Outdoor Wood Furnace Info
All-Purpose OWF Discussions => Regulations => Topic started by: Roscoe on March 24, 2018, 06:37:07 PM
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At least someone is trying.
He says he sent this to President Trump this past week and "If you desire, please feel free to copy any part of our letter and contact your congressman, senators, and also President Trump yourself. The more they hear from us, the more likely we are to restore our freedoms!"
Dear President Trump:
It seems that for the EPA, “even wood isn’t green or renewable enough anymore”.
According to Forbes, “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.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2014/01/29/epas-wood-burning-stove-ban-has-chilling-consequences-for-many-rural-people/#739173ec7ee0
President Trump, I am one of your strongest supporters. I now represent a large group of the wood burning industry, and I would like to request that you reverse these EPA regulations on our industry, which went into effect January 2016. These regulations are described in detail here: https://www.epa.gov/residential-wood-heaters/final-new-source-performance-standards-residential-wood-heaters
It is much wiser to institute these regulations on a local level, such as in urban areas. The EPA under President Obama greatly overreached by instituting these regulations on a national level. At one hearing I attended, participants from rural Michigan demonstrated (rather embarrassingly for the EPA) how people who burn wood live in rural areas where they do not have access to cheap natural gas, and they live in areas that are not densely populated; therefore, emissions from burning this renewable fuel are harmless. Note that wood burning is “carbon neutral”, since the carbon dioxide emitted from wood burning equals the amount of carbon dioxide absorbed by the tree when it was growing.
This wood burning industry consists of 2.4 million homes (12 percent of all homes) that burn wood as their primary heating fuel. The industry also consists of over 50 manufacturers, although due to this recent EPA regulations, some of these manufacturers have exited the industry, many through bankruptcy.
I see that your administration is removing EPA regulations that are harmful to the American economy. This article lists 67 rules your administration is removing: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/10/05/climate/trump-environment-rules-reversed.html
I would like to request that you add these wood burning regulations to your list of EPA regulations that you will reverse.
Please let me know – I have over 60,000 customers who follow my new company and I would like to inform them via our newsletters and announcements of your willingness to reverse these regulations.
Thank you,
Warren Walborn
President & CEO
OutdoorBoiler.com
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Well…
Several of the “facts” in that letter are at best a little misleading.
Unless your cutting and splitting all your wood by hand, chainsaws and gas powered splitters all release carbon into the atmosphere.
We all breath the same air, all the pollutants spewed into the air in China or India eventually find there way here via the jet stream, so to claim emissions in rural areas of the country are harmless is a heck of a whopper.
The poorest that are heating with wood can’t afford a conventional outdoor boiler either.
I don’t care for how the rule was put in place, would have been much better to offer more incentives far as tax credits than just outright banning conventionals. Or better yet let the market decide. I do believe that the added cost of a gasser is quickly offset by the reduction of wood that needs to be processed.