I’ve been read­ing a lot about the increas­ing pop­u­lar­ity of wood-fired boil­ers for home heat­ing. This tech­nol­ogy has attracted an out­spo­ken set of advo­cates who claim that wood is cheap, renew­able, and domestically-produced.

These things are all true, but in their zeal, wood-fuel advo­cates have for­got­ten one of the most stag­ger­ingly impor­tant changes the indus­trial rev­o­lu­tion brought to our land­scape: the shift from wood fuel to coal (and later, oil). For mil­len­nia, the dom­i­nant source of fuel for heat­ing and cook­ing had been wood. But wood is inef­fi­cient, and entire forests would be stripped clean to pro­vide win­ter heat­ing. Straight­for­ward com­bus­tion of wood is also a tremen­dous source of pol­lu­tion. I haven’t tried cal­cu­lat­ing any num­bers, but I’m pretty cer­tain that in a mod­ern pop­u­la­tion of our size, it is not a viable fuel for every­day use.

It’s funny how his­tory repeats itself. What next, another killer smog?