Quote:
Originally Posted by dpg
Don't a lot of New Hampshire people already live or at least heat like 100 years ago? What would you call buying, cutting, splitting, stacking and burning wood?
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Some people are economically compelled to keep their heating costs under control. If they have access to a free or cheap wood supply that's what they use. Other's are attracted to the ambiance of a wood stove.
The problems are 1) is this really good for the environment? If you are around wood stoves, especially in certain still weather conditions the wood smoke smog outside is oppressive. 2) if everyone did it we would use up our forests very quickly. The same lesson is being learned with ethanol. It takes a LOT of growing stuff to produce the energy equivalent in gasoline or natural gas.
If we are to make our decisions based on cost, oil wins (for now)(or free firewood).
If we base our decision on what's best in the long run economically and for the environment then we have SOME alternatives in SOME cases. I have faith that technology will continue to provide better and better solutions, I just want to be sure we aren't buying snake oil. In my opinion, many of the alternatives are not viable (reliability, economically, practicality) for broad based distribution.