Jack London’s famous short story, "To Build A Fire," a man freezes to death because he underestimates the cold in America’s far north and cannot build a proper fire. The unnamed man--a chechaquo, what Alaska natives call newcomers--is accompanied by a wolf-dog that knows the danger of the cold and is wholly indifferent to the fate of the man. "This man did not know cold. Possibly, all the generations of his ancestry had been ignorant of cold, of real cold, of cold 107 degrees below freezing point. But the dog knew; all its ancestry knew, and it had inherited the knowledge." Sorry, Alaska Paul, the EPA says you have to freeze.
If only the bureaucrats in Washington DC knew what the wolf-dog knew. But alas, now comes the federal government to tell the inhabitants of Alaska’s interior that, really, they should not be building fires to keep themselves warm during the winter. The New York Times reports the Environmental Protection Agency could soon declare the Alaskan cities of Fairbanks and North Pole, which have a combined population of about 100,000, in "serious" noncompliance of the Clean Air Act early next year.
Like most people in Alaska, the residents of those frozen cities are burning wood to keep themselves warm this winter. Smoke from wood-burning stoves increases small-particle pollution, which settles in low-lying areas and can be breathed in. The EPA thinks this is a big problem. Eight years ago, the agency ruled that wide swaths of the most densely populated parts of the region were in "non-attainment" of federal air quality standards. Just another power grab. Gotta keep the Natives under control.
That prompted state and local authorities to look for ways to cut down on pollution from wood-burning stoves, including the possibility of fining residents who burn wood. After all, a declaration of noncompliance from the EPA would have enormous economic implications for the region, like the loss of federal transportation funding.
The problem is, there’s no replacement for wood-burning stoves in Alaska’s interior. Heating oil is too expensive for a lot of people, and natural gas isn’t available. So they’ve got to burn something. The average low temperature in Fairbanks in December is 13 degrees below zero. In January, it’s 17 below. During the coldest days of winter, the high temperature averages -2 degrees, and it can get as cold as -60. This is not a place where you play games with the cold. If you don’t keep the fire lit, you die. For people of modest means, and especially for the poor, that means you burn wood in a stove--and you keep that fire lit around the clock.
As Necessary As Food And Water
Growing up in Alaska, I learned this from an early age. (My father, in fact, was a chechaquo. As a white kid growing up in Alaska native villages in the 1950s, the native kids would call him and his siblings chechaquos as a kind of juvenile epithet. Like many families in Alaska, then and now, we weren't wealthy and had no other means of staying warm besides burning wood. As kids, my brothers and I would spend long hours stacking cords of wood and, when we were older, felling trees, cutting them into logs, and hauling them back to the house. It wasn't romantic, it was simply part of life in the far north: firewood was as natural and necessary as food and water.
For most Alaskans, it still is. Replacing wood-burning stoves, especially in the state's interior, isn't easily done. More at the link.
Posted by: Deacon Blues ||
12/31/2016 08:41 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[11126 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
Send all the EPA pointy headed idiots to Alaska, put them in a house and tell them they aren't allowed to burn wood. If they survive the winter, we'll all adopt their methods. They are also forbidden from using any hydrocarbons.
#2
Silentbrick, my plan for the EPA was to send them to India. In America these days, you can sometimes see the air pollution over a large city if you can see the whole city at once, like from a hill. In India, you can just look down the road. The pointy heads would have heart attacks.
I would send the OSHA people right along with the EPA folks. I saw men walking to work in hard hats and flip flops. Same fate as EPA.
Posted by: Rambler in Virginia ||
12/31/2016 14:42 Comments ||
Top||
[BOSTON HERALD] What a pathetic piece of work this Kerry is. Always has been. But what’s the mid- or long-term upside to rolling over for these bloodthirsty Third World savages? Remember, this is a guy who said he could, uh, sort of understand why the Muslim butchers of the Charlie Hebdo magazine staff in Paris had decided to go Gestapo.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to call throwing in with the vermin at the United Nations “joining the jackals.”
Gigolo John has joined the jackals, big time. And as he stares at himself in the mirror this morning, he’s thinking … if I can’t get the Nobel, maybe I can at least score a Profiles in Courage award. After all, my initials are JFK. Will James Taylor croon as Caroline hands me the plaque?
Posted by: Fred ||
12/31/2016 12:14 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[11129 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
I won't be sorry to see Kerry go, he is the giver of interminable, long-winded, overly repetitious, stem-winder speeches and the co-author of treaties that sell out the U.S.
#3
Oh, he'll try to dance back onto the stage with the rest of the butt buddies of the left, but the stage is shrinking. There might not be enough room on it for him.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
What a pathetic piece of work this Kerry is. Always has been. But what’s the mid- or long-term upside to rolling over for these bloodthirsty Third World savages? Remember, this is a guy who said he could, uh, sort of understand why the Muslim butchers of the Charlie Hebdo magazine staff in Paris had decided to go Gestapo.
