Hard choices.

• Author: Stewart, Heather Dawn
• Position: From the Editor - Air quality control - Editorial

When I purchased my home last year, it had one feature I was particularly delighted with: a wood-burning stove. I envisioned wintery nights spent with my children in front of the warm, crackling fire. What I didn't anticipate was a campaign, endorsed by the Utah Clean Air partnership, Breathe Utah and others, to ban wood burning during the state's annual inversion season.

My first reaction? Oh, no! Don't take away my cozy fire! My second reaction, as a parent, a journalist and a person who breathes air in Utah: I wonder how much of an impact it would make to ban wood burning?

It turns out the impact would be fairly small. According to the Utah Division of Air Quality, wood smoke accounts for about 5 percent of the particles in valley smog. That doesn't seem all that significant, but here's the thing--we are at a moment when we're going to have to start making hard choices and difficult sacrifices in order to make a difference in our air quality.

We've taken all the big steps as a community, like building out our public transit infrastructure, creating HOV lanes on the interstate, encouraging residents to stay off the road on poor air quality days, and working with industry leaders to identify cleaner processes and technologies. We've picked the low-hanging fruit. Now comes the hard part.

The governor's Clean Air Action Team recently released its recommendations for dealing with Utah's annual inversion. Banning residential wood burning is among the recommendations, as is requiring suppliers to sell only ultra-low nitrogen oxide (NOx) water heaters. According to the team, replacing all water heaters with ultra-low NOx models would eventually reduce daily area emissions by about 5 percent.

Take 5 percent...