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We need to outlaw wood; the smoke when it is burned contains over 200 chemicals, 1/4 of them toxic and many carcinogenic.

Not at the 1,300°F temperatures of my catalytic converter, nor with the twelve miles of distance and 1200' of altitude I have for dispersion. You and your majority don't have a beef with my stove.

Toxicity is a matter of dosage, but then, you don't care about that when you finally think you can vent your frustrations. The people of Los Angeles just got a pretty nasty dose of the consequences of your kind of thinking.

We non-wood burners have rights and we outnumber you.

Oh, lookie there! A democratic claim. Well, last time I read the Constitution, we live in a republic. That means I have property rights that say that you don't have the right to mandate processes that stupidly destroy my forest without paying for it. If you want me not to use natural processes to manage my forest, you'll have to pay for the substitutes or suffer the same fate as the people of LA do now. Those are laws of physics and economics that don't give a hang about your fantasy "rights." Your comment is collectivism worthy of a Soviet apparatchik.

You flunked again "professor."

Carry_Okie, it is in places of growing population density that such disputes as this fireplace business are most likely to happen.

If people like Old Professor lived miles away from you and your fireplace, it would be much more difficult for him to interfere with your way of life.

And wood burning is just one of a growing number of such disputes.

Regardless of how you try to reason or ratonalize, you will lose your freedom as America's population grows from immigration and people live more and more on top of each other.

After all, the more people you crowd into a liferaft, the more each occupant must learn to compromise his freedom of action, lest it conflict with another occupant's freedom to enjoy life his way.

America has a limited amount of land--and an even more limited amount of good land.

And so the more America's population grows from immigration, the greater America's population density.

And with that growing population density, comes a change in attitudes.

This change is most pronounced where the population density increases the fastest, so in such places the change is easier to detect.

Good fences make good neighbors, but more space between neighbors makes even better neighbors.

I marvel at the politicians passing laws against burning wood in a fireplace at the same time electricity and gas prices have been pushed so high by government mismanagement. I just spent a week in the rail yard around the Miller electric generating plant in Alabama. The coal trains arrive on a continuous basis at that plant. The plant burns over 1,000 pounds of coal PER SECOND. Currently, the fuel of choice is low sulfur coal from the Powder River area of Wyoming.