Want an efficient, cheap, carbon-neutral fuel? Buy a wood stove.
Wood comes from trees. Trees get their carbon from the carbon dioxide in the air. Burn the wood, put the carbon back in the air, and grow more trees to take it back out again. Solar power covers all the inefficiencies in the system.
Just what the greens ordered jack, renewable energy source, 90% less CO2 emissions than fossil fuel, and minimal amounts of sulphur and acid rain problems.
Sounds like a real back to the future solution..
So, why are we not supposed to use wood fires during smoggy days?
As for wood being cheap – maybe if you have your own supply. Do you have any idea how much good, matured fire wood costs? I haven’t bought any since 2001, but it was high then and can’t imagine that price has gone down.
Jack, I heated my entire house this past winter…I never dropped below 66degrees, and since we replaced electric baseboards, I actually saved around $400 each month where the temperature dips below that 60 degree mark.
An extra sweater was worth roughly $4 bucks a day to us.
Lovisa — crude oil is a lot cheaper than gasoline, too. Fortunately, maturing wood is a lot easier than refining oil. Just buy the wood in advance and let it age.
Uranium and water dams are also carbon neutral.
Freddie,
Too true, but since those solutions are actually economically viable and workable the greens hate them and refuse to allow them to be considered.
BM,
A house heated with a wood burning fire place has superior heat for sure. We did the same a few years back, the temp was kept in the mid sixties, but due to the nature of the heat source there was no dampness, and so we were very comfortable.
“the temp was kept in the mid sixties…”
Until that pyro friend of yours came over! Then is was a balmy 92!
Exactly jabob in #6, their goal is to make us live a certain lifestyle, not save the environment.
Wood pellet stoves are less expensive to operate than traditional wood stoves, plus they have the advantage of using wood waste products.
But I guess if you have access to your own source of firewood..
If you cannot afford the cost of firewood, you might consider laying in a large supply of the Congressional Record. Natural hot air.
Wolv,
Great idea! One congress critter blows enough hot air to heat a 4000 sqft house.
Add to that most of what’s written here and we’d have a bad case of global warming!
I routinely keep a pot on the stove. It provides the humidity. It really gets dry in the house in the winter.
We did as well, it was a cast iron behemoth that would hold a over a gallon of water.
The defection of the following 8 Republicans helped to push forward the largest single tax increase in U.S. history today ( Waxman-Markey ):
Bono Mack (CA)
Castle (DE)
Kirk (IL)
Lance (NJ)
Lobiondo (NJ)
McHugh (NY)
Reichart (WA)
Chris Smith (NJ)
Connolly (VA) of course also voted to increase energy taxes on his fellow citizens.
We may need those wood and pellet stoves, if their use isn’t taxed so much that they become luxury items.
Rachelfriend,
The vote was 219-212, these 8 votes were the difference.
EPA puts the lid on an internal report which shows global warming hype to be the red herring that it is :
Alan Carlin is the economist and 38 year veteran at the Environmental Protection Agency whose report was stonewalled internally and so was not considered (or so he was told) in their decision to regulate CO2 as a pollutant. I spoke with him for an hour this evening. (A background interview with an anonymous source in the EPA that corroborates what Carlin says below can be found here.)
http://www.examiner.com/x-9111-SF-Environmental-Policy-Examiner~y2009m6d26-The-politics-if-not-the-science-is-settled-at-the-EPA-Alan-Carlin-global-warming-and-trouble
It’s not about climate, it’s not about the environment, it’s not about CO2, it’s all about reaching deeper and deeper into our pockets..