EPA To Alaskans In Sub-Zero Temps: Stop Burning Wood To Keep Warm https://t.co/0xbylnKgcx via @FDRLST
— Teri Peters (@hipEchik) December 30, 2016
In 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.”
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.
...The problem with the EPA bullying the people of Fairbanks about their wood stoves is that the federal government thinks this is a problem that can be solved. What would the EPA have Alaskans do, use solar panels to heat their homes in winter?
