As Americans nearly freeze to death, EPA pushes to criminalize many woodstoves

Only a government bureaucracy would seek to impose insane heating rules during the dead of winter, but that’s Washinton, D.C., for you – short on common sense, high on authoritarianism, and drunk with power. 

That’s the only way to explain a new Environmental Protection Agency proposal to impose regulations on new heat stoves, as reported by Fox News: The federal Environmental Protection Agency has proposed new standards for wood stoves that would reduce the maximum amount of fine particulate emissions allowed for new stoves sold in 2015 and 2019. 

The Fairbanks Daily News Miner newspaper further reported: The EPA’s much-anticipated wood stove regulations are proposed to go into effect throughout the country in 2015, requiring newly manufactured stoves to cut maximum emissions by more than a third. 

Those standards would tighten dramatically in 2019. The new proposed rules ostensibly come as a result of “increasing research and scrutiny of fine particulate air pollution,” the paper continued, which is known as PM 2.5. The agency said such particulate matter has been linked to long-term negative health impacts, like heart and lung disease – though there is nothing from EPA geniuses about the negative health effects of, say, freezing to death. Alaska seems to be of particular interest to the agency, which appears to be saying that, despite its distance from the ruling class, Alaska is still not too far away to be messed with by petty little tyrants who draw paychecks from Alaskan taxpayers, as well as those “in the lower 48.” From the Miner: Fairbanks and North Pole have been struggling to meet the EPA’s air pollution standards, with much of the focus being placed on wood burning as the primary source of PM 2.5. The EPA set a deadline of 2014, but compliance isn’t expected to be reached for a number of years. More