Of course I can take it...
Anyway, I am always suspicious of government statistics...a healthy skepticism is important. Transparency in government isn't so transparent...and bureaucrats do manipulate their statistics for their own agendas.
Sort of like "If you like your plan, you can keep your plan..." blah, blah, blah.
I'll read your links when I get home tonight...but I did scan the one about Cuomo. In his case, he's got so many upstate New Yorkers PO'd about that idiotic gun ban as well as his comments afterward, he's doing anything he can to mollify those folks. There's more issues in upstate NY as well, but that's probably the proverbial "straw that broke the camel's back".
The EPA hadn't bothered with wood stoves since about 1990 (give or take a couple years)...why now?
I would replace suspicion with trust but verify. The verify part is getting more difficult I grant you, and that leads to suspicion. The studies the EPA relies upon for lower net costs; i.e., stove prices increase some, health costs decrease more, are darn hard or impossible for the average person to verify. It is human nature to not trust that which we cannot verify. However at some point, in the absence of reliable information to the contrary, I accept that we buy kids books and send them to school for a reason.
Sometimes that education and new knowledge leads them to things we'd rather not hear about because it adds complexity to our lives. More often that new knowledge benefits us greatly, and that we like. Well, it all comes from the same places and processes. Arbitrarily trusting that which we like while rejecting that which we don't, is very human but illogical.
The current EPA stove particulate standards this new proposal would replace have been in effect since 1988, 26 years ago. In those 26 years stove designers have managed to create more efficient stoves that produce more heat with less fuel while emitting fewer particulates. There were some clunkers along the way but that would be normal for any technology. The cost increase for stoves have been repaid by reducing fuel consumption. Over a stove's lifetime that cost $500 more to buy new, that is only 2.5 cords of cut, split and delivered wood around here that needed to be saved to break even. In reality the stove likely produced net savings in excess of that $500.
Also in the past 26 years, the population and its corresponding pollution load has increased and will continue to. And we've learned that we need to manage the global carbon cycle primarily through greater use of carbon-neutral energy sources such as solar, wood/biomass, hydro, and wind.
Wood, fiber and biomass have great potential as energy sources. Wood has a high level of consumer acceptance, its use is relatively low-tech, it produces energy on-demand, it can often be locally sourced, and it is renewable. What's not to like--if it can be used at greater levels without increasing damaging side effects such as particulate pollution?
In the face of increasing population and hopefully growing use of wood, the only way to hold particulate emissions at safe levels (which are constant restraints for health no matter how many people and stoves there are) is to reduce the particulates produced by each wood burning appliance. The same concept applies to Tier IV diesel engines; how are particulates held at safe levels while adding millions of engines to the globe? It can only be done by reducing the particulates each engine produces. We can debate about the technology choices to best accomplish that, but we cannot argue about the need to do it somehow.
I think now is an excellent time to work on the known challenges. There is nothing to gain and much to lose by delaying.
