> City carve-outs for gas cooking aren’t unreasonable, said Sara Baldwin, who works on electrifying the building sector at environmental policy firm Energy Innovation. But eventually, she believes that buildings will need to be fully electrified, including stovetops, to meet ambitious emissions-reduction goals, presenting an existential threat to the gas industry.
So it's not quite "blaming gas stoves for climate change". The claim is there's a need to transition away from gas stoves _as a consequence_ of getting rid of gas hookups (which are presumably mostly used for heat), which would have a noticeable impact on emissions.
Further driving that point home, the next sentence is:
> “The gas industry really wants to make the household stovetop a wedge issue and use that to animate people against electrification as a whole,” said Charlie Spatz, a researcher at the Climate Investigations Center, an environmental advocacy group.
So they know that a storm is brewing over gas stoves, because there's inherent resistance _and_ there's an large industry trying to use/abuse that fact in order to preserve their profits.
To me, the reason the article focuses on gas cooking instead of gas hookups in general is for that exact reason. Gas cooking has a small impact on climate change, but the claim is it's a necessary sacrifice to get rid of the bigger problem of gas hookups and distribution, and it seems like it'll be a tough sell for opinionated people who are being amplified by a large industry trying to extract as much profit as possible on the way out. It could have spent more time on that claim that it's a necessary sacrifice though.
The emissions from gas heating are drastically higher than electric heating, and eliminating gas heating would absolutely have an impact on emissions. However, gas heating is significantly cheaper than electric heating, and I wish the article had spoken more about how environmental groups plan to deal with lower income residents switching from gas to electric. In Massachusetts, for example, a house that spends $1,200 in a winter on natural gas would spend over $6,000 on electric resistance heat (unless you have a newer electric heat pump, which is much closer to competing with the price of natural gas)
I live in an area where those low temperatures occur seasonally, but heat pumps absolutely can improve energy efficiency and reduce carbon emissions, even here, especially if tied to non-air-source heat pumps, or just massively increased renewable energy production (including base load sources like geothermal).
The capital/installation costs are the real problem, and it will take some toothy legislation and expenditure to get it done.
Where I live in Michigan, I could use a heat pump for some time in the fall and spring, but there's no way it would replace my gas furnace in the winter. I'd be curious to know if the cost of getting a heat pump would be worth it at that point.
[1] https://homeinspectioninsider.com/heat-pump-work-subzero-tem...
Even with an air-source heat pump, as long as it's smart enough to defrost itself as appropriate, etc., you can definitely get a Coefficient of Performance greater than 1 even at below freezing outdoor temperatures. You could run it the majority of days even in winter, and while your current electricity prices may make it not competitive with current natural gas prices, it would be _efficient_. If natural gas externalities were priced in, it almost certainly would be cheaper to run a heat pump except when COP goes all the way down to 1, where yes, you would need an augmented/alternative heat source -- no denying that.
But if you have central air conditioning, which is pretty common in the Midwest, reverse operation is a heat pump. In practice, many A/C systems don't do that, but the capital cost between a central A/C only system and a central A/C + heat pump system is minimal. A/C + heat pump should really be the default, and supplemented or augmented for the few weeks when COP is too low, and for longer while the economics are the way they are.
One augmentation is that you can get non-air-source heat pumps. At least for buildings with several units, it _should_ be cost-effective to get a ground source -- just dig below the frost line. That's almost never something you can easily just hire a crew to do, so unfortunately it's not a practical suggestion right now, but if/when that market failure is dealt with, it'll be a good option for many, as you wouldn't need a secondary system.
Not trying to convince you to buy a heat pump by the way, the economics of it do matter a lot. I would like to sell people the efficiency argument though.
Just buy it from Quebec at 0.05$/KWh. They have been willing to sell it at that price for decades. Bonus, completely green. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_%E2%80%93_New_England_T...
> Humans have an impact on the planet. Deal with it.
> Some of the big ways we do are summarily ignored.
That is, ironically, the point of the article (not that it's perfect). Let's not summarily ignore the emissions from the gas distribution network, just because we're upset that cooking will change slightly. Deal with it, and don't let silly resentment towards an individual activist or cynical campaigns by massive carbon emitting industries fool you into doing otherwise.
Saying "deal with it" is not at all how I would communicate the issue to the average consumer, but you don't fit that description. Never mind that individual consumer choices like your own, summed across all individuals, have almost zero impact compared to systemic changes like those proposed in the article. I say this as someone very similar to you (vegan, bike/walk everywhere, use renewable energy, etc.).
Manipulating people isn’t a sustainable solution.
Houses in Malibu fall into the sea because they are built in a coastal erosion zone, not because of your grilling - which can also be done over charcoal or propane, which don't have the huge issues of gas grid leaks and maintenance.
And FWIW I usually use charcoal/wood.
It's a systems problem that requires system solutions, not the problem of an individual's right to cook over a natural gas flame.
>Nationwide, fossil fuels burned for energy in businesses and homes sit at 13% of annual carbon emissions, according to 2019 data from the EPA.
>Gas stoves’ contributions to emissions are negligible compared with the gas used to heat homes and water. Less than 3% of natural-gas use in homes comes from cooking on gas stoves, according to a 2015 residential energy survey from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
3% of 13% comes to just under 0.04% of carbon emissions. Yup, definitely making a big difference.
Edit: 0.04% of residential carbon emissions in the US only.
60% of US electricity is generated from fossil fuels (1). 40% of that is from Natural Gas. 20% from Coal which produces almost twice the carbon as Natural Gas.
60% of that energy is lost in conversion (2). So, converting from natural gas to electricity would actually increase carbon emissions in many parts of the US.
So, where should we start? I'm not an expert, but just this quick analysis says decreasing the amount of fossil fuels used for US generation would be a much better choice.
However, unlike for a home gas boiler where the efficiency is maybe 90%, direct efficiency for gas stoves is poor. Basically you set fire to the gas, the fire is near the pans you're using for cooking, so they get hot. It's simple, but it is not at all efficient. This also produces waste CO2 (and some CO but hopefully not much), which is poisonous although not that poisonous, right where you are standing, whereas your gas boiler vents the waste gas to the outside air.
In contrast induction has much better efficiency and of course produces no poisonous gases itself (though cooking foods does release a variety of volatiles you shouldn't really breathe, especially pan frying)
So while "Burn gas in your home" to heat water is definitely a net efficiency win over "Burn gas in a power station, ship the electricity to your home, then use that" to heat water, the same does not follow for stoves where I suspect it's either a wash or a small win for electricity.
Large boilers need to die. Small "instant heaters" at or very close to each faucet is the correct way. Way way way less energy usage.
Sadly the electrical water heater units usually don't have access to the 240v line and are limited to 120v, 10A or something measly. People then complain their water doesn't heat fast enough or get hot enough for a given flow and then complain/swear off small instant heaters =/
A centralized system avoids having multiple circuits with potentially high loads like this. Not to mention the likely gigantic heat exchangers required to transfer 9kW!
Also, at least in my country, the network connection fee to the gas network is often higher than the gas used by appliances, (warm climate) and residential cooks don't realise they're subsidisng the cost of our business gas users.
Yes, but the plan is a more clean grid in the future. If you are building a new home now then this calculus (hopefully) will not hold in 20 years. If we've got a clean grid but everybody is still using gas to heat their homes, we've still got a huge problem.
A much less egregious but still valid one is buying a sports/lower mileage ICE car today, and driving it less (e.g., using public transit for commutes, and the sports car for weekend rides). This can have a lower carbon footprint than a long distance everyday commute in an electric car. The fixes that properly account for these things are trivial technically (any econ grad can tell how), but do not have any political support.
I do not expect the political landscape to ever appreciate these things. Therefore, I will alter my consumption pattern according to my own understanding, and not according to the whims of Capitol Hill.
Gas stoves are more collateral damage than culprit, in my opinion, although the indoor air quality issues are a compelling health concern.
But again, it's more of questioning the scale. How big of an issue is leaks in the natural gas grid? I'd like to see some actual numbers as to the damage that is done. Promote electric space heaters as primary option, sure. But this smells like all hype and little bite
We don’t know exactly how much leaks, but the estimates have been growing and most sources cite 2-4%. Given the 80x multiplier on methane as a GHG compared to CO2, that’s potentially a really big problem.
One of the reasons to be aggressive here is that building codes are upstream. You won’t see the impacts on the market (reduced gas consumption, strong demand for induction stoves & electric space heating) until many years after this change, and it’s precisely those shifts in demand we need to drive further advancement in electric stoves and heating to make them even better quickly.
This is leakage from between our recieving gas and it being metered to the customer. On the customer side, there's another estimated 2-4% loss.
Get your appliances serviced regularly!
Gas production fell by almost half.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46896
Researchers found that frozen wells caused natural gas production to fall by 85 percent in the days leading up to Feb. 16, with up to two-thirds of processing plants in the Permian Basin experiencing an outage. Researchers looked at a sample of 27 natural gas processing plants, and found that as many as 18 of them had zero output at the worst of the storm. Natural gas producers are not required to weatherize their equipment in Texas.
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/UT-...
The desperate scramble to power up natural gas facilities again exposed a major structural flaw in Texas’ electric grid: Oncor and other utilities didn't have good lists of what they should consider critical infrastructure, including natural gas facilities — simply because natural gas companies failed to fill out a form or didn’t know the form existed, company executives, regulators and experts said.
https://www.texastribune.org/2021/03/18/texas-winter-storm-b...
Moreover, this very similar situation happened 10 years ago already and that had natural gas curtailments to retail customers. So, no, not a good backup solution.
Texas's power grid went down in part because natural gas plants couldn't get the necessary gas.
Are there 2 unique gas distribution systems? Was there no gas, or was it just super expensive spot price and no one wanted to pay for it?
I get the impression this isn't typical, but for me "gas" usually means a 150-gal propane tank, filled asynchronously, often by truck rather than gas main. A benefit of this, like most asynchronous systems, is that no amount of disfunction in the backend will have any immediate effect on local usage.
But yeah- in my neck of the woods, anywhere outside the city has a propane tank on the property somewhere.
Actually, that is a specific thing that this method does help with: if people stockpile in a given month, it has no immediate effect on me, because my gas tank still has gas left in it. It might cause non-immediate problems, but a lack of local buffers doesn't help with that, and I've at least bought weeks or months of time for those problems to clear up.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-20/a-giant-f...
I also live in Plano. This law was passed many many years ago, so if the HOA is really saying that they should change their tune if you point them to that relevant passage.
It’s not a helpful comment. If you have something to say… say it. If you don’t like the HOA rules don’t move to the HOA neighborhood. It’s hardly a Texas specific problem.
Not my house, I wouldn't have moved to that neighborhood, but my mom didn't have a whole lot of time at the time but of course that doesn't matter we must all embrace the free marketplace of ideas because no other solution is possible here I know I know... Bored now...
The funny thing is that my conservative friends complain about exactly this sort of mindset in California. And I tell them to move to Florida or Texas instead of perpetuating their own misery but they rarely do. One of them seems to have killed himself last year over this. I conclude that I do not understand people and why they can't just do the simple obvious things because you're right that my mom shouldn't have moved there but there's a story behind how she ended up there and you've completely neglected that. Maybe my late friend has a story too.
I find this unnecessarily political, but I also find the more "conservative" minded people to be more supportive of independence, including solar. Not sure how many HOAs are in your experience, maybe it is a lot more than mine.
While the protections have been extended and clarified by subsequent legislation, its worth noting that this policy (the Solar Rights Act) was adopted in 1978 in California.
HOAs can be pretty evil that way.
I'm sure lots of people used an oven or a range as emergency heat, but a point in favor of keeping those going is not a point in favor of natural gas space heating.
Quite a few. Older through the wall gas panel type gas heaters work without power. Often found in low-end apartments and trailers. Newer ones tend to require power, mostly for a fan, but sometimes for "cloud connectivity".
Not only do I agree with this thing about electric efficient stoves, but I think we push our lifestyles much more in favor of environment, like not really "I have respect for the environment, and I drive an electric car", but more "I have respect for the environment, and I ride a bicyle" this means more to me (electric cars are still a large source of pollution, from their components: plastics, electronics, to the batterires, their maintenances..)
I work in earth science, I know how bad methane is a greenhouse gas. The comment on top is absolutely right in that the line has to be drawn somewhere for a sensible approach though. Your bike example, the factories making these bikes still pollute, steel is a major source of pollution actually. So we should all walk!
You see, there is no end to it once we get started and don't have a plan.
It's a compromise, but those compromises should be more toward environment, less toward personal comfort (like hearing they use gas stoves because it makes something taste a little better, is a bit ridiculous). My footprint is very small, not 0% (electric cars showing "100% electric, 0% pollution" is not honest, I see the good intent behind, but let's not lie), I've one bike collected from garbage, the other is second-hand, even replaced tyres from thrown-out wheels. This compromise is good because it's also give me a good health, immune system, things like covid is not really a concern for me, at least far behind road accidents
There's already a significant difference between this kind of basic bike and a full blown competition bike with all sorts of electronics devices. And the difference with a car is another level, just considering the weight of it (all kind of road kills it does, road damage, ..) and all services needed to maintain to fuel those cars, all the hidden indirect pollution, that's what people don't consider.
If people reduced all their footprint by a half, we would in short/mid term pollute twice less globally, so it's defnitely worth trading some lifestyle habbits for environment friendly ones
I grew up in a developing country without heating or aircon. I remember having frostbite on my feet some winters. Most of the food we ate was brought from the local farms straight to the market. No shipping stuff around the world, no cooling etc. I also biked everywhere and still do. If you're from a first world country, just by existing there and living the most basic life you're already responsible for so much CO2 it will be hard to ever catch up. So please give up everything and revert to monke before preaching to me.
But seriously: Moralizing doesn't help. People need better education so they understand energy issues, which they currently don't. Instead everyone repeats believe the science™ or such mantras, but they never actually look at the science. Once they have an understanding, as societies we need to figure out rules that work for most people, not just edge cases. It's good you ride your bike and I do to, but it's not a solution for everyone, some people will still need to drive cars. On the same note the push to make all cars electric is idiotic. The other day I saw they introduced electric highway patrol cars in New York, who on earth would think that to be a good idea?! I work in earth science and the amount of myths people believe about energy and climate related topics is insane. The lack of understanding makes them easy targets for misinformation by the energy lobby, the car industry and other actors with ulterior motives.
I don't preach for my way to optimize things which is a bit extreme, just for a more achievable end result: cutting by a half our footprints. People can take more pblic transports, train, avoid planes, consume more local food, consume less overall etc..
I suspect a lot of restaurants will move to bottled gas for cooking while using electricity everywhere else. That way they can still get the flame seared taste or the feeling of control they don't get with an electric or induction cooktop.
I don't think ecology is the main drive here. It's more of a safety/convenience thing. No need to care about gas lines, a lot of new houses are fully electric (heating, stove). Also, no more grandma forgetting to shut down the gas and exploding half the building.
Also, afaik, gas stove are pretty bad for indoor air quality
Gas cooking is the last hurdle culturally to dumping citywide gas lines entirely. This is just a theory.
Unfortunately, Carbon taxes have been become political poison and red meat for the republican base, so we use methods that are less effective, more costly, and more annoying.
The citizens never fight back. They are pretty easy to convince that they are doing the right thing (see every Tesla owner ever [don't fight me guys, I'm joking])
Unfortunately it's the bourgeois that loves those things and they vote.
Do we really need to shed such a cornerstone of humanity in order to remain being human on this rock?
This is death by 1000 cuts.
Cities don't have gas hooked up to homes in the part of country where I live, so that's how people do it.
Tens of millions of Americans living in rural and exurban areas have been cooking like this since before we were born. This is what we’d call a “solved problem.”
Natural gas run directly to the home is a solved problem. Yet we're having this discussion.
Nowhere in the US is even close to having an energy mix where this is not the case. Why take steps backward and pollute more? Shouldn't we be trying to make strides to reduce emissions?
> the average efficiency of gas heating rose slowly to 86% over the last decade, so that carbon emissions from producing 1 kWh of central heating [using natural gas] fell to 215 grams of CO2 in 2019. However, simple [resistance] electric heaters averaged only 207 grams of carbon dioxide per kWh by the end of 2019
https://www.designingbuildings.co.uk/wiki/Carbon_emissions_o...
For new buildings the effect is probably even greater, as you are probably going to choose a heat pump (2-5kW heat output for 1kW electrical input) over resistance heating.
The US averages around 400g CO2 per kWh, so yes maybe resistance heating doesn't make sense, but heat pumps for sure do.
Which is why almost no houses in heating-dominated climates use primarily resistance heating.
Solar panels are built in China, powered by coal and slave labor.
My point is there is no such thing as a free lunch, and a lot of "green" tech is very much not-so at this point.
Put another way, what is the alternative you are proposing for the energy source to manufacture the first wind turbine (at cost and can scale)? You might be able to manufacture a couple of wind turbines with some horses and man power but it will never be cost competitive with fossil fuels unfortunately.
Those also produce CO2 (effectively by burning sugar, more or less), and IIRC generally more of it per unit of useful work than a good fossil-fuel-powered engine.
I think hydro and nuclear are the realistic clean options. Solar and wind are not going to fix our problems.
For the rest of us, it would be an enormous disruption. If we were forced to get rid of gas stoves, the individual and aggregate economic cost would be huge.
And while you might get used to an induction stove, nobody gets used to an electric one - those things really are rubbish.
> unless you're entire cooking knowledge is boiling a pan of water
If your entire cooking knowledge is boiling a pan of water, just get a damn microwave and stop ruining things for everyone else.
0: Quoted in full because it disappeared while I was writing my answer.
Good for you? The most Chinese thing I make on a regular basis is frozen orange chicken (from <checks freezer> Foster Farms, apparently), so I don't really care.
In any case, I've yet to encounter a electric stove that's fit-for-purpose for anything more sophisticated than boiling water. That's not to say they don't exist, but someone else, somewhere else having one is rather irrelevant to me.
> induction stoves are far more common in China than the US, which one would expect not to be the case if they couldn't be used to make Chinese food.
FWIW, I'm pretty sure most uses of "Chinese food" on eg HN refer to American-adaptations-of-Chinese-food, similar to how "pizza" generally bears little resemblance to the traditional Italian dish, so this doesn't mean much either way.
> Of course most people trot this argument out as a talking point
I appreciate the implication that I'm not most people, I guess?
I have no idea what those people know, care about, or want, and I don't see how my comment has anything to do with them; it certainly doesn't make your point. My point is that electric stoves are not suitable for (almost) any kind of cooking, presumably but not specifically including Chinese.
I never said that.
0 > If your entire cooking knowledge is boiling a pan of water, just get a damn microwave and stop ruining things for everyone else.
1 > 0: Quoted in full because it disappeared while I was writing my answer.
2 > Good for you? The most Chinese thing I make on a regular basis is frozen orange chicken (from <checks freezer> Foster Farms, apparently), so I don't really care.
3 > In any case, I've yet to encounter a electric stove that's fit-for-purpose for anything more sophisticated than boiling water. That's not to say they don't exist, but someone else, somewhere else having one is rather irrelevant to me.
4 > FWIW, I'm pretty sure most uses of "Chinese food" on eg HN refer to American-adaptations-of-Chinese-food, similar to how "pizza" generally bears little resemblance to the traditional Italian dish, so this doesn't mean much either way.
5 > I appreciate the implication that I'm not most people, I guess?
Which of those reads like "electric stoves are even worse at cooking chinese food (in particular) than they are at cooking most types of food" to you?
It was this sentence that I was replying to.
Aside from anything else, this whole exercise smacks of making people believe they're helping the planet so they continue to consume, consume, consume with wild abandon - all the while providing a huge cash injection for companies selling stoves. Some quick maths, just for fun: there are 122,800,00 households in the USA, and around 35% of them have gas stoves (42,980,000). I don't know about the US, but here in the UK the cheapest (and therefore not great) induction stoves are around £300/$411, and for anyone mad enough, electric stove tops are around £100/$140. Let's assume average replacement unit cost is around $300, with fitting around $100. Cost to replace all gas stoves is around $17,192,000,000 - and that's assuming everyone buys the cheapest stove tops available.
If we really wanted to do something that would actually make a difference, how about banning bunker oil?
Again, I have a gas stove for the first time with my home now. I don't find it that much better and I don't really like the hazards associated with it. I cook frequently. Perhaps I'd feel differently if I'd learned to cook on gas and then went to electric, rather than the other way around, because the issue people have seems mostly to be not accounting for the temperature not being easy to change on the fly.
My point was why don't we fix the very obvious and low hanging fruit like cargo ships that run on sludge, fix that first before you tell me and millions of others that "we don't know how to use electric stoves"
This push to be perfect is never ending, but always attacks the common folk, and rarely the multi-national megacorps. It's always with a justifiable pro-environment angle, which means any common folk who fight against it are painted as immoral, or uncaring about the planet.
This is just the next lowest hanging fruit, but I'm getting annoyed at this point.