Good news for biomass-based energy enthusiasts: Heating with wood is making a comeback. If tree carcasses are good enough to power the trucks of energy-starved North Korea, they’re good enough for homesteaders in Maine! And more to the point, heating oil has gotten super expensive.

From 2000 to 2010, the number of homes in the U.S. heating with wood went up by a third, reports Clarke Canfield of the AP. In Maine, wood heating nearly doubled. In Michigan and Connecticut, adoption went up 135 and 122 percent, respectively.

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Northeastern states benefit from an abundance of firewood, so this isn’t, for example, a solution for pine beetle-ravaged Western states. (Or at least it won’t be a solution once all those dead trees are gone.)

“People are trying to do as much as they can to replace oil,” [says Rocky Gaslin, owner of Rocky’s Stove Shoppe in Augusta, Maine.]

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