I think all fireplaces are bad. They burn years of plants (trees) that have taken CO2 out of the air and release it in a very short time of an hour or 2.

More fireplaces are very poor and let more heat out than they produce. It's soooooo last century.

I read this blog comment on Sierra and it was great.

Posted by: Nancy | January 05, 2010 at 05:36 PM

Jim: there's nothing environmentally-unfriendly about burning wood, no matter what anyone here tells you (including this article). It's all about the carbon cycle: burning natural gas is bad because you're digging up a hydrocarbon from deep below the earth's surface that's been there for millions of years, and burning it, releasing all that carbon into the atmosphere, increasing the overall amount of carbon there. Whereas, with wood, you're taking wood, grown only within the last few decades, and burning it, releasing its carbon into the atmosphere.

With wood and other yard waste, plants capture carbon dioxide from the air and use it to build more plant matter, and then we burn these things and release the carbon. Overall, the net change of carbion dioxide in the atmosphere is basically zero, because it's all happening within a very short timescale (years to decades). With oil and natural gas however, instead of burning recently-captured carb on, we're burning carbon captured by plants millions of years ago when the atmosphere was very different from now, and overall increasing the amount of CO2.

Of course, too many people burning too much wood in a valley can cause "particulate" pollution and smoke, but that's not an environmental problem at all, only a health problem: it's bad for humans to breathe it (and perhaps any animals in the area, but this generally is a problem only in urban areas, not places where there's wildlife). Wildfires happen all the time in nature and cause tons of "particulate pollution", but even though these fires are completely natural in many cases (caused by lightning), they'll damage your health too. Same goes for volcanoes. Don't confuse "environmentally bad" with "dangerous to human health". Hemlock is a completely natural plant which is in no way environmentally harmful (after all, it grows naturally), but it most certainly is dangerous to human health if you drink its extract. Similarly, there's nothing wrong with smoke from fireplaces, or even outdoor wood furnaces. Sure, the smoke may be bad for humans' lung health in the immediate area, but it doesn't hurt the environment.