My burning shame: I fitted my house with three wood-burning stoves | George Monbiot

Wood burners are incredibly bad for the environment - and flood our homes with toxins, too. I wish I'd known that in 2008

It's shame that has stopped me writing about it before. The shame of failing to think for myself and see the bigger picture, which is more or less my job description. Instead, I followed the crowd.

In 2008 I was refitting my house. It was a century old and poorly built. Insulating it and installing efficient appliances was expensive but straightforward, and the decisions I made were generally good ones. But the toughest issue was heating. The technology that had seemed to show most promise a few years before - domestic fuel cells - hadn't materialised. Domestic heat pumps (which are now more accessible) were extremely expensive and scarcely deployed in the UK. That left only two options: gas or wood. I wanted to unhook myself from fossil fuels. So I went with wood.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

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