Wood-burning fireplaces will be banned in Montreal because “they cause pollution.”
I’m now happy that I’m not in Montreal. They are very regulation-happy back there. There is also a regulation banning food trucks. And I’m not even touching on language policies.
Oh that’s horrible! And I’m someone who tends to be in favor of regulation. But that’s nonsense! There are very few things as delightful as a wood burning fireplace.
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But they do actually cause pollution and are banned in lots of places. There is also the fire issue — those sparks are downright dangerous in some places. And yes, I love wood fires.
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Punishing tiny and insignificant individual actions under the guise of protecting the environment is a nifty little trick governments and corporations use in order to shift the burden of responsibility for the environmental crisis onto individuals.
Thee is just a few of these fireplaces in Montreal and many are never lit. At the same time, the municipal authorities that are busily fighting the horrible pollution supposedly caused by this handful of fireplaces has created a really horrible traffic situation in the city that cause the air to become next to unbreathable in the summers.
It really, really bugs me when everybody’s attention is distracted in this way from real causes of real environmental problems.
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Heh, this reminds me of how defensively an online acquaintance reacted once when I suggested that perhaps individual water-wastage-preventing measures weren’t either necessary or worth the bother, especially in places like England, where said acquaintance was living. People do tend to happily participate in such nifty little tricks if through them, they can redirect other anxieties to problems they can neither fix nor understand.
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Well, re el’s comment below first, Napa Valley is one of those places that has too many wood burning fireplaces. And it is an attractive place to have one, too, those cool starry nights and those vineyards. (Another type of fire I miss is campfires, but a lot of the greatest but more delicate wilderness areas do not allow them any more, not for pollution reasons as much as that down wood needs to work itself into soil, not get burned by tourists.) Montreal has so few wood burning fireplaces? I’d have thought they would have more, that is interesting.
Agree re shifting responsibility for environment to individuals and also about meaningless individual sacrifice (much that one can do to be green only serves to make one feel good, I am told).
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“Montreal has so few wood burning fireplaces? ”
– Very very few. But everybody has gas or electrical fireplace.
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I would be super-angry, had neighbors in other apartments begun damaging my health with their smoke. In cigarettes, it’s called second-hand smoking. To prevent it, there are laws banning smoking in quite a few public spaces. Unfortunately, one can’t escape if neighbors have wood-burning stove:
“Research has detailed that 50 percent to 70 percent of smoke from a fireplace can be taken up in neighboring homes.”
And if somebody has asthma, good luck, even if you live in a private home, but are surrounded by homes with wood-burning fireplaces.
” Wood-burning fireplaces and stoves account for 50 percent to 80 percent of the source of particulate matter less than 2.5 microns (PM 2.5). These are critical particles because they are small enough to bypass the body’s normal defense mechanisms and are inhaled deeply into the lungs, can be absorbed into the bloodstream and can subsequently increase plaque formation in the coronary arteries.
Some have argued that this affects just a few people. Here are the facts: 15 percent to 17 percent of our children will have asthma at some time before their 17th birthday. … Napa County had the second-highest rate of asthma in the state.
[…] Approximately 60 people, including two-to-three children, die every week from asthma in the United States. Data shows the hospitalization of children with asthma increases 10 percent with high PM 2.5. I personally manage many of these kids in Napa County, and I can speak to this first hand.
Does this affect every person with asthma? Of course not. It is also possible to smoke three packs of cigarettes a day for 50 years and not get lung cancer, either. Staying inside doesn’t solve the problem. ”
http://napavalleyregister.com/news/opinion/mailbag/asthma-and-wood-burning-stoves-a-heated-issue/article_760b50d8-15f0-11df-b2d0-001cc4c03286.html
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I am sure that those “critical particles” aren’t that good for healthy people either. It’s just that with somebody suffering from asthma, the damage is more visible, happens faster. Others just quietly get this “increase plaque formation in the coronary arteries” and damage their lungs, while their neighbors enjoy the “home feeling” of their furnaces without giving a thought to side-effects because of sentimental reasons. It’s true that cities are already polluted, but it isn’t a justification for increasing the damage the air we breath does to us ( 50 percent to 80 percent of PM 2.5!).
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“breathe”, not “breath.”
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A salient discussion in Atlantic magazine:
“Modern government is organized on “clear law,” the false premise that by making laws detailed enough to take in all possible circumstances, we can avoid human error. And so over the last few decades, law has gotten ever more granular. But all that regulatory detail, like sediment in a harbor, makes it hard to get anywhere.”
Example:
“Health-care regulators have devised 140,000 reimbursement categories for Medicare—including 12 categories for bee stings and 21 categories for “spacecraft accidents.””
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“Punishing tiny and insignificant individual actions under the guise of protecting the environment is a nifty little trick governments and corporations use in order to shift the burden of responsibility for the environmental crisis onto individuals.”
Thank you for saying this! I am all for being a responsible citizen but it’s industry that need regulation. Not some random family toasting marshmellows in their fireplace.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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