Americans’ Gas Stoves Are as Bad for Climate as 500k Cars

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-27/americans-gas-stoves-are-as-bad-for-climate-as-500-00-cars

by mettler • 4 years ago

28 37 4 years ago

Kon-Peki3• 4 years ago

Swapping a gas stove for an electric can easily cost double the price of the stove. Consider running a 30, 40, or possibly even 50 amp circuit and capping or removing the gas line. Neither of these tasks are ones that are ok to be done poorly.

throwaway0a5e• 4 years ago

And that's before you even turn it on.

Electricity is far more expensive per BTU than gas pretty much anywhere with municipal gas.

Kon-Peki3• 4 years ago

Do you have a source that quantifies it? Something along the lines of "It costs 5 cents to make a box of macaroni and cheese using gas, but 7 cents using electricity".

I just moved from a condo that used electricity for cooking to a house that uses natural gas for cooking. Same number of people in the household and same amount of cooking done. How much less am I paying? $1? $10? Is it enough to matter?

conjecTech• 4 years ago

That's true with marginal costs, but it doesn't consider fixed costs. My range is the only thing that uses gas in my unit. The connection fee is $18/month. The actual charge for gas was $0.73 last month. Sure, the marginal economics look better, but I'd save close to $200/year if I could switch over to all electric.

vba616• 4 years ago

So Americans' gas stoves are as bad for the climate as ~0.2% of Americans' cars.

baud147258• 4 years ago

The title could be re written as "Americans’ gas stoves are as bad for the climate as less than 1% of US all cars".

j_walter3• 4 years ago

They didn't really dive into the fact that if you switch all of those gas stoves for electricity...a lot of that electricity comes from NG or coal fired plants anyway.

They focus on leaks too...well every appliance plugged in leaks electricity it multiple forms.

unethical_ban• 4 years ago

There is a planned pivot from dirty electricity to clean electricity. There is no pivot from dirty NG to clean NG.

More efficient electronics and less wasteful leeches are possible over time. Sealing hundreds of thousands of miles of decentralized gas piping effectively is cost-prohibitive.

barbazoo2• 4 years ago

I'm very environmentally conscious but personally I'm gonna switch to an electric vehicle and heat pump before changing my stove to an electric one I think.

I will make sure to have proper ventilation when cooking though from now on, I wasn't aware of the health aspect of all the byproducts of cooking with gas.

bushbaba• 4 years ago

To be fair. Your gas stove in your home can pose health risks due to often poor ventilation of the fumes.

Your personal and childs health might improve by moving to induction.

barbazoo2• 4 years ago

True, I hope that being more mindful of ventilation, especially while cooking will have a positive short term effect.

tssva• 4 years ago

Many hoods are ductless and recirculate the air after passing it through filters. I imagine these likely do nothing or close to it regarding removing the offending substances.

beerandt• 4 years ago

All but a very few instances of natural gas malfunctions (like a completely severed pipe) are safely mitigated by mixing and dilution.

Most common gasses are only dangerous in large amounts, when stratified and consentrated in a small confined space.

Which is why ductless hoods are able to meet code in the first place.

Ironically, this has become a bigger issue because of houses being more tightly sealed due to efficiency regulations. Old houses would naturally draw and vent in the event of any sort of out-of-equilibrium gas buildup.

jvanderbot• 4 years ago

My father in law, a quite intelligent person with a non-technical background, asked me a really good question re: electric appliances and vehicles.

He was holding off on getting an electric car, because he didn't understand how it could possibly be more efficient and cost-effective to use gas appliances in the home, but suddenly it's more efficient and cost-effective to use electric motors in cars.

Of course the problem is that generating heat with electricity is probably easiest done by spark-gapping to start a fire, and letting the fire generate heat, whereas generating motion with electromagnetism is quite easy compared to harnessing explosions to transfer to movement.

At any rate, I'd say let's replace cars first, then come after home appliances. They're relatively efficient at their job.

Tagbert• 4 years ago

And cars are a much much larger scale problem. Home stove emmisions are a rounding error.

smileysteve• 4 years ago

To add confusion; induction is drastically more efficient than resistance heating; heat pumps are drastically more efficient than gas or traditional heat.

So the communication problem is also one of changing technology. Technologies that adults learned 30 years ago are not the same as those today.

mikewarot• 4 years ago

Resistance heating is 100% efficient, how can inductive heating be more efficient than that?

bradstewart2• 4 years ago

While I am generally supportive of electrification efforts as a major tool in combating climate change, I am wary of having a single energy source to my house.

Particularly in light of the grid failures in Texas last winter. We would have been in big trouble without uninterrupted gas service. Running a small (1500 watt) generator to power the blower and control circuits, we were able to heat the house and cook without issue.

The redundancy was hugely important. Granted a rooftop solar+battery system would also suffice, but I'm wondering how long you can run a stove or furnace from those batteries.

teeray• 4 years ago

This is the reason many people in northern New England typically have a combination of propane, electric, or a wood stove. Relying on any one is an invitation for frozen pipes.

olliej• 4 years ago

In all fairness the Texas grid failures were the result of intentional choices made by the Texas government. Other states with similar weather had nothing like the catastrophic failure TX had.

bradstewart2• 4 years ago

Absolutely true. But redundancy is still a good thing.

fatnoah• 4 years ago

I don't have a strong opinion either way, but it's great to see a study with accompanying data and reasonably human-readable documentation: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.1c04707

BXLE_1-1-BitIs1• 4 years ago

According to Statista there's 284 million cars in the US; so getting rid of gas stoves would address < 0.2% of the problem posed by cars.

j_walter3• 4 years ago

Not to mention where does the electricity for those replacement stoves come from...probably NG or coal...

b0mbadilh0le• 4 years ago

Here's an excellent article about how our damning of cheap, reliable, "dirty" energy is going to push us into a crisis that dwarfs anything in recent memory. What happens when energy isn't cheap and isn't available?

https://adventuresincapitalism.com/2021/09/29/will-esg-creat...

jeppesen-io• 4 years ago

I respectfully disagree. This article make large generalizations with little data. Borderline fear mongering

Almost every day, we hear of a different policy plan to reduce energy production. We learn of new mandates, new taxes, more cancelled pipelines, more cancelled permits, and more penalties. What we don’t hear about is where the replacement energy comes from.

Solar, wind and more recently battery capacity is growing at an incredible rate. Even just this week there have been announcements for massive battery expansion in Texas and in California

Not saying there wont be problems over the next decade. Transitions are difficult. But for the article to to say "it will cause chaos for most of society" seems disingenuous

floatingatoll• 4 years ago

I appreciate that this is mathematically interesting, but from a practical standpoint, they should focus on “the emissions from gas stoves combined with an absence of fresh air inflow and poor exhaust outflow” if they want to see actual change.

advisedwang• 4 years ago

https://archive.fo/stDMo

Americans’ Gas Stoves Are as Bad for Climate as 500k Cars

Related Stories