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Comment by jnwatson | Hacker News Reader

I don’t buy the climate argument. However, banning gas appliances comes from the same place as banning lead paint. Gas appliances are a major source of indoor pollution. Gas heating leaks pollution inside the home, especially as furnaces age.

Plus, many residents don’t own their own property. This helps protect renters.

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Yes, but this regulation targets everyone in the state of New York, not just renters, and the research I've read seems to indicate that fume hoods protect against this indoor pollution.

I have never seen an actual fume hood in any residential home in my life (close to 800 homes across the South and New England. I have seen plenty of faux hoods that do absolutely nothing.

Maybe it's something they only add in luxury homes.

These are common in New York and may even be required by residential building code: https://up.codes/viewer/new_york/irc-2018/chapter/15/exhaust...

(Note: I'm a New Yorker but not an expert in building code.)

ah that makes more sense, like those 15+ story buildings? I should have clarified my comment was in regards to SFH or triple deckers. I would honestly think it would be easier to implement in SFH but I'm guessing it's mostly due to developers cutting costs and that there is no regulation to actually make a viable one.

I'm not sure, but yes I could imagine the larger buildings being targeted by more regulations.

It would be pretty easy to do in a large building - they already have plenums for hvac, external exhaust is not much different.

Interesting, I live in Spain and every home I've been to has one.

Live in New England. Home I grew up in (built in the late 70s) had one. All but one apartment I've lived in had one -- including this one, which was built in the late 1920s.

I find this very shocking NY allows that. I'm in CA and I've never seen a gas stove that didn't have a fume hood. In fact a lot of electric stoves here have fume hoods. I would assume we have a regulation about it here but I've never looked it up.

I've lived in several places in the US, and every residential range hood I've seen vents back into the living space.

I would believe it's different in CA, though. CA's public health regulations are famously stricter than elsewhere in the country.

That's odd, I mean my apartment has a "vent hood" but it just feeds into a sponge into a wall with no ventilation leading outside. These are the types of hoods I've only seen in my life, only in professional kitchens have I seen true ventilation and even then some kitchens are moving to induction sense it's a much safer work environment and speeds up cooking but even then you still need ventilation.

I went ahead and looked it up. It seems like it is required in CA. It also seems NY is similar but also allows ductless. I didn't read up on it that much though.

https://www.prolinerangehoods.com/blog/is-a-range-hood-requi....

Grew up in NJ. I had a real stove vent hood. A lot of my friends had a real vent hood. It’s very normal I guess depending on the exit of i95.

Thinking back so did my home in VA, DC and my last two homes in TX. I wonder what is different about our scenarios

I remember seeing a stufy fairly recent that discovered that they actually weren’t very effective, especially if you use the front burners. My intuition about it is that if you can smell the food, you’re probably also getting air pollution.

On top of that I’m not sure if anyone has studied what percentage of people actually turn their fume hoods on, because I bet that is low too.

Most stoves have that microwave/vent thing above them, and that is NOT a fume hood, it's a poor approximation of an attempt at venting.

A true fume hood overhangs the front of the stove and can be heard when turned on, and requires makeup air.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSIqKGsF2ZA

(Note that a proper ventilation system is recommended for ANY stove/cooking besides maybe a microwave/pressure cooker, but especially needed for gas)

Bwahahaha this is so ridiculous.

This isn’t even on the same planet as lead paint.

All this does is saddle folks with shittier, more expensive options in the name of ‘green’.

Some historical context:

> In 1960, New York City prohibited the sale of paint with high levels of lead for residential use, New York state imposed a state-wide ban in 1970, and the federal government banned lead in paint in 1978.

You seem to think the danger from lead was obvious to all yet NYC was decades ahead of other places where the paint industry prevented or repealed actions to even label lead paint as poisonous.

The dangers of lead were known before leaded gas was even invented much less popularized. But immediate profits and convenience are much stronger human motivators than long term health consequences ever are.

See also PFOA and similar. Health impacts were known for 20+ years but it was too profitable so those reports were buried and lobbied against. And consumers weren't eager to acknowledge their amazingly convenient non-stick pans were directly poisoning hundreds of people and causing long-term issues in thousands more.

Now gas stoves are a little bit more unique in that the proponents aren't profit hungry corporations doing shadowy bribery but instead countless chefs who prefer it and will demand it, consequences to themselves be damned.

> But immediate profits and convenience are much stronger human motivators than long term health consequences ever are.

This specific case was worse, it was intentionally introduced to increase and maintain long term profits, despite it was inconvenient to manufacture.

It's arguably less dangerous than lead paint. If don't let lead paint deteriorate and clean regularly then the health risk is minimal.

There's no comparable mitigation option for gas stoves. Installing a fune hood involves cutting a hole in the wall, no chance your landlord will ok they in a cheap place.

It's called a window. It works pretty well usually.

Induction is better and can be cheaper

im from a part of the country where we get hurricanes

the power will go out and usually we also have a boil water notice

for those days it is extremely helpful to have a gas stove, we can still cook and get clean water rather than just eating cold cans and hoping we have enough bottles

But you are, by definition, not from NY. So this shouldn't impact you.

i recall tales of sandy hitting NYC a few years ago

my guess is most people in this comment section aren't from NYC

You can regulate the safe use of gas without banning it.

What does that even mean? Did you not get the whole, burning hydrocarbons is bad for the climate memo? We have to stop all net carbon emmissions in the next fifteen years or were screwed (propably already are) and twats like you keep going online spouting your 'i don't buy the climate argument' bullshit. We're literally talking about burning hydrocarbons to heat stuff, how the hell can you say that you don't buy the climate argument?!?

We’ll muddle through. At any rate, the point is to focus on low hanging fruit —- target high emitters, an electric stove powered by a coal plant is worse than a natural gas stove.

New York doesn’t have any coal plants.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/20/nyregion/coal-energy-ny.h...

NY does get some amount of power from out of state while it having any coal plants in the state but - edit - it seems to be less than 1%. Now I actually wonder why NJ has so much coal power compared to ny.

This is actually probably untrue. Gas stoves produce a huge amount of waste heat (==extra fuel burned) that isn't produced by electric.

You can believe climate change is real and an imminent threat and still hold the position that banning gas stoves is a meaningless, misguided policy that will have no effect on climate change. There is no mutual exclusivity.

A typical natural gas stove burner uses around 7,000 to 10,000 BTUs per hour, which translates to about 0.8 to 1.2 pounds of CO2 emissions per hour of use. This doesn't even qualify as a blip on the radar of the global emissions problem. It's completely irrelevant to the problem you claim is prompting your antisocial outbursts.

At some point, you'll have to decide whether it's more about the climate or more about you. Hopefully you'll choose the climate eventually.

giving per person emission numbers isn't meaningful. multiply by a couple billion people and it's a lot more. you're also missing part of the reasoning which is that if you want to also ban gas heating (which produces a lot more CO2) and get rid of the gas pipes, you also want to minimize the number of gas stoves that need to be thrown out.

It really depends how much of the methane in the entire chain is combusted. Uncombusted methane has a short term radiative forcing 100x as much as C02.

And it turns out there are a lot of leaks and incomplete combustion in the overall methane supply chain. Residential hookups are a significant source of slow leaks.

So completely avoiding a hookup in the first place may have a larger climate impact than your napkin math suggests.

Oh no, we are all going to die.

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