Robert, what kind of evidence do you desire? Personal experience? Can you imagine perhaps that tenants of housing with clear deficiencies in HVAC efficiency and interior air hygiene - very much inter-related, yes? - keep quiet about it so as to keep on their landlord's good side? How many low-income or modest-income tenants would like to e.g. use 100% green energy but are not able to do so with a centralized hot water supply?

Keith, what term is acceptable to you?

nice post

Decades ago I used my fireplace a lot, until the time I stepped outside and realized I was harming my neighbors. Obviously the smoke is household hazardous waste, so the whole idea of fireplaces and wood stoves is a dirty leftover from the Nineteenth Century.

New fireplaces are disallowed when applying for building permits, but our local governments pretend that existing fireplaces are not harmful. Breathing smoke is unhealthy for everyone, and makes some people sick right away. If the same smoke came from an industrial source, our elected officials would be happy to say "evil corporation," but they won't criticize voters for ruining the air.

City of Davis folks have told me that they rely on the Yolo-Solano Air Quality Management District, but the YSAQMD mission is to keep regional air better than Federal thresholds, which overlooks locally concentrated smoke in neighborhoods. The AQMD says "Don't light tonight" when regional air is expected to be dirty, but when the air is nice and clean for people to enjoy and be healthy, then they say it is OK to dump hazardous waste into people's lungs, utterly lame and pitifully misguided.

The Bay Area AQMD has run radio ads to say "Smoke is Smoke, so Don't Light That Fireplace," and they sent me the MP3 audio file to share. The State of Washington produced a public service document, "How Wood Smoke Harms Your Health."
<https://apps.ecology.wa.gov/publications/documents/91br023.pdf>

Anyone can help by submitting public comments to Davis City Council meetings (by telephone voice messages starting at noon before Tuesday meetings), as I have been doing for almost every meeting since late 2020. Another way to help is to email or call real estate sales people when they advertise fireplaces as a positive feature of a house for sale. Most of them write back to me, and they understand that such advertising misleads not only home buyers but anyone who reads the ads. Only a few of them play dumb.

A sad argument is to say that burning is not illegal and people have the right to burn on their private property. The logical response is, "For your own privacy, please keep all the smoke inside your house."

John Whitehead: Thank you. A lot of that also applies to leaf blowing, and from there an obvious segue to driving with internal combustion. And while I suppose some - but not many - people with solar panels also burn wood in fireplaces or firepits, the more interesting question for me right now is how can we use the best methods for making roads safer to reduce danger from narcissistic burning (using a fireplace not for heating). A primary strategy is road diets and narrowing of lanes. So the carry that over into fireplaces, it probably doesn't mean narrowing, but elimination. So the conclusion is that existing fireplaces have to be removed or otherwise taken out of action, and we do this by using the existing law you mention to disallow in new builds.

I can imagine the riots... but this begs the question: How many fireplaces need to be going in town to create the bad AQI in the image I use above? How many households burn some of the time?

I like wood burning. Image is misleading, the 117 is in a light industrial area, for example. No chance a fireplace would be a source of smoke concentrated enough to set off a meter that far away from a source. As for the use of the T-word defined as: “the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives” -- no way could you stretch use of a fireplace to that extent. Wood burners unite!

"Combustionarcissism"?

You might want to save that term for people who drive cars. LOL