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Comment by bgentry | Hacker News Reader

I'd get behind an incentive in the form of natural gas prices that accurately reflect its externalities. Even add a requirement that new homes have spare/dedicated 220V wiring in places where gas appliances exist (dirt cheap to do at build time, makes retrofitting much easier).

Beyond that, let the markets do their work. If induction cooktops are actually better or win the cost/benefit tradeoff, customers will want them and builders will want to install them. There's very little to gain by forcing them on people.

As noted by the article, there are much also bigger & more impactful targets if your goal is actually to reduce carbon emissions: most notably industrial usage, but also furnaces and water heaters.

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This is clearly a case of market failure where the current users of gas are not paying the full costs associated with that use, and where full information on the impacts of using gas are not always known.

For example, between 6 and 19% of current childhood asthma in the US is attributable to gas stove use.[1] What parent would choose a gas stove if they knew there was a 1 in 20 to 1 in 5 chance that they would cause their child to have asthma?

1. https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/20/1/75

Again, that problem is better and more cheaply solved with adequate ventilation. And quality household ventilation not only removes natural gas byproducts in the air, it also removes CO2 buildup, dust, cleaning chemicals / VOCs, respiratory viruses, etc. Many benefits for much less cost than a gas -> induction stove retrofit.

Disagree that it's cheaper to retrofit quality household ventilation compared to changing stove types.

The cost of the heat exchanger alone is likely to exceed the cost of entry level portable induction cookers. Now add in costs to run ducting, cut through walls, seal the penetrations etc.

Of course, things are different at scale, and there's no reason we can't have a world where quality household ventilation, and less-harmful cooking stoves are both mandated.

The ventilation retrofit is likely much cheaper for any home that already has central HVAC. I would know this because I did that exact upgrade on my home and spent <$2500 to have a professional install a high end oversized ERV to replace the inefficient ventilator that was installed per code. If you don't have central HVAC, of course it's much more difficult, but most US homes from the past 40+ years have central HVAC.

An induction stove, on the other hand, would require me to rip open a bunch of walls to run a new 220V line from my outdoor electrical panel (the garage subpanel doesn't have sufficient 220V running to it), remove or shut off the existing gas line, and install a many-thousand dollar cooktop to come close to the cooking quality I get from my modern gas range.

> For example, between 6 and 19% of current childhood asthma in the US is attributable to gas stove use.[1] What parent would choose a gas stove if they knew there was a 1 in 20 to 1 in 5 chance that they would cause their child to have asthma?

Those odds only make sense if 100% of children have asthma. I believe the probability would actually be 0.4% to 1.8% given CDC child asthma prevalence figures[1]. I'm terrible at math though.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/asthma/asthmadata/Child_prevalence_state...

Market forces won't work because either every house in a subdivision gets a gas hookup or none do, and that cost is going to be bundled into your house price whether you use it or not.

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