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Comment by bob1029 | Hacker News Reader

The respiratory argument I really don't understand with specific regard to gas vs electric cooking.

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.

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I don’t think that’s true. The worry is the NOx emissions (that is a combustion product from the foams, not from cooking), the amount being produced by gas stoves which was previously under-appreciated until recently.

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.

The point still stands, the NO2 emission might be negligible compared to simple food emissions. From personal experience, preheating an (electric) oven to high temperature seems to result in lung irritation for days if I forget to turn on the extraction hood.

I don't know the numbers, but the premise here is not (a) that gas is bad or that (b) cooking releases particulate, but rather that gas stoves are actually constantly leaking very small amounts of particulate that in aggregate can cause harm along the same lines of other sources of PM2.5 pollution.

Gas stoves might be constantly leaking, but they only produce particulates when they are alight. Assuming you don't have an ancient appliance with a pilot light.

> 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.

That may well be the sort of mitigation the CPSC goes with. (And probably just in new construction.)

I suspect that of measuring “particulates in the air” pressure cookers and microwaves easily win.

A microwave and pressure cooker only future is the definition of dystopia.

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