The weather has been glorious of late, but even so, the nights are chilly. And with the recent rise in natural-gas prices, we enjoy our air-tight, wood-burning parlor stove even more.
Recently, I’ve discovered a new time-saving feature. Rather than walk over to the stove and open its lid to see if it needs more wood or an air-intake adjustment, I just check the position of our two household felines, Maggie and The Cat Formerly Known As Princess.
If they’re loafing more than 10 feet away, the fire is too hot. If they’re within a yard of the stove, then we need more fire. Cats seem to be quite sensitive to room temperature – generally, that’s the only factor which can inspire them to move at all. There’s nothing lazier than a cat near a warm stove.
I have no idea what they muse about while loafing there, but once in a while, I ponder the politics of wood heat.
One reason we need to augment our gas heat with wood is that natural gas has become quite expensive. That can go back to the Clinton administration, which encouraged power plants to use natural gas instead of coal. Gas burns much more cleanly, and at the time, supplies were abundant. Further, our region produces more gas than it consumes, so prices were lower here.
The Bush administration fixed that problem by expediting a right-of-way for a gas pipeline from Wyoming to California that was completed in May 2003. As the U.S. Department of Energy reported, “spot prices in the region had been much lower on average,” but after the gas started flowing, “spot prices in the Rocky Mountain trading area rose significantly, to levels more comparable to those at other major gas trading points in U.S. production areas.”
At first this looked like bad politics. California is a blue state. We’re a red state. Why should a Republican administration reward California consumers at the expense of Colorado consumers? Don’t we get some kind of reward for voting the right way?
But even if a majority of Coloradans voted for Bush, they aren’t the people he’s interested in serving. It’s the people who produce natural gas who make the campaign contributions, and obviously, that’s the constituency that matters.
It seems safe to predict that if more people heat with wood and thus hurt natural-gas prices, then the Forest Service will find ways to make cordwood more expensive by raising the price of permits and restricting gathering areas.
We might also reasonably expect this administration to announce a “Clean Air Initiative” that primarily affects wood-burning stoves. Why not get some brownie points for reducing pollution while at the same time helping your buddies in the natural-gas business?
Granted, my stove and many others in Salida send up plumes of smoke. So do forest fires, which is a likely destination for this wood if I don’t burn it. So the question is not “Wood smoke or no wood smoke?” but “If we’re going to have the smoke in our air anyway, why not allow someone to get some useful heat from it in the process?”
It’s hard to determine whether wood heat is conservative or liberal. It’s a traditional American activity, which should make it conservative, except that many modern conservatives don’t have much use for other American traditions, like civil liberties or fiscal responsibility.
But a lot of liberals, at least those concerned about the environment, don’t have much use for wood-burning either. There’s the air pollution, which got to be so intense in some mountain towns that they banned wood stoves.
There’s also the act of removing trees from where they would otherwise rot and be part of the cycle of nature if they didn’t burn in a wildfire – which is natural, as opposed to my unnatural stove.
So, if a lot of liberals don’t like wood heat, and if the Bush administration’s policies keep pushing me toward it at the moment, it must be a conservative activity.
Except it competes with one of Bush’s favorite industries, so it couldn’t really be conservative, right?
Never mind. The cats have the right idea. Stretch out near the stove and enjoy the warmth while it lasts.
Ed Quillen of Salida is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
