Letter to the Editor: Wood heat

The best thing this county can do to beat the fossil fuel/climate crisis blues is to continue, and hopefully increase, the use of woodstoves.  The drawbacks to other heat sources are overwhelming.  Electricity has always been expensive; and with increased storm severity, we have experienced decreased reliability. Fuel oil consumes water and energy in the extraction and refinement processes, as well as in the transportation to a remote rural county. Propane is cleaner on-site, when being used, but still has a large footprint in transport to individual customers.

While petroleum products are needed in in obtaining firewood, mixing oil, gas, and bar’n’chain oil, and gas is needed for transport; it’s a difference of cups to barrels for other heat sources. An eighty-year-old cedar or pine tree has been separating the C from the O2 for a good long time.  Fell it, buck it, split and season it, then the carbon is released in a useful and efficient manner in the woodstove.  The forest has space for more trees to grow.

Have a nice, warm day.

Gene Nielsen

Crescent Mills