> residential wood combustion serves almost no economic purpose

It’s a lot cheaper than the alternatives. And a lot more resilient in areas with unreliable power.

> It’s a lot cheaper than the alternatives.

Really? The efficiency is very low heating a house with wood unless you use it to warm water which is distributing the heat to radiators (and for heating warm water to the showers). Almost no-one who burns wood has this, people just have a chimney in the living room.

And how do you feed the wood into the burner? Waste 10 minutes every hour, 24/7?

All it costs is your time, and not much of that since it replaces some of the time you'd otherwise spend exercising. 30hr/yr to break down a recently downed tree into firewood, 5min/day to clear out ashes and bring in new wood for the stove, and 1 min every 6hr to shove some new wood in the stove. You have gas as a more expensive fallback to keep things from freezing if you get lazy or are gone for awhile, and especially if a good job in the area pays $10/hr it's a no-brainer for most of the population to use wood heat. The stove pays for itself in less than a winter in gas savings.

I live in the North where -40 is common. I would say the vast majority of people have a wood stove, and they work exceedingly well.

You might not be aware but ones that burn the wood twice (even three times) are now common and in fact are law in many places. So they're MUCH more efficient, and drastically reduce the particulates coming out the stove pipe. Another benefit is they only need to be fed once every 24-48 hours (depending on what heat you set the thermostat, what size stove you have, how well insulated your house is and what temperature it is outside.)

Wood stoves are a necessity.

I don’t have actual data, but I strongly suspect that emissions from actual well-designed wood stoves are negligible. The problem is wood-burning fireplaces, which are a whole different animal. If you want to heat your house with a high quality wood-fired heater, be my guest.

Nothing good will come of trying to heat your house with a wood-burning fireplace. They’re pretty, they’re fun, they crackle nicely, they combust wood very poorly, and they send almost all the heat right out the chimney. And, if they work correctly, lots of air comes out the chimney for the ride (keeping the combustion products out of the house), so a lot of makeup air comes in from outside, cooling your house.

If you want to heat your house by burning something, you want to capture as much of the heat of combustion as practical (preferably the higher heating value, which condensing boilers and furnaces can do, but the lower heating value is a good start), and you want to minimize the degree to which operating the heater forces you to replace conditioned air in the house with unconditioned outside air. A fireplace fails at this.

I think it might be fair to point out that particulate emissions from vehicle exhaust is likely low because of the regulation, not that they were regulating the wrong thing.

On an unrelated note, how did they come up with these numbers for percentage contribution? It seems quite difficult to attribute cause outside of a controlled laboratory setting.

Agreed, but the point here is that there are diminishing returns. Absolutely keep an eye on it, but now lets move on to the next thing that we can move the needle on.

Or pay attention to exhaust from the remaining highly polluting sources. For example, two-stroke gardening equipment (and bad four-stroke equipment), some trucks (where are the AI-powered freeway cameras detecting gross polluters), motorcycles, etc.

Here in the Netherlands I'm starting to smell and hear about lots of people warming their houses by burning wood since the natural gas prices have skyrocketed. Personally I'm not too fond of the idea of breathing in more fine particulate. But trying to ban wood fire heating would be political suicide.

In the city I live in it's borderline impossible to go outside during late hours in winter because you get literally gassed with smog from the various shit people burn for heating, it's absolutely unreal.

Nothing about leaf-blowers. The amount of pollution they produce is insane. Both directly by their exhaust, and secondary because they kick up a LOT of dust.