The gas industry is paying Instagram influencers to gush over gas stoves (2020)
motherjones.com
motherjones.com
First it was adding catalytic converters in cars, then regulating tobacco, banning asbestos, removing contaminants from drinking water. It never stops.
This is nothing more than one more rung in a decades long campaign of using the democratic process to hold companies accountable for pollutants and slowly improve the health and well-being of millions of Americans. Sure, air is cleaner and these interventions have all been amazingly effective, but qui bono?
Who are these people? What do they have to gain from all these laws?
I'm worried my grandchildren are going to have to grow up in a healthy, well regulated world where when they buy products in stores they don't have to worry about how it will impact their health or the health of their community.
Being American means slowly killing yourself and your neighbors for the greater GDP. I don't want us to lose that.
The world is allowed to change with new data and new technology.
Not exactly certain of the history, but embracing natural gas after WW2 and through the 1950s was an easy choice for most Americans.
I imagine, someday, the world will change again.
Coal was shifted from the home to the energy plant.
Is this better because the negative effects of coal burning were removed locally and moved to a central location? Or maybe because the local locations can no longer control their own consumption?
Why is that a problem? At this point in the game most things that need to be done to address climate change and pollution are reactionary.
> If this comes down to CO2 there are bigger fish to fry, no?
You can say that about almost anything. There's always "bigger fish to fry", but that doesn't mean we should only ever deal with the "biggest fish". We regulate car emissions even though ships and airplanes are arguably the "bigger fish". We prosecute thefts even though most people would consider prosecuting murders the "bigger fish".
There's zero indication gas stoves can't be "made safe".
Switched from gas to induction and love it. I miss my stove every time i have to cook elsewhere. Mine is pretty much the cheapest induction range on the market (and i bought it used). Heats up way faster than gas (WAY FASTER, will get cast iron glowing if i leave an empty cast iron on the stove for a while at the highest setting), low/medium control is excellent and precise, and i really appreciate the lack of waste heat (pot handles don't overheat, kitchen doesn't quickly heat up from cooking - small kitchen).
The fact that the stove is more expensive is really the only downside. Not being able to use fabulous copper pans seems like the only meaningful downside but I'm not rich enough for that anyways.
Anecdotally, I love my induction. It saves me so much time! When I first bought it a few years back, I was razzed quite a bit by co-workers whose only personality trait was they liked food. "You can't char peppers!" they'd exclaim. It's so funny to me to see so much passion for gas stoves.
I have their portable, which I think cost me $40 at the time, up to $70 now. https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/tillreda-portable-induction-coo...
It's well worth trying a portable one, especially if you don't have a slow cooker or pressure cooker already.
Tongue in cheek, but nowadays it's so hard to establish what is a genuine appraisal and what isn't..
Also the anti gas stove thing feels like the most blatantly astroturfed indoctrination project in quite a while.
Maybe it's a cultural thing, Wild West, Cowboys, camp fire, which turned into phrases like 'Now you are cooking with gas!'.
From the outside it just looks like slum, favela, ghetto-style, third-world. Uncivilized.
Like much of your electrical installations, no matter if on the in- or outside :-)
Edit: Optionally crying out loud in public on all available channels for being victimized, and insisting on subsidies for the next better thing!
>From the outside it just looks like slum, favela, ghetto-style, third-world. Uncivilized.
means you'd be fine with gas stove if electric had been banned by the government? Could have fooled me.
Implying an improvement, like phased array semiconductor microwaves, or something like that.
Edit: Don't laugh, that actually was 'on the radar' about 10 years ago. IIRC the availability of the parts went away because the producing company has been bought by another, shifted goals, whatnot else.
Anyways, no Sci-Fi:
https://patents.google.com/patent/CN202733981U/en
https://reviewed.usatoday.com/ovens/news/freescale-semicondu...
Edit: https://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedias/solid-state-micr...
https://www.comsol.com/blogs/optimizing-microwave-ovens-with...
https://community.nxp.com/t5/NXP-Designs-Knowledge-Base/Soli...
https://www.nxp.com/company/blog/how-to-build-a-better-micro...
https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/design/the-future-of-...
https://www.wbdg.org/resources/microturbines
I've heard they are in common use at fracking sites, so should be easily available.
Edit: Time to move elsewhere, then. Honestly.
giggle
I'll consider moving to induction after I get my electrical panel upgraded.
Just this morning I was making tea, looking at the stove and thinking to myself "gdi I have to clean this thing again." Even when I stay on top of it the ease of cleaning is nothing like wiping down a flat glass surface.
It seems like people keep comparing gas to “regular” electric stoves, which are definitely inferior in many ways. The biggest issue is they’re very inefficient, and take forever to heat anything.
Grab one of these: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004FPZACE
They're great for creme brulee, among other things.
I don't care if my range is powered by alien technology that magically sequesters carbon somewhere else - When you heat something above a certain temperature, you are producing all kinds of chemical compounds that are not going to be good for you. It doesn't really matter how the mass was brought to that temperature. The contribution of a gas range to indoor air quality is absolutely negligible compared to what comes out of a deep fryer or frying pan once you hit 400F+.
If the primary concern is everyone's health & safety, we should mandate high CFM extraction hoods be installed above every range and run public information campaigns to encourage their use.
Studies I’ve seen indicate that most domestic rangehoods (apart from the very high end ones) are not sufficient to effectively remove these gas combustion products.
That may well be the sort of mitigation the CPSC goes with. (And probably just in new construction.)
Rocky Mountain Institute - Carbon Free Buildings paid for funding of study.
Well known astroturfers.
They’ve known since 1970 that climate change due to induction stoves… wait, sorry, confused them with Exxon.
Easy mistake.
Who has deeper pockets and more to loose if anthropogenic climate change is real and caused by co2 emissions? If you truly think it’s the folks that are cutting grant checks to climate scientists, I have a bridge to sell you.
My brother in Christ, re-examine your priors.
My brother in Christ, re-evaluate your thorazine dosage.
For those who don't know these are stoves that have on board batteries allowing them to generate, for a period of time, far more heat than an ordinary house circuit would be able to power. This replicates some of the advantages of gas.
But honestly I think the ban gas stoves thing is brought to you by the same people who gave us bans on plastic straws. "Let's maximally inconvenience people for extremely tiny environmental gains while ignoring huge contributors to pollution and climate change. That way we alienate as many people as possible and drive them into the arms of the far right."
See the problem is that the far right is so ridiculous and repellent that the left is having to work really hard these days to lose. They're having to push for things like banning gas stoves or the word "field" to have any chance at losing to the people who brought you Qanon and January 6th.
Now we're seeing the pushback for the pushback. fvdesson is right.
There's an article from 2003 so this isn't exactly new.
If you roll out the tax as 25% starting in July, increasing 25% every 3 months after that until it hits 300%, people have some time to plan for it and you don't hit them this winter. Maybe you need to return 1/3 of the tax money to low-income households who are having a hard time getting their equipment upgraded in a timely fashion and 1/3 of the tax money in incentives to that same group [and landlords of affordable housing] to help them cover the capital costs.
Trying to backhand it by making people "not want" gas stoves seems like a longer and less certain path than just giving people economic incentives to do the thing that you want them to do.
- That would have an immediate financial impact on people with gas boilers in a way that banning new gas appliances does not. This kind of thing would need to be rolled out very slowly over time if you want to avoid extreme backlash. Constraints on new construction don't have the same effects.
(EDIT: Ah, you edited your comment to address this one - sure, if you can reliably distribute funds for lower-income people to replace their appliances then maybe. I bet you still get a lot of backlash from people who can afford it but don't want to though. Unless it's rolled out very slowly.)
- Ultimately we need to get rid of the infrastructure piping all that gas around too, as that's where a lot of the climate impacts come from. Any new gas usage at all, whether for cooking or heating, makes it harder to do that.
Utilities already have the means to bill and tax fuel. Most already have conservation rebate schemes in place. Many already have low-income billing plans and rate cards (probably all have multiple rate cards). I think you could reliably administer a tax, rebate, and capital credit scheme using mostly existing mechanisms.
> I just installed a new gas boiler (I wanted to go electric but it was massively economically disadvantageous). That thing is probably going to run for 20 years.
You're making a bet that gas will remain economically advantageous over electric for 20 years. I don't know about you, but the way the winds are shifting, that doesn't sound like a good bet.
If they do disconnect and electric becomes advantageous, I'll have saved money for likely a decade and can consider switching at that point. (It was capital costs that made it non-advantageous, not operating costs.)
Not true, at least not by definition. I heat with oil and cook with gas. My gas stove is fed by an outdoor propane tank that's filled once a year. When I was house hunting there were plenty of houses with gas ranges but I didn't see a single one with gas heat, that's really uncommon here.
Personally, I like my gas stove, though I expect to have to adapt to something else in my lifetime (the big push in Ireland is towards heat pumps, and once gas heating goes it will not be economic to maintain the home gas network just for stoves).
Depends exactly where you live, but it's unlikely that all the gas generation is by CCGT; a lot of places would use far less efficient plants for peaking at least.
> and an induction stove is about 3x as efficient as a gas stove
Hmm, where are you getting this? From a quick look, gas stoves are about 40-50% efficient, induction about 85%.
You also have to consider transmission loss, and the possible (in many places likely) presence of coal in the electricity supply.
In any case this is all pretty irrelevant; stoves just aren't a big enough piece of peoples' energy consumption.
In one experiment, using coal fired electricity to boil a pot of water on induction released 0.29 pounds of CO2. Using natural gas to boil a pot of water released 1.16 pounds.
https://zeroenergyproject.com/2016/10/24/induction-cooks-bet...
As you said, it's fairly irrelevant. The point is to reduce natural gas heating and methane leaks. Natural gas cooking is a side effect.
The real reason seems to be elsewhere: people care about cooking with gas, but they use gas heaters if they have gas. If you can stop people from cooking with gas, you can switch entire houses to electric more quickly.
Depends on ordinarity of a house. My ordinary house has 3phase power and my pretty cheap induction stove outperforms all gas stoves I had. When I was living in a flat, I only had single phase power, but 4kW should still be enough for a stove. In USA you typically only have 110V (or 220v for those daring), so anything electric is straining your circuit breakers.
Surely stoves are connected to the 220 V connection? Same for washers and dryers.
110 V in the US is one arm of a centre tapped secondary.
Yes, except the washers.
It was put in to replace a gas cooktop which was there when we bought the house, and vastly out-performs that unit in speed and heat output.
If you converted you'd be pulling a dedicated circuit through anyway - no one's tying induction cooktops off to just whatever line you already have.
The one area gas can be better is if you're doing wok cooking, but that's more to do with how wok's are shaped and heat up then any limitation on the ability to get heat into them (I've not been able to find one of the adapters which apparently exists to solve this).
Also, if you are really serious about wok cooking, you’ll go with propane rather than natural gas.
https://www.amazon.com/Induction-14-inch-tempered-precision-...
I think problem is the induction ranges aren’t properly marketed. They have an image problem not a regulatory one.
Specially when there's no direct contact between the pan and stove.
It also produces way more heat faster if you need to.
My experience with electric stoves is that you have to coax them into cooking things right.
Most of the particulate problems could probably be solved with better forced ventilation and air filters.
For example, where I live, commercial kitchens have an electric gas valve connected to the forced extraction systems of the kitchen, so you cannot turn on the stove unless the ventilation is on.
Yes, it’s obvious that gas heat and cooking could cause respiratory issues due to combustion.
As a gourmand though, cooking on a gas range is the best experience wrt temp control and convenience. I prefer an electric oven, and the heating system I’m impartial to, though radiant hot water is what I fondly remember from youth.
It's a game changer in a kitchen.
I've worked in a kitchen with gas and I found it awful. It was harder to clean, you had to be really careful to not burn yourself when you had to do a quick wipedown. Making sure not only that you turned it off, but that anyone else there wasn't forgetful either.
Induction like I have at home now is so convenient. I have no worries. It responds super quick to temp changes, it automatically detects if I have something on the stove or not, so no fear of wasting power. You can't burn yourself. The surface is flat and super easy to keep clean.
I’ve only rented one place with a gas stove and it was mind blowing how good it was compared to those god awful glass top electrics (which I own now) despite it being ancient. Hated the oven though, hence gas range / electric oven.
Unlike for example a wood stove which might release some smoke into your house, at a level where it's not good for you, but not violently toxic.
But the article is about gas stoves, which do release significant NOx output into the house, which domestic rangehoods are generally not very effective in removing quickly enough.
But it's also an easy platform to sell to the un/misinformed, and a great platform for a candidate who just wants what's healthiest for you and the environment.
This is also inherent in the "left" vs "right" discussion since those on the "left" can gain fame by forwarding themselves as spokesperson for a "marginalised" group which is "oppressed" by "(fill-in-the-blanks)-normativity". Once one of these self-proclaimed "experts" gets into the limelight and gets the ball rolling the collective needs to follow to avoid accusations of "(fill-in-the-blanks)-phobia" or "*-ism". On the right the way to fame lies in portraying yourself as the defender of traditional values and/or being the one to fight the dragons coming from the left. This is a vicious circle since any new goofy idea from the left is fodder for a dragon-slayer on the right and thus the circle game continues.
If I'm not mistaken, it was _not_ a political initiative, at least not initially, but talked about as an option by The US Consumer Product Safety Commission in the case if stoves could not be made safe, in response to scientific research revealing its hazardous effects.
Generally, right-wing parties care less about health hazards (if at all), so I wouldn't expect any supporting such a ban. Mind you, what is considered right-wing varies from country to country.
Gas stoves are not banned in the Netherlands but natural gas is being fazed out leading to the same outcome. When I bought a new house in the Netherlands in 1996 I had no choice but to move to electric cooking since the whole are was built gas-free. I ended up buying/building an induction range out of a separate induction hob and an electric oven. I sold the house in 2002 after moving to Sweden where I now cook and heat the house on wood - no gas here but no need for it either given our 21 hectares of forest and land. I prefer the latter over the former by far since there is no way meddling busybodies or warmongering Soviet-wannabees can increase my heating/cooking bills.
UK Government legislation ... from a right wing government.
Eventually we all need to move away from gas, this is about that. Not banning gas stoves overnight, but gradually banning all fossil fuels, which you can't do if everybody is still cooking on gas. You need to gradually reduce your dependency on it.
I've only seen the tweet from Biden appointed Trumka - https://mobile.twitter.com/TrumkaCPSC/status/161255345946272...
By now the playbook looks too easy for any lobbyist or interest group - just present any issue as left-right and the useful idiots do your work for you.
It uses a fraction of the fuel that my car does. Easily less than 10%.
Frying on an electric hob is hardly good for your lungs either.
This is just rage porn.
Good. One of the possible interventions is to make ventillation a building code requirement.
You cannot fry indoors without ventilation unless you enjoy choking on smoke.
Neither can you boil indoors without ventilation unless you enjoy coating everything in the room with moisture.
The combustion of a gas stove IME is a smaller contributor to ventilation requirements than both of the above. Maybe the moisture one is less relevant in low humidity environments like parts of California?
edit: I just checked, here in the UK new kitchens require extractor fans regardless of fuel used, which makes sense to me.
Not in the US at the federal level. Some states have code requirements about it. My house lacks one, which is annoying when I'm searing steaks, and I plan to rectify it when we redo the kitchen.
I don't particularly agree with making it a legal requirement either way, but if it is, then it's a cooking thing.
(a) https://www.theonion.com/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-na... et.al.?
(b) any suggestion that the US is neither colour-blind nor all middle-class?
(c) the quaint custom of an electoral college?
To me gas stoves are the best, and now that I don't have one I miss it even more.
The downside of induction is it doesn’t work with all pot types.
The big advantage gas retains is the ability to see with your eye exactly how much heat you’re producing. I do love being able to precisely tune exactly how much heat I’m cooking with. I assume this is why gas is so prevalent at restaurants.
But I’ve also found that at home once I get to know an electric stove (what does level 5 do vs 6?) I’m just as capable as I am with gas.
(I’m opposite of you btw. Had electric for a long time and just moved to a house with a gas stovetop.)
Unfortunately for me, since I'm renting I can't change what I have and even if I could, it's pretty hard considering the country I'm in (Germany). Not too fond of gas over here.
Of course, I won't make that change until it's time to buy a new stove.