Let's look at your original post, shall we? (Emphasis mine.) I mean, you basically said, "I get wanting to be able to breathe, but what about freedom?" Did you really expect no one to find that a bit absurd?
Fear not. I have it on good authority that wood burning will still be permitted in San Francisco in the distant future of ten years from now.
Wow. That is a seriously large, unauthorized conflagration. If you're not careful, the EPA will see it, and when they do, they're going to be pi- Fuck Fuck Fuck! Everybody Run!
It may be cheap for the person burning the wood but it has external costs to others. Namely the frigging disgusting pollution that no doubt causes all sorts of health problems. So, look at it another way. Why should someone be allowed to use a method of heating that produces excessive pollution and health problems for others? Is the wood burner going to compensate the health problems of others? No. And, that's why it superficially appears to cheap but in reality it's not cheap. Mr Awe
You live in one of the more Liberal states/cities in the country. This seems on par with that. Perhaps you'll be happier living somewhere else? Texas? South Carolina? Anywhere in the South?
I don't think it's you. There seems to be something going on board wide with images taking a longer than normal time to load or not loading at all for some people. There was a similar issue in the Thread Bomb topic and a couple other places.
I mean don't get me wrong - I love a good wood fire, many fond fireplace memories. But, I live somewhere (relatively) rural; it's the price you pay. Spoiler: Spoilers! DS9, Past Tense - the one where Sisko and Bashir end up in 2020s San Francisco "Sanctuary Disctricts".
Like have sex with children? Things get banned all the time. They have been since time immemorial. If something you do is deemed to have a negative impact on society as a whole - be it burn wood or diddle a 4th grader, then society through its elected representatives will tell you to stop. Why is this so difficult for Republicans to understand? You're free to do whatever stupid, inane, worthless thing you want to do as long as it doesn't interfere with others. If and when it does, then you have to stop it. Don't like it? Get people elected who will let you live in this libertarian wonderland that's never existed.
But see, the thing is, it always comes across like it IS a huge deal. Misunderstandings can happen, but you have to reach a point where - if every time you do a certain thing, EVERYONE reacts to that thing in the same way, every time you do it - you gotta start looking at how you do that thing. The likelihood that this many people are all just reading way too much into your words over and over is extremely low. On this particular topic: please. This is the SF Bay Area. We are having nights that dip down into the low 30s, and we call that "unusually cold" for early December. My sister lives in Madison, Wisconsin. Know how cold it is there right now? FIVE degrees F. Out of every region in this entire country, this is one of the places where it's least problematic to have a ban such as this. Heating even a large house to an acceptable degree is not overly costly or difficult, especially when combined with the fact that you can just add layers, which does a lot more for us than for people in places like Madison - we've gotten by with just wearing a sweater and turning our wall-mounted gas heater on for maybe 5-10 minutes every couple of hours at most. Unless, of course, you have no method of heating your household outside of a wood fire... in which case you are exempt! Combine that with the fact that, as has been able demonstrated, the smoke from wood fires CAN negatively impact others, and I don't see any merit behind complaining about this regulation.
I think this air quality problem is particularly bad in cities where the local geography forms a 'bowl' where the air can just sit stagnantly for weeks during different times of the year.
Where I live they encourage you to get a wood burner. Practically everyone I know has one. I don't, can't be bothered, I just want to turn a knob and have heat. But on a cold day my whole street smells like woodsmoke from people's heaters.
In Tasmania they are trying to encourage people to give up woodheaters because of the many health problems caused by woodheaters here. This is especially true of the city of Launceston because of the bowl effect there. However there are several Hobart suburbs where the air quality is bad during the winter because of woodsmoke. It is such a problem that woodheaters are now being removed from government housing.