[Big Dave]

Rumsford fireplaces are an idea similar to the masonry stoves.

These masonry stoves are a nice idea, but even if you are a professional brickmason it is still gonna be one expensive project to retrofit an existing house to use one even if the floor plan accommodates it. Nobody is giving brick away and you house will be a construction site for weeks.

For this kind of money I could buy a late-model VW GTI and give it the full basjoos treatment and have Boyd Coddington do it for me.

Back on topic.
This is probably not a good site to gripe on because this site is a community of grassroots types and the problem in question has been generated top-down.

Coal has to be part of the US energy mix because we have enormous reserves. Coal is best used for large-scale utility, industrial or institutional applications because coal needs at least sulfur dioxide and particulate emission controls. Big operations can hack those but residential users cannot. Problem is that regulations on big users are so stringent that even they cannot economically comply, so they go to gas and that robs the residential sector of gas supplies.

So what will happen is that stringent environmental regulations will cause an overall degradation of air quality where reasonable regulations would have resulted in cleaner air.

Wind, solar and geothermal all still have the same problems they had back when I was a young engineer in the Jimmy Carter days. All those forms are site-dependent and many of the best sites have already been developed or disqualified. Wind and solar are intermittent and require enormous energy storage to be dispatched on demand. This is why I am semi-psyched about the algal biodiesel. Nature has worked out a very efficient solar collector with built in storage in the algae plant. The numbers look right. And converting it to the transportation fuel we are short of makes wonderful sense. I hope it works out. One thing for sure, these forms of energy are limited by their own requirements, not by some hare-brained conspiracy theory.