The UK government already mandates plain packaging and grisly health warnings on cigarettes, and now the same is coming to home stoves and even sacks of ‘coal’ and firewood. [some emphasis, links added]
New wood-burning stoves, bags of firewood, and even sacks of ‘smokeless fuel’ — a coal replacement now sold as the government has already totally outlawed the sale of real coal — will have to be sold with cigarette-style health warnings, the government has said.
Appliances will be rated from A to C depending on their efficiency, with many presently available burners and furnaces becoming illegal to buy as the maximum smoke output is to be slashed by 80 per cent.
The Times reports that messages printed on the packaging of burners and fuel will include the warning that “this appliance emits air pollution into and around your home, which can harm your health”, and that it has a “negative impact on the health of you and your family”.
The government claims wood smoke can be linked to the deaths of 2,500 people a year. Health warnings and even plain, unbranded packaging for cigarettes and other tobacco products are now the rule in the UK, introduced on similar grounds.
Despite the draconian new measures intended to clamp down on homes heated by traditional means, campaigners say the rules don’t go far enough and that Westminster should ban log burners altogether, something the government has reportedly been considering for years.
The debate has occasionally taken on something of the appearance of a class war, the latest assault against rural Britons by a distinctly urban-dominated government that neither understands nor sympathises with its fellow countrymen.
Energy prices have soared in the United Kingdom over the past 20 years, with both gas and electricity prices at historic highs as global prices rise and the government pursues an aggressive decarbonization policy, sacrificing traditional energy sources for wind and solar.
The energy prices Britons pay are among the highest in the world, so perhaps it is unsurprising that some have sought to wrest back some control from centrally fixed pricing and generation policies, and the number of homes known to be burning wood and installing new log-burning stoves has increased.
Read rest at Breitbart
