Last week, the New York Times ran two stories that present a fascinating dichotomy in people’s response to rising home-heating costs.
On Friday, Elisabeth Rosenthal reported from the central German town of Darmstadt about “passive houses” that employ high-tech designs to provide warm air and hot water using incredibly small amounts of energy – as little as might be used to power a hair dryer.
Rosenthal explains the design briefly:
Using ultrathick insulation and complex doors and windows, the architect engineers a home encased in an airtight shell, so that barely any heat escapes and barely any cold seeps in. That means a passive house can be warmed not only by the sun, but also by the heat from appliances and even from occupants’ bodies.
The next day, Rosenthal’s colleagues, Tom Zeller, Jr. and Stefan Milkowski, reported on an entirely different trend that is developing here in America. Homeowners are rediscovering the age-old tradition of burning coal in home furnaces and boilers. After hitting its historical low in 2006, residential coal use increased 9 percent in 2007 and over 10 percent in the first 8 months of 2008.
Simply put, coal is cheap. According to the Times, one ton of high grade coal might cost as little as $120. To get equivalent heat from heating oil might cost $380, while natural gas could run up to $480.
But coal is also dirty. Lacking pollution controls, home installations emit carbon dioxide, particulate matter, mercury, and every other pollutant found in the coal. EPA has put restrictions on wood stoves and fireplace inserts to limit particulate matter emissions, but there are no such regulations governing residential coal burning.
As Zeller and Milkiwski point out,
In some localities where residential coal burning is becoming a factor, that might be changing. In Fairbanks Alaska, air quality experts suspect the increase in coal burning — along with increased wood burning — is contributing to concentrations of fine particles well above federal limits. “We see it as a real health hazard to Fairbanks,” said Jim Conner, the Fairbanks North Star Borough’s air quality specialist.
A little more growth in the residential coal market will likely result in regulation to protect against exactly such problems.
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Matt Shudtz | January 5, 2009
Last week, the New York Times ran two stories that present a fascinating dichotomy in people’s response to rising home-heating costs. On Friday, Elisabeth Rosenthal reported from the central German town of Darmstadt about “passive houses” that employ high-tech designs to provide warm air and hot water using incredibly small amounts of energy – […]
Yee Huang | January 2, 2009
Chairmen Henry Waxman and James Oberstar have been busy sharpening water protection tools on the Congressional whetstone. In a memorandum to President-elect Obama, Waxman, chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and Oberstar, chair of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, detail serious deterioration of Clean Water Act (CWA) enforcement. The investigation […]
Matthew Freeman | December 31, 2008
The Environmental Working Group is out with a new guide to Compact Fluorescent Light bulbs (CFLs), and they warn that not all CFLs are environmentally equal. CFLs offer huge energy-consumption and length-of-use advantages over traditional incandescent bulbs, but they introduce one noteworthy environmental problem: each CFL has a tiny amount of mercury inside the […]
Matthew Freeman | December 30, 2008
The Fresno Bee’s Mark Grossi ran a piece this weekend about local deaths caused by air pollution. It must have left readers shaking their heads; indeed, that seems to have been the point. Here’s the lede: The more than 800 people who died prematurely this year from breathing dirty San Joaquin Valley air are worth […]
Matthew Freeman | December 29, 2008
David Fahrenthold had a powerful article in Saturday’s Washington Post on the failures of Chesapeake Bay cleanup efforts. The lede: Government administrators in charge of an almost $6 billion cleanup of the Chesapeake Bay tried to conceal for years that their effort was failing — even issuing reports overstating their progress — to preserve the […]
Matthew Freeman | December 24, 2008
The Mercatus Center is out with a new report focused on midnight regulations — the last-minute regs pushed through by Presidents even as their successor’s inaugural parade reviewing stand is being constructed on the front stoop of the White House. President Bush and his political appointees at regulatory agencies are making considerable use of their […]
Matthew Freeman | December 23, 2008
It breaks no new ground to observe that the Bush Administration’s record on respecting science and scientists is dismal. Three examples tell the tale: The President’s 2001 decision to severely restrict federal support for stem cell research; The President’s embrace of Intelligent Design – the latest ruse for insinuating the religious doctrine of Creationism into […]
Matthew Freeman | December 22, 2008
Last year at about this time, the toy giant Mattel was up to its ears in recalled toys – more than 20 million of them to be specific. Not a good posture for a toy company right before Christmas. Nevertheless, there’s an argument to be made that Mattel caught something of a PR break […]
James Goodwin | December 19, 2008
The past few weeks, Congress has been working on an economic stimulus bill intended to jolt the U.S. economy back to life. Earlier in the week, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi projected that the bill will combine roughly $400 billion in infrastructure spending with roughly $200 billion of targeted tax cuts. According to its […]