I'm curious why the EPA is wasting it's time on a campaign like this. There may be 10 million wood-burning "stoves" in the U.S. (I seriously doubt this figure), but how many of them are in regular use?

I remember a log cabin I used to travel to quite a bit as a youngster. It had a wood-burning stove that sat in the living room. That is all it did... Unless there was some sort of major natural disaster, I seriously doubt it would ever get used. I'd imagine that the vast majority of wood-burning stoves in the U.S. are just like this one.

I mean, I'm all for replacing wood-burning stoves with newer, less-polluting ones (if they're actually being used). But doesn't the EPA have bigger fish to fry as far as pollution goes (i.e. coal power plants)?

Not only that, but burning wood is not really a bad idea no matter how inefficient the "stove" is. Why? Because burning wood is completely renewable. The amount of CO, CO2, etc, that finds it's way into the air from burned wood is going to go right back into a tree somewhere.

The only problem that we could have with burning wood as fuel for anything is if we A) burn too much (and run out of forests, very bad), or B) we burn wood in sufficiently large numbers and that smoke ends up in people's lungs.

Compare this to the problem of burning fossil fuels... All that carbon (which generates CO2, CO, etc when burned) has been sequestered in oil for millions of years. By pumping it out and burning it, we're filling the atmosphere with it. Thus, massively increasing the amount of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere.

I know I'm probably preaching to the choir on this website, but I'd rather see cars running around burning wood (pellets) than burning oil.

To answer quickly:

1) It's a voluntary program. The people buying new stoves and asking for rebates are probably the people who use them.

2) The pollution problem with wood burning is not so much with CO2, it's with particulate matter (PM). If you live in canada or northern USA, you could find many neighborhoods where the air quality is worse than near most highways because many people burn wood in their houses, not only in their cabin.

I am in the process of wanting to go BACK to wood stoves, my home has two fireplaces and both are gas. There's never a way to win, is there. Switch back to wood, not so clean burning. Switch to gas, rely on the grid and big oil to heat my home as costs go up and I help further deplete the world's oil supply.

I'm still going to take one fireplace back to wood with a wood stove insert, and take care with the wood I burn. In the end, I'd rather have the opportunity to be more self sufficient then completely reliant on someone else to let me heat my home. I at least want the choice.

lunesse,

If you get an efficient wood stove (70-80%) there should be relatively little pollution. It's inefficient wood stoves, or open air wood burning, that are not recommended.

But natural gas is pretty clean compared to other combustibles...

Natural gas is still a fossil fuel, is still being depleted (with regard to world reserves), and still contributes CO2. LNG/CNG infrastructure is still vulnerable to supposed terrorist attacks. The fact it's "cleaner burning" is moot. My parents heat with a woodstove almost exclusively; they are one of only 3 or 4 households in their neighborhood of 250+ homes to burn wood. Local air-quality is not affected, and the fuel comes from our own land or from developers looking to get rid of the timber. Is this sustainable long-term? For them, yes. For the entire planet, no. The issue of particulates is something to take into consideration, but with the more efficient stoves, I say go for it.