Letter to the Editor--San Diego Union-Tribune

The San Diego Union-Tribune
Letters to the Editor
June 11, 2007

The South Coast Air Quality Management District (“Rules would ban some fireplaces to cut pollution,” News, June 2) is trying to do what we expect of it: Ensure that the air we breathe won't kill us. There is no confusion about definitions. Clean air is clean air. It is not air contaminated with carcinogenic particulate matter.

Clean air can be described as a type of “beauty.” The building and real estate industries, on the other hand, are unclear about definitions.

To the builders and sellers, pollution is beauty. And this hokey poetry is what sells houses. No one, they claim, will invest “emotional” energy into a house without a wood-burning fireplace. Good grief, we would rather be homeless, under the bridge, a little trash fire going, than live in a house without that cavernously “beautiful” hole in the wall with its smokestack of a chimney that spews, all over our lovely neighbors, the worst pollutant one can breathe.

M. POWER GIACOLETTI
Oceanside