especially during this extended cold spell.Things like this make me want to smash my head into a wall.
The samething is happening here in Canada but more indirectly. I have several friends who had wood stoves in their homes some being there for emergency use (power in rural areas not always being reliable). Insurance companies doubled and even tripled their insurance just for having them. Most of them buckled under and removed them.
That would just not fly in my rural area.
Get quotes for insurance premiums from various companies.
Insurance companies hiked their rates due to earthquake tremors, too. Typical shysters.
And although EPA regulations don’t directly apply to Canada, they affect the market. Some U.S. based stove makers will go out of business, the rest will have to pass on to customers the cost of meeting the new standards, and the Canadian market won’t be big enough to make it worth their while producing cheaper models that aren’t EPA compliant, and Canadian makers will want to meet the EPA specifications, too, so they can sell in the U.S.
ropw said: “Insurance companies doubled and even tripled their insurance just for having them.”
Ah yes, the rather obscenely named WETT Certification racket. I paid several hundred dollars to have an already installed and certified wood stove RE-certified by the WETT Inspector guy, to keep the insurance sharks from dumping me off insurance altogether. My sh1t is all 100% inspected and legit. It wasn’t cheap.
Why did I pay? Because I knew that one day I might NEED that wood stove, and given the propane shortage I spoke of earlier, this weekend might bring that day. Same reason I shelled out money for a generator that sits around collecting dust, taking up floor space and generally getting in the way. One good ice storm away from needing that bad boy too.
WETT certification is just one of a number of scams to keep rural people on the straight and narrow path of PC righteousness, no matter how pretzel the path gets made by cubicle dwelling concern trolls in Toronto. Making wood too expensive to burn appears to be a policy theme in Ontario these days.
Its not working though. Poor people out here have the house inspected first, THEN install the stove. If insurance companies insist on being scum, people will invent new and exciting ways of cheating them.
What are the EPA going to do, register arc-welders to make sure that no-one is welding together a non-compliant wood stove? I know I could build one in a weekend.
The next PotUS and Congress have to take an axe to the bureaucracy if the USA is to survive as a free country.
I happen to have worked with a companhy that makes wood burning hearths, and has made one to pass the latest EPA specs. The hearth is designed with some basic changes to reduce particulate, but the main effort was in the ‘design’ of the test. You use a certain species of wood at a certain moisture. The test involves 4×4 and 2×6 manufactured lumber, not cut logs. The main effort was in positioning of the wood and directing air flows to that as the supply burned, everything would drop vertically, if any chunks fell forward or to the side they would fal the test. If a chunk of wood fell forward the would easily fail by 400%-1000% depending on when the chunk fell. Obviously you can imagine how this will work with a piece of wet pine in real life
The EPA has been out of control for years already and the single best reason to turf Democrats out of office. Obama continues to grant them more power and they already feel they can bypass congress and do whatever they feel like. If one googles “EPA power grab” it’s enough to make one realize that there’s a unrelenting war to destroy the economy completely. Dozens of articles like this one:
http://illinoisreview.typepad.com/illinoisreview/2013/11/thorner-epa-power-grab-goes-unnoticed-while-obamacare-burns.html
or this and dozens more. Woodstoves are just a tiny tip of the iceberg.
http://dailycaller.com/2013/12/18/massive-seizure-of-power-climate-scientists-economists-challenge-epa/
The EPA is encouraged and pushed by a POTUS that still believes CO2 is a pollutant. They now have more power that the dictator in chief himself. And they are loving it.
Beyond wood stoves, the article’s explanation about the collusion between the EPA and environmental activists is important. It puts to rest any lingering faith in objective, impartial bureaucracy. No such thing exists.
They have banned new woodstoves and fireplaces in Quebec and a ban is in the works for Ontario,
The “blow back” is coming …
Meanwhile, out in Manitoba:
http://www.ottawasun.com/2014/01/31/winnipeg-has-coldest-winter-in-64-years
“inspected first, THEN install the stove”. That may work for a while but with every insurance renewal the question of “any changes ? comes up and if you happen to omit the istallation of the wood stove your insurance would be null and void. I installed a approved wood stove and my insurance went up by $600. to $1800. Rural Volunteer Fire Dept. and Insurance companies don’t recognize them. Iv’e been mortgage free for over decade and told them to stick it where the sun doesn’t shine. Cancelled insurance altogether. If the place burns down I’ll rebuild it myself. Once you’re mortgage free you are also free to gamble. One less bureaucracy to piss me off.
I thought firewood was a renewable energy source?
I hate the EPA. Of Canada or the States or anywhere else.
A silver lining exists in the woodstove EPA new rules, such as design and work for independent types and stronger local economies. The needed medicine.
And as Phantom says above, to hell with the insurance bastards.
Get yourself a chimney brush (or an urchin) and make sure you sweep the chimney at least once a year. that will prevent 99% of the potential risks from a wood stove.
We had an old Fisher that was built like a locomotive (the good kind). A couple of times I loaded it up with dry fir and forgot to turn down the vents. Started to notice an eerie orange glow coming from the room where it lived. Oops! Where are the oven mitts?
Put a turban on your noggin or a feather in your ponytail and tell the useless *&%$#@g parasites to *#^k off and leave you alone because you’re burning camel dung or sweetgrass.
Dung from camels that ate sweetgrass! Yeah!
Wood fireplaces have been banned in BC since 1993 or 1995. All new home construction after that date used gas fireplaces only. Same for wood burning stoves. I think you can install those tiny pellet stoves legally, but that’s it. No backyard fire-pits allowed either, yet it’s perfectly fine to allow a stinking pulp mill stack to continue spouting 24/7 w/o meeting emission guidelines-successfully delaying their implementation for 20+ years, citing costs for the delay. Residents subsidize the same mills huge water consumption to add insult to injury.
LOL. I’m crying that is so funny!
I was raised with a wood stove up in the Yukon and our house had the old cheap chimney but great old pot belly type stove with a water jacket. Dad would cram that thing full of cardboard every week end and when that took off the whole stove shook and the top actually got red hot. Never had a problem with chimney build up. Never had to clean it either.
We had a couple of chimney fires when I was a kid and I can still remember the roar that sounded like a freight train coming. It was scary.
Engineers and generals build countries, lawyers, politicians, and bureaucrats destroy them.
I’ve been heating my house with a wood stove since I built it a dozen years ago. It’s a very efficient Pacific Energy Summit stove that doesn’t need a catalytic combuster to burn clean, and was EPA compliant at the time. It’s clean by design. I get more heat out of the wood and the chimney stays clean.
I would not replace it regardless of what anyone says. Insurance is a scam. It’s wiser economically to invest what you would spend on premiums in a TFSA and get a reward if you never have to spend it. Of course, if you live in a city, insurance usually isn’t optional in a socialist totalitarian society; yet another reason I don’t consider cities a viable option for healthy living.
Engineers and tradespeople build countries,
generals, lawyers, politicians, and bureaucrats destroy them.
What I suggest is that parties interested in social perturbation techniques dynamite all power substations of a major US city during a period of record cold. Then, “concerned citizens” could cruise the streets and report all individuals who are emitting particulate matter in violation of EPA guidelines into the atmosphere. I suspect that being handed a hefty fine for trying to stay warm might get a majority of the population riled up enough that they really will go out and shoot the bastards.