Your article on the harmful effects of burning wood (‘Eco’ wood burners produce 450 times more pollution than gas heating – report, 8 December) highlights a broader problem with risk management in public health. Very different values are placed on human life, depending on the specific risk.
The level of air pollutants considered acceptable by the World Health Organization is already dangerous, increasing mortality by 2%. In contrast, the level of radioactivity considered acceptable is 100-500 times below levels that cause a similar increase in mortality. What this means is that a life lost to air pollution is valued 100- to 500-fold lower than a life lost to exposure to radioactivity.
It is partly because of this difference, and the resulting regulatory regimes, that coal-fired power stations are much cheaper to build than nuclear power stations, even though they are at least 500 times more dangerous. It is only because of concerns about the effects of greenhouse gas emissions on climate change that countries are now considering alternatives to coal, including nuclear power. If we had, from the outset, valued lives lost to air pollution the same as lives lost to radioactivity, we would have been building nuclear power plants rather than coal-fired power plants for the past 40 years. Many millions of lives would have been saved, and the climate emergency might have been avoided.
Anton van der Merwe
Oxford
• Your article about wood burning stoves seems to be yet another example of individuals being made to feel responsible for the world’s environmental woes while governments and business pay little more than lip service to such issues.
The wood that I burn is collected within a five-mile radius of my home, and I would guess that most wood burned domestically is similarly local.
By contrast, Drax power station, about 15 miles from me, burns millions of tons of woodchips imported from forests in North America and elsewhere, brought here in huge, polluting tankers. But because it is called “biomass”, it attracts billions of pounds in government subsidies.
While I am concerned about pollution, I will be continuing to burn biomass, without subsidy, for the foreseeable future.
Alan Robertshaw
Haxby, North Yorkshire
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