I am well aware of this. Non-combustion energy sources are what is needed if we want to solve climate change and prevent the 3.8 million deaths per year caused by indoor air pollution. Money spent on improving energy systems should not be invested in infrastructure that further locks in killer+high carbon energy sources like biofuels.

Alternatives are different in different places, but are some combo of electrification using wind, hydro, solar, tidal, geothermal, and nuclear.

I get that these things take time. I guess if this article pointed out that wood energy is generally terrible for air pollution and carbon reasons and must be moved away from, I would be less upset by it.

I mean, that's fair, but I also think this is well enough understood as to be obvious... maybe a comment about it would have been good for context but it did come across as a technology article.

Of course burning wood produces more particulates, though less sulfur or radium. These I imagine would be slightly more upscale ovens though than I think you're talking about, the kind with chimneys so they don't exhaust into the house at least. For those kinds of ovens I feel like demographic wise you're talking semi off-the-grid New Hampshire rather than cooking with coal indoors.

Consider that trees collecting solar energy are maybe 50x worse than solar cells at converting sunlight to biomass energy. But for the kinds of situations I'm imagining they have enough land that the wood is free anyway. And I do believe that in that situation it's carbon neutral, except that the carbon gets released more as soot than it started which does suck.

For electricity? Solar panels. Even for someone burning wood in a stove they're still a better and cheaper source.

They are not. For all the reasons mentioned in the article.