Gas stoves became part of America’s culture wars | Hacker News Reader

Gas stoves became part of America’s culture wars

economist.com

10 pointsbrianmcgee8 comments

No, gas stoves were just proven scientifically to cause asthma in children. Which would mean in a saner world, they were finnished for homes and private use.

https://www.massmed.org/Publications/Vital-Signs---Member-Pu...

But a subpar, unsafe product, with huge negative side-effects is not dead, when it can limp into the conflict zone of the civil war.

Asbestos today would declare itself, either by making rainbow asbestos or blue line asbestos and life forever. Dystopian begins not even to describe it.

While I’m not going to shed tears for gas stoves, I also think that your argument is flawed. Everything in life is unsafe to some degree. Kids drown in pools of water, yet pools aren’t being banned. Electricity can be very unsafe, yet we allow our homes to be wired with it. Storing fuels or certain chemicals can be very dangerous, but we don’t outright ban it. Why?

Because we manage risk. We manage risk by forcing appropriate containers, safety measures, building codes, etc. Gas stoves have a risk that can be managed as well if we want to. Last I checked, labs work with far more dangerous vapors yet have no problem because they use proper fume hoods. Here, there’s nothing that would stop you from going for a compromise solution demanding that all new gas stoves are installed with a fume hood capable of X amount of CFM with automatic sensors to detect the presence of either CO2 or particulates.

Gas stoves were not proven scientifically to cause asthma in children, and are in fact a little unlikely to be causative. They're bad for the environment, but only marginally so.

Economist or no, this story is just going to be the nth recapitulation of the gas stove argument on HN, and we'd be better off not having it on the front page.

https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/42/6/1724/737113?login=...

Google puts this meta analysis of 41 studies up top of the results so i assume it’s well linked to.

I can’t find reference to back up unlikely to be causitive, have you got a link handy for that? Google is not ranking it highly for any terms i try.

See Emily Oster's thing, to begin with, but there's more after that:

https://www.parentdata.org/p/gas-stoves-and-asthma

Also this thread:

https://twitter.com/GidMK/status/1613336168061632512?s=20&t=...

If there's an effect, it doesn't seem to be a significant one.

At any rate, my objection is to your use of the words "proven scientifically". No, and that's for the most part not how science works anyways.

Can you please provide a scholarly citation for your claim that gas stoves have not been proven to be a contributor of asthma in children? I know you can't prove a negative, but a published study that found no correlation between indoor gas stove and asthma would be a great starting point.

GP provided a scholarly citation for their statement, but you did not.

Unbridled safetyism is good for no one. If we banned everything that was "proven scientifically" to be bad for children, we would quickly go back to pre-Industrial Revolution living standards.

If indoor air pollution from the usage of gas stoves is correlated to (note your link doesn't claim causation) asthma in children, why is the response to ban gas stoves? Why not facilitate better indoor air quality through the use of air filters and ventilation, which are some of the options your link suggests? Why must everything be through the heavy hand of the federal government?

Because gas stoves are popular and with that a reason for people to avoid buying houses in gas-free neighbourhoods. People care far more about what heat source they use to cook their food than what is used to heat their house and water. Since the penultimate goal is to get rid of domestic use of natural gas or at least price it out of reach of most people such gas-free neighbourhoods are deemed to be essential to reach this goal. When gas is still available people will want to use it to cook and heat their houses. Banning gas stoves removes the main reason for shunning gas-free neighbourhoods.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com