Gas utilities used tobacco tactics to avoid gas stove regulations
npr.org
npr.org
That's *barely* above the 1-hour guideline, and as evident in that photo it's an (illegal?) stove with no hood or ventilation. This just reinforces my prior beliefs—that this is a complete non-issue for normal, code-compliant stoves.
(Was NPR unable to take a photo of a NOx meter next to a normal stove?)
I'd like to point out, that I _do_ support the current thing.
Thank you for your attention.
NPR makes money by publishing articles, so obviously they will make more money by publishing content that people are likely to read. Those articles can be in some arbitrary continuum between fluff articles with sensationalistic headlines (aka clickbait) to highly technical articles with tons of references and/or transparently-documented original research. I’d put this one more towards the latter: the intended audience isn’t highly technical, so it includes approachable interviews with key people, but links to the more technical research are clearly called out. Importantly, the substance of the lede is mostly backed up by the supporting research.
On the other hand we have an industry with deep connections to the oil industry that, according to the article, has used a well-known playbook of disinformation to stop or reduce regulation of their industry in multiple areas, with apparent success. States have recently passed laws to protect them, and the article also cites regulation that has been stopped or changed. The article also cites the health impact of natural gas and gases that are created by burning it, with general population statistics and studies about specific groups of people. It also cited evidence that the gas industry has funded research to combat these studies, and hidden the fact that this research was funded by them. Their motive for doing this would obviously be the negative impact that regulation could have on their ability to make a profit, which could impact jobs, the price of appliances, or even the choice of products that are available for purchase.
Add in the background noise of trillions in subsidies to oil and gas companies, the almost complete capture of the leasing agency in the Federal government back in the early 2000s, and the chronic underfunding and understaffing of inspectors, and it _seems_ really obvious who is actually “winning” in this struggle.
Am I missing something? Because the facts as I understand them seem to indicate an industry playing the regulatory capture and PR game on level 1000, while the regulators are playing with both hands behind their back, blindfolded.
I don't think "shoddy" is the correct term to use here. NPR/PBS, just like e.g. SVT/SR in Sweden, the BBC in the UK, NOS in the Netherlands and ARD/ZDF/NDR in Germany are better characterised by the term agenda-driven journalism - they tailor what they publish and how they publish to fit their desired narrative. They are certainly not alone in this but the difference with commercial actors is that these public broadcasters mostly use tax funds and/or special unavoidable levies to finance what comes down to poorly masked propaganda. NPR actually gets most of its funding from corporate sponsorships and donors but it does also receive state funding.
OP's point at least makes sense: The thing that actually seems to motivate journalism companies is to "make money by publishing articles." Where is The Narrative in that motivation?
Just shouting that someone has an “agenda” is enough to make some people uncritically drop any facts that are uncomfortable.
In this case it’s honestly silly. News publications started widely publishing articles on gas stoves when research papers came out a couple of years ago indicating they posed health risks. They didn’t all simultaneously develop an anti-gas stove “agenda”. At worst you could argue that they’re being sensational for clicks.
This compared to gas industry publications. They actually have a pro-gas agenda because when people buy gas they make money. They and the people they lobby have an actual financial stake in making sure people use gas stoves.
Who are They? I am one person, not a group or cabal. There are others who notice the same pattern, also individuals. Realise that the they is just a applicable to those pushing the current thing.
> News publications started widely publishing articles on gas stoves when research papers came out a couple of years ago
Yes, a couple of years ago. Not decades ago, not even 10 years ago. Recently.
As to the gas industry it is worth knowing that cooking stands for only a tiny fraction of gas use so even if people stopped cooking on gas they would see much of a dip in profits. What is really at play here is that people really like cooking on gas stoves and are not about to give it up without being forced to do so. Rising gas prices will not do that because cooking only uses small amounts of gas. What was needed was some other means to get those pesky gas cookers off the market. Once the gas cooker is gone it will be easier to wean people of gas-fired central heating and gas-fired clothes driers given that most people have less of a preference for those but are likely to keep on using them as long as they need to have a gas hookup for their cookers anyway.
The gas companies know this as well of course so it is not surprising to see them react. While cooking may be only a small part of their income heating does represent a sizeable fraction.
With propaganda from "both" sides it is imperative to use your head when dealing with the issue of air quality inside the home. If you have an air quality meter/monitor you can use that as well but even without one the solution is clear: use ventilation when cooking. Use it no matter which heat source is involved. Problem, solved? From what I gather the answer to that question is mostly, "yes".
You said:
> NPR/PBS, just like e.g. SVT/SR in Sweden, the BBC in the UK, NOS in the Netherlands and ARD/ZDF/NDR in Germany are better characterised by the term agenda-driven journalism - they tailor what they publish and how they publish to fit their desired narrative.
Two of those were both gas and new construction.
So I'm guessing for a lot of people it doesn't matter very much!
So, it's a thing.
Since you mentioned that you have backup heating, I assume you don’t live in a very cold climate, in which case a heat pump for your backup heat and water heater is your most efficient lowest cost option, not a gas system.
Part of your gas bill is just paying the gas company for a line. Your bill would be around $10 even if you use 0 gas. So basically having two different bills costs you extra money already.
Then there’s the fact that you can get a solar system and generate your own electricity, which you can’t do with gas. Solar systems can have a payoff period in the 5-10 year range which is very reasonable. If you pair it with an electric car you’re almost never paying a utility or oil company for your fuel needs.
I’m not saying you should run out and retrofit your whole home because that would never pay itself off, but in your climate I would never touch gas in a new build.
So you just throw out all your pots?
So far we found one that doesn't work.
It'd be helpful for my household for hot water for coffee and tea, and it'd also help us for heating up some extra water for grits or risotto when they need more.
Also, isn't boiling water just the measurable outcome of the test but what matters is that the pot is coming to temp sooner? Pots and pans heating up more quickly is helpful all the time.
Pans coming to temp sooner would be useful if the gap was measured in large units of time but it isn’t. I care more about the properties of the pan and fire more. For instance cast iron pan is used to hold a lot of heat but isn’t very reactive. A copper pan can heat up quickly but more importantly it can change temps quickly. This is known as reactivity.
For instance maybe I want to sear a pork chop on high heat and then drop the burner and toss in butter and herbs. I need reaction (in this case the pan cooling quickly) for this basic technique or else I have burned my butter.
For example I may use high heat to sear meat and then drop the heat to add butter and herbs and then use the pan drippings to make a sauce which requires intense heating to deglaze and flambé to enhance flavor and then reduce heat quickly to mount the sauce. Copper is the best material for this and it doesn’t work with induction. High quality steel just doesn’t perform.
It's like the EU ban[0] on lead paint. Fine artists said "wait but what about Flake white? It's a critical paint! Nothing else compares! We know how to use it safely!" And the response was "Just substitute Titanium white. It's brighter anyway!" But Ti is absolutely not a substitute. It's like telling sculptors to substitute plaster for marble.
[0]I can't recall if the ban was lifted. I live in the US.
EDIT: Don't take my word for it. Here's Michael Harding on the subject, he makes paints that are among the very very best available:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=G1pXT06HXX0
https://www.lucillesmithson.com/single-post/2016/05/06/in-co...
Having gas appliances where I live is seen as a liability, as you have yet another maintenance item, and it contributes negatively to indoor air, so you have to have much more care regarding air handling in your areas where it is used. (unsurprisingly, demand for gas and gas appliances has plummeted ever since Russia started with their fuckery so people have been converting in droves as well.)
Like OP, I also live in South Carolina. My primary heat is a modern, efficient electric heat pump. When it’s cold enough outside that the heat pump is no longer more efficient than gas (maybe 8-12 weeks/yr where I am), the system switches fuel sources and runs a natural gas furnace instead.
Look to the oil crisis of the 70s for examples - it was a bad time but the cost of fuel spurred a surge in sale of small cars because fuel efficiency finally mattered. On another front it spurred the cycling culture of the Netherlands - they didn’t take up cycling and build infrastructure to support it out of altruism, they did it because their fuel supply was nearly cut off entirely.
Innovation only happens when there is a reason to innovate. If carbon emissions don’t cost the emitter anything then there’s no reason to invest in ways to emit less.
Right now there’s minimal financial benefit to being more carbon efficient. If anything it’s disincentivised because efficiency is itself costly, so it’s cheaper to just emit.
Either the market will start to invest in non-fossil fueled alternatives when demand exceed supply, or people will elect governments that step in and invest in non-fossil fueled alternatives. Either way, the coal, oil and gas plant can not continue to be part of the European energy grid.
https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/eus-energy-taxa...
Fortunately, I live in one of the few countries which don't subsidize gas (Sweden). When I visit the continent and see a gas stove, it feels like going to a museum. Induction stoves are so much better.
Depends. When the electricity comes from a gas power plant, it is way more efficient, to use the heat of the gas directly, instead of heating water and steam, running through a turbine, transmit lossy overland, convert to household power -> turn the electricity into heat again.
But when you have renewable sources, it is a different story. I believe you have mostly nuclear power in sweden?
Electricity is the first utility and all homes have it. Of course, you can be off grid and have no utilities, just have solar+batteries, electrification works perfectly in that scenario.
Replacing is a cost.
Sorry, I don't understand. What is being replaced? With what?
With the electricity equivalent.
Makes sense when all is powered by green energy, but it does not makes sense to switch all that and power it with electricity from coal. Then the CO2 costs are higher.
(And the above even generously assumes the generation is not CHP which would make induction look better still, and ignores the extra energy needed for chilling your house)
The low efficiency of transferring heat from gas to the cooking vessel kills the odds for the gas range in the competition, most of energy goes to heating air instead of the kettle.
(But we shouldn't generate electricity from gas of course, fossils need to be left in the ground to avert worst of the climate disaster)
Even electrical resistance heating is more carbon efficient than burning gas at home. This doesn’t even require a high-renewable grid - it produces less CO2 burning gas for electricity to run an electric stove than it does burning gas at home due to the efficiency of a modern gas power plant and the dreadful waste heat of a gas burner.
That all depends on what you're cooking. I have used just about all types of cooking contraptions there are ranging from an open fire through a pit fire, several types of "cultivated" fires (wood-fired stoves, BBQs etc), propane/butane/methane gas burners of various types, coil/cast_iron/ceramic/halogen electric and induction stoves. I normally cook on a wood-fired stove seeing how as I live on a farm in the Swedish countryside with plenty of forest on my doorstep which I also use to heat the house and whose branches I cut up for the stove. I do have one of those cast-iron resistance heated electric ranges next to the wood-fired stove but I only use it as a parking lot for pans etc. I also have a few single-hob induction plates around which I sometimes use outside when we're not supposed to light fires due to extreme drought etc. When I lived in the Netherlands I bought a "gas-free" house which meant I had to use electricity for cooking. Induction was supposed to be the bees knees so I built myself a range with an induction cooker on top and a hot-air oven underneath it. The thing worked fine for some types of cooking but it royally sucked for e.g. stir-fry cooking using a wok. Even the flat-bottom version I got did not come close to the real thing on a gas stove or wood fire.
Now, more than 20 years later I regularly use my mother's new induction stove when I visit her in the Netherlands. That thing still sucks for stir-frying, no matter which pan I use. There is just not enough power to be had on a residential induction cooker to reach the quick heat needed to make a good nasi goreng (i.e. Indonesian-Dutch fried rice). On the wood-fired stove here at home I use a Chinese wok which hangs directly in the fire and as such is close to perfect. The sad part of this is that my mother's previous range had a special wok burner which, while not as capable as the wood-fired stove, at least made it possible to quickly reach a good heat and keep it. Alas, she felt she needed to go with the flow and had that range swapped out for an anaemic induction cooker which is supposed to be able to run 2 plates at max power (~2 kW) at the same time but does not even seem to be capable of that without dropping one of them a notch down.
If you're comparing commercial induction cookers to gas stoves the comparison might hold. There are special induction plates for using a round-bottomed wok which may also lead to better results. Those are not what most people will get at home when they replace their "dangerous" gas range though.
Induction's pro's are its reaction speed, cleanliness, electrical efficiency and sometimes price (single-hob plates at e.g. IKEA are dirt-cheap) but that is about it. Its cons are the lack of power in most residential ranges, the lack of fine-grained control, the sensitivity of the ceramic top plate - it gets scratched easily when you have an 'active' cooking style as well is liable to break when confronted with heavy cast-iron skillets in the hands of inexperienced users, this is true for all ceramic cookers and not specific to induction - and the power electronics (I have repaired two induction cookers already, one of them (a commercial single-hob plate) had a blown out capacitor (literally - loads of black smoke blew out off the thing), the other (Siemens) suffered from a whole bank of broken power transistors (RJH60T4 IGBTs). Finally, confusingly in the light of my remark about single-hob plates being cheap, its often high price. Induction still seems to be priced as a "luxury" good while in reality it is fairly cheap to produce, the only relatively expensive part being the power electronics (where "expensive" means "a few tens of euro's for the requisite transistors and capacitors as well as the copper induction coils).
I don’t think a carbon tax is economically efficient, but I’m starting to think it is emotionally efficient to just let people do all the minimal little things that I don’t think warrant discussion (paper straws, dishwashers, gas logs).
We are fucking terrible at risk analysis and management.
I pay approximately $33 a month in service fees, $1 for gas 9 months of the year, and $30 for gas 3 months (we've sort of embraced the fire as a way to make some use of the fees)
If you're doing the math, we're paying $360 a year in fees for $70 (5x the fees as the use)
Oh and the game of carbon credits a $6 a month fee that the gas company then gives us a promo credit for each month
I like that it's more efficient. Gas kicked a LOT of heat into the kitchen.
I like that it didn't scorch the side of the saucepans.
Ultimately I switched to avoid burning fossil fuels. Every bit counts.
* natural gas (42%)
* nuclear power (29%)
* coal (12%)
* solar energy (10%)
* hydroelectric power (5%)
* and wind (1%)
Switching out billions of stoves, cars … to electric counterparts is going to take a long time. The thousands of power plants are much easier to convert.
If a typical home cook was buying a stove for their house, I'd recommend induction without thinking twice, especially if they have kids or can't have a hood that vents outside. Even without considering environmental concerns, I'd choose induction for restaurant pastry work— the precision and consistency are really great. It's also nice to not have all of the heat from 30 90k BTU burners all the time in a small room, too.
But for most uses, having a flame you can see, hear, and feel affords much more expressive heat control than digital displays and pan temperature alone. Most pan work is about feel rather than "heating something at x temperature for y time." Also, being able to pick the pan up a few inches to jostle the contents while still getting nearly the same heat transfer is really important for high heat sautées. It's also much much more expensive to get an induction burner that doesn't have a tiny hot spot in the middle of the pan— even with a relatively small burner, the gas flame still spreads out more, which is critical for things like searing large cuts of meat properly. In many ways, gas is a better tool from a functional perspective, environmental issues aside.
My dad is a retired mechanical engineer— he was the chief engineer at a fairly large company for years, and he knows a lot about heat transfer. He won't even entertain the idea that induction stoves are inferior to gas stoves in any way. He's probably also used a stove about two dozen times in his life and standing in front of one he vibes like someone learning to drive. It's the equivalent of his arguing I should use a compass, French curve and drafting templates when figure drawing. Induction being more precise and efficient on paper doesn't make it better in all use cases, and some use cases are really important to some people. Ultimately, the emissions and efficiency make induction the way to go, and I've only seen glib countetarguments against that. But the people telling others— even ones with vastly more experience cooking— they're wrong for preferring gas as a cooking tool are saying more about their own understanding of cooking than the other person's.
Notice how she does not criticize their methods or analysis, but rather the conclusions.
Sounds like some groups have a preferred outcome and will not tolerate any dissent and engage in ad-hominem attacks and innuendo (for example see the title of the article).
In other words, it seems like the tactics used by the current regime are successful in that gas stoves have been turned into a "current thing".
1."Should I be worried about Nitrogen Dioxide from my stove?"
2."In the absence of trustworthy, detailed research, how would I know to be worried about Nitrogen Dioxide?"
I feel the focus should be on the second question -- "big stove" seems to have prevented us from making an informed decision on the topic, and that should make us all concerned regardless of the particular dangers of Nitrogen Dioxide. Personally, I'd like to know whether it matters for my health. With the existing data, I can't tell.
I’ve noticed these types of “shade” articles that are strange and boring that an org like NPR dedicates people’s time to writing this.
The goal isn’t to eliminate gas stoves. They don’t matter. It seems strange that anyone cares whether I have natural gas for stoves or not.
I don’t think anyone claims that infrastructure doesn’t have costs. Of course it does. But the argument is that the benefits are worth the cost.
Brining up a gas pipeline explosion as relevant to a discussion about stoves isn’t useful unless you quantify what portion of that pipeline went toward cooking.
The argument that all gas should be eliminated because 8 people died in 2010 is too simple.
Any loss of life is sad. But 8 lives is important depending on the value from their loss. If it’s 8 lives in 100 years to allow 300 million people to have gas then that may be acceptable. Just like the loss of life from building hydro dams and solar arrays and whatnot.
The simplicity isn’t in the loss of life, it’s in not performing the analysis to know if it’s meaningful or not. I suspect it’s not meaningful.
We only see the failures of this activity. There are many more big lobby success stories, where the externalities a line of business produces are removed from public discourse. In some cases, veggie libel laws for one, the lobby is so successful that criticism is practically illegal.
Edit: gas is also really important for places without reliable access to electrical power.
Even with extremely high CFM on your range hood, a meal prep session is likely still going to make your house smell like a restaurant for an entire afternoon.
For me, the type of heating seems irrelevant after a certain point when we are talking about air quality. If you make a big pan full of oil and other stuff hot for a long time, it doesn't really matter how it got there.
This sounds like we disagree with any science that disagrees with our preferred policy.
Notice how she does not criticize their methods or analysis, but rather the conclusions.
This is not how science should be done.
Ideally I'd like both induction and gas eyes on my countertop. Resistive stoves just suck and putting the elements under glass panels is the worst of all worlds.
Having a gas oven (like the one integrated into my unit) is stupid, slow, and smelly. I try to remember and open the window if I'm using it for very long.
Cooking isn’t just about getting a pan hot quickly.
And there is significant cost to the default being gas that hasn’t been caught by our current legislative regimes. And that the gas companies are using dodgy tactics to keep it that way.
Piping an explosive gas all over cities just seems like a generally bad idea.
Why isn't this the discussion?
Electric stoves may at least help us solve the obesity crisis by avoiding letting anyone have food worth eating.
And what about the adults who wouldn’t have chosen a gas stove if they had balanced and factual information rather than information tainted by corporate influence?
When she was 5, we moved to a new house. When I read the recent research, I realized that this coughing declined around when we moved.
The difference? The old house had a microwave over the stove and vented inside. The new house vented outside.
Anecdotal, but the research connected the dots for me.
It's barely filtration, yet it successfully masquerades as ventilation.
Plus, by your logic, nobody living in cities should have kids at all.
I could maybe be more okay with gas stoves not being banned in new builds if there was automatic venting that turned on as soon as a burner turns on.