The Herald has just now reported on this issue.

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I am a regional planner by trade, majored in politics, environmental sciences, geography and planning, currently working at a university in Germany on topics of rural resilience and survival of rural communities.

This article, or rather its contents, struck me hard, as in: Nonsensical and not at all helping the already struggling highlands and islands in either maintaining or growing their population.

What does this sub make of it? Are you interested in the opinion of an "expert" who has studied and researched just that field for a decade?

by SchmalzlockenJoe

25 comments

  1. It’s unsurprisingly being misreported by pretty much every news outlet. The fact sheet about the legislation, which came out in January, made it clear that there are exceptions for emergency heating where justifiable and yet it’s being presented as a total ban.

  2. Why is it nonsensical?

    Do you not have reliable power in the Highlands?

    Heat pumps are much better than they were, Norway regularly uses them.

  3. Requiring new builds to be built to a high standard of insulation and with green heating should be the standard, I don’t see why we shouldn’t be building rural homes to the same standards.

  4. For me, they shouldn’t be installed where they’re not needed, like built up areas where central heating is a feature of the houses, and this is likely going to be all new builds. It should be protected in areas where it is a primary or important redundancy form of heating (rural highlands, islands, huts, bothies, etc.). I live on a narrowboat and it is my primary source of heating and secondary source of cooking heat, so I understand this issue at a personal level.

    My question is; will this affect newly built or converted rural homes that would require that level of redundancy (no or unreliable electrical connections, reliance on gas cylinders)

  5. If I didn’t have my wood burning stove I’d be well and truly fucked.

    I can’t afford £25k for air source heating and I don’t qualify for free stuff.

    I certainly can’t afford to heat a home with electricity either(have you seen the price of it).

    Strictly speaking logs are a renewable energy.

    Edit: For the people that seem to be struggling with their reading comprehension, I’m well aware the current changes don’t have any direct impact on my circumstances(I can read).

    I’m simply sharing my experience as a current log burner user.

  6. The idea that there government can tell you that you’re not allowed to burn wood for heat in your own property, something we’ve been doing since time immemorial, is absolute nonsense and sickening

  9. It’s nonsense, a few thousand additional homes in Scotland burning some logs to keep warm and make a cup of tea is such a pathetically small impact in terms of global climate.

    Building high quality insulated homes is a good thing, banning wood burning is a bridge too far.

    Unfortunately a lot of the climate activists have completely lost touch with reality and don’t understand that these types of interventions have no impact other than on the people who lose their best option for heating their home.

    Also, the government telling you can’t burn wood… fuck off and stay in your lane of doing a terrible job running the country and making a show of being different from Westminster with every piece of legislation.

  10. Banning things is the one of Scotland’s best solutions for anything, and I wholly support banning anything except banning things.

  11. I love the phrase “don’t let perfect become the enemy of good”

    Biomass fuel isn’t perfect, and yes eventually will need to change to something more suitable.

    But Biomass is better than fossil fuels, at the moment.

  12. SNP/Greens aren’t interested in experts, they always know better.

  13. Nice bit of scaremongering there.

    The solution? Build according to regs then fit a woodburner after the planners have signed off on the build.

    The planned complete ban on “direct heating” is over 20 years away and there will almost certainly be exemptions for rural homes.

  14. If the government are at all serious about re-populating the highlands and islands (they’re not) then they’ll know this is a nonsense.

    Very real possibility of somebody one day having peat cutting rights but not being allowed to use the peat.

    That’s before we even touch on the issue of power cuts spanning multiple days in some areas too. What’s a new build house supposed to do?

  16. Am I right in thinking people can install a wood burner if they want?

  17. Agree with you.

    Funny how you only mention the Highlands and islands but ignore the rest of rural Scotland – eg borders Galloway Dumfries Buchan Ayrshire. How come ?

  18. As we’ve seen with just about everything that’s been outlawed, banning shit doesn’t solve the problem

  19. My advice for anyone falling for this clickbait pish by a Unionist rag is to actually read the Building Regulations.

    It is guff and has indeed been updated several times throughout the day as the original headline was pish.

    Source: Architect.

  20. Crazy.
    Burning wood is natural and as old as time itself.

    It’s one thing for the green brigade to be against burning hydrocarbons but this next level lunacy.

  21. Hard to know where the political heart of this lies if the law has been overseen by Patrick Harvie, a green MP. What would have been more useful would have been increasing standards for home insulation or subsidising heat pumps or biomass systems. That would at least make wood burners a less attractive option.

    The law itself seems performative at best as the scope is fairly narrow but it will be a political football. I do believe tbf that governments and local councils definitely do have a hard on for cracking down on burners though. You can heat your house for free if you can source, store and dry wood. Insert the “Energy companies HATE him!” meme. When something like this comes from the UK Gov I’ll be more concerned.

  22. Banning low emission biofuel is exactly the kind of ideology over expertise approach favoured by the SNP and their ‘Green’ enablers.

  24. From my cold, dead hands!!! (If they come for existing burners!)

  25. Why would we listen to experts when we can unqualified doctrinaire eco fundamentalists making things up on the hoof?

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