> But when you dig into the details, it seems like the change may not have much effect on climate change at all.
Are you saying that if we got rid of all gas burning appliances in homes, that would not have much effect on climate change?
Are you saying that if we got rid of all gas burning appliances in homes, that would not have much effect on climate change?
The heat transfer and energy loss of electrical appliances generally makes them less efficient than natural gas appliances, thus actually increasing the amount of natural gas that will need to be burned to accommodate this policy. This is literally going to increase the amount of natural gas that needs to be burned to maintain existing cooking patterns.
This policy and ones like it are why people can't take environmentalists seriously.
And a heat pump is superior to gas even if the grid consists 100% out of gas.
Further, you don't build a building built for gas when have to switch to electricity in the future anyway when the grid is even cleaner.
I don't know who told you this. Can you point to any large city that is running on purely wind & solar right now? As far as I'm aware, there's not even a large regional city that has demonstrated this can work with current battery technology. I would be really happy to be wrong on this, but as of right now, it's not an option and we need to be realistic about that.
"The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) says nuclear power plants had a capacity factor of 92.6% in the US during 2022. This compares to 36.1% for wind energy and just 24.8% for solar photovoltaic technology. To a rough approximation, it takes three times as much wind capacity and four times as much solar to produce the same amount of electricity as a nuclear power plant over a given period. This is complicated by seasonality. Solar, for example, is particularly ineffective during the winter months when energy needs in the northern portion of the country are highest."
[0] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
Regarding seasons: in our country wind is strong when solar is weak and vice versa
That wasn’t their claim at all, so it seems questionable to demand they prove this.
It’s like if someone said “cheerios are good for the heart”, and you asked someone to demonstrate that nobody ever had a heart attack while eating cheerios. You’re challenging an exaggerated version of the claim that was made, not the actual claim.
That is a fair criticism.
But major cities are getting close.
Adelaide, Australia went from 100% carbon energy in 2007 to ~30% today, and looks to hit at a net 0% by 2028.
Even in the furnace case you need fairly ideal numbers for the heat pump to overtake the loss of 50% you're taking just in the generation step.
And I don't know what's up with your claim about solar and wind energy.
This go-nowhere attitude and is why people can’t take fossil fuel apologists seriously.
If nothing would make you happier, make that point in your comment. “Maybe this will make a difference in 20 years” or “nuclear advancement is what we need” would completely change the tone.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/methane-leaks-era...
Yes. (Also, I welcome strong evidence to the contrary.)
The 2nd figure accounts for carbon footprint of electricity generation used in the home as well as gas combusted in the home. The 4th chart from [1] suggests this is about a 50/50 split (if we bring grid emissions to 0 but don’t exchange these natural gas devices, carbon intensity remains at half of what it is today). Therefore, we can conclude that these 4 appliances in residential properties account for 10% of US carbon footprint.
You could potentially make an argument that stoves are not the lions share of those emissions - but even if they only represent 10% of residential building emissions, that’s still 1% of US carbon emissions annually (which is a huge number when expressed in tons of CO2)
[1] https://www.rewiringamerica.org/policy/bringing-infrastructu... - Chart 4 [2] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1922205117
If you're telling me that fully eliminating gas stoves in the U.S. (something that will not happen in our lifetimes and will come at great political and personal cost) is going to reduce U.S.-specific emissions by just 1%, I think I'm even more convinced that this regulation should not have been passed.
What am I missing?
I know you'll disagree, but my take is that the upside (<1% savings over the course of, say, 30 years) is outweighed by the downside (lack of ability to cook or boil water during a power outage, far worse cooking experience).
Additionally, the energy cost of creating new stoves with significantly more complex internals (both due to the constant march of technology and the relative complexity of electric or induction cooktops versus gas) can't be overnighted.
Not sure where you’re coming up with this - the average modern gas stove is expected to last 13-15 years [1]. Obviously there are exceptions but we can expect 95%+ of this infra to be replaced in 20 years just due to equipment failure. Seems reasonable to expect that effectively all gas stoves in the US will be replaced at least once in the next 50 years.
> great political and personal cost
This assumes that installing new gas infra has no cost. It also ignores the long term health impacts (and costs) of burning natural gas indoors. Additionally, IRA subsidies partially cover the cost of stove replacement in the US. Upfront cost may be higher with induction today, but lifetime cost is lower due to the lower cost of electricity.
This frame also ignores the climate impacts, which I would argue have both significantly greater political and economic costs than not allowing gas infra in new buildings.
> What am I missing?
I agree that it is not viable to say “we must replace all gas infra today.” However, by allowing it to be built in new buildings, we’re locking ourselves into at least 15 years of additional CO2 production from this hardware at a time when we need to be reducing CO2 emissions as much as possible. CO2 not produced today is CO2 that we won’t have to draw down from the atmosphere in the future - something that also costs money. Not installing infra that produces CO2 is the easiest way to ensure we stop producing CO2
Beyond that - I’m not quite sure what your argument is. Is it just that 1% is too small to make a difference (or be regulated) - I’d ask you what is the cutoff at which it is viable for you? And what is the strategy for addressing emissions that don’t meet your cutoff?
[1] https://www.hrblock.com/tax-center/lifestyle/how-long-do-app...
I am stuck using an electric stovetop, and will replace it with an induction one soon, but I would switch to gas in a heartbeat if it were available.
Ceramic ones suck a bit less, induction is pretty damn good.
Meanwhile, you seem to be using different definitions of household emissions. Your first source about 95% seems to be talking about direct emissions, ignoring the impact of electricity generation. Your second source about the size of the problem (20%) seems to include electric production.
> The 2nd figure accounts for carbon footprint of electricity generation used in the home as well as gas combusted in the home. The 4th chart from [1] suggests this is about a 50/50 split (if we bring grid emissions to 0 but don’t exchange these natural gas devices, carbon intensity remains at half of what it is today). Therefore, we can conclude that these 4 appliances in residential properties account for 10% of US carbon footprint.
To your first question - the answer is yes; replacing gas appliances with modern electric appliances is less carbon intensive, even if the electricity is produced by fossil fuel combustion. This will become increasingly true as the grid gets greener over time and the carbon intensity of electricity production continues to drop
Still the drops make a full bucket in the end
That does not suggest that anyone is taking the environmental effects of their choices very seriously, and that they just want to lower peoples' standard of living and intrude on our lives. If that's what this is really about, then how about none of it?
I'm sure you understand that if people continue getting inconvenienced in the name of climate change while governments and big corporations go on pumping CO2 into the atmosphere at industrial scale, that's what's going to happen: instead of everyone making the changes they need to make, the vast majority of people will do nothing. The hypocrisy is not lost on anyone.
Just keep in mind, things aren't always always that simple. E.g. Russia stopped shipping Germany gas, because they helped defending Ukraine which Russia started a war on. At the same time Germany relied on that Gas, and hat to quickly move to alternatives to keep the country running.
As to Germany, why did they rely on gas? Oh right, because they shut down their nuclear plants. So in the span of 3 years, Germany has gone from getting its base load from nuclear to gas to coal. If you really believe that atmospheric CO2 is an imminent threat to civilization, the tradeoffs are obvious and clearly biased in favor of ramping your nuclear industry significantly rather than hoping for a future breakthrough in battery technology that can allow you to run your base load off solar and wind.
Like solar panels before they reached scale, this will start off as an incredibly expensive proposition, but it will get cheaper with scale. France seems to get it - they are building 50 new plants - but nobody else does.
Instead of lobbying for impactful changes at this scale, we have plenty of activists going after ersatz plastic items, gas stoves, and gas-powered cars (all of which emit less CO2 than the top 20 biggest shipping vessels). It's not clear to me that these stupid little inconveniences actually take less political capital than anything else, but they certainly do wear down public tolerance for the program, which is fatal in the long run.
Nuclear was phased out because of the potentially catastrophic risk as well as the unwillingness go provide permanent storage for nuclear waste.
Further, traditional nuclear power plants don't scale well, see the costs in France (even though it's not represented in electricity prices and this although France is already heavily invested in nuclear power plants), problems with heat waves/dry climate, as well as the fact that economic uranium sources are limited.
France is building new plants, planning close to 50, however the long term trend will be a reduced share of nuclear power in the grid, because old reactors will have to shut down as well, and renewable energy build out will shadow everything else.
This is in terms with the estimates in the IPCC report that cover cost and potential avoidance in CO2 emissions.
Personally, I see activists mainly going after the government's to implement a strategy to reduce emissions, but surely almost everyone doing this will call out plastic items and fossil fuel usage where avoidable. Rightly so, if this reduces tolerance for whatever program (doing what? Reduce emissions?), I don't see the problem there, but rather at NIMBYism, mis information and green washing. There's nothing wrong with going after these things.
I feel like you are more interested in preventing actions from being taken than shedding light on things that are missed - I hope I am wrong though and calling out hypocrisy of climate activists isn't the primary part.
That kind of personifies the eco-hypocrisy I have mentioned: The Germans want what they want, but they want other people to bear the cost and the risks of it. If they aren't willing to pay the costs for cutting carbon emissions, do they really want to do it? I think they have revealed that the answer is "no."
> Further, traditional nuclear power plants don't scale well, see the costs in France (even though it's not represented in electricity prices and this although France is already heavily invested in nuclear power plants), problems with heat waves/dry climate, as well as the fact that economic uranium sources are limited.
The people who say this have no clue whether it is actually true. Since Chernobyl, there hasn't been a serious effort to build out nuclear power plants at scale. Previously, the Soviets did a pretty good job demonstrating the scaling laws here, but they also cut too many corners.
As to the whole idea that renewable energy will overshadow other sources of power, renewables are not dispatchabale on-demand without several significant advances in power storage technology (which will come from batteries before anything else - nothing else scales well enough right now).
Meanwhile, the obvious consequences for nuclear reactors on shipping vessels will be radioactive debris spreading terrorist attacks.
Also, you may need to learn more about modern nuclear technology. Shipboard nuclear reactors these days are very safe, and there are plenty of available reactor technologies out there that are impossible to turn into bombs.
Meanwhile, shipboard nuclear reactors have radioactive material. They can be cut open, so the radioactive material can be taken out. It can then be distributed throughout NYC by a terrorist with conventional explosives, killing millions.