The disruption isn't that big, if you don't own a stove and don't cook in your home.

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.

>[0] Cooking on electric is a horrible experience compared with gas, and cooking on induction isn't great either (unless you're entire cooking knowledge is boiling a pan of water, in which case, yay!). And of course there are dishes (such as many Chinese dishes) which you simply could no longer cook.

> 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.

The idea that you can't cook Chinese food on an electric stove is nonsense. If you are a hardcore wok enthusiast you can actually get an induction wok burner, and 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. Of course most people trot this argument out as a talking point and not because they actually like to make Chinese food very often.

> The idea that [I] can't cook Chinese food on an electric stove is nonsense.

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?

So you're making my point, then. Most people who trot out the line about how electric stoves are not suitable for Chinese cooking don't know or care about Chinese cooking and just want to use it as a cudgel.

> Most people who trot out the line

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 thought what I meant to imply was obvious enough, but maybe not. The idea that you can't cook Chinese food on an electric stove is nearly always made as bad-faith concern trolling and it is not correct.

> The idea that you can't cook [specifically] Chinese food on an electric stove

I never said that.

Your post contained a paragraph to this effect.

> Your post contained a paragraph to this effect.

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?

> And of course there are dishes (such as many Chinese dishes) which you simply could no longer cook.

It was this sentence that I was replying to.

That's a quotation, as indicated by the ">[0]" and even explicited mentioned in the associated footnote.

Come on, man. You might not like it as much but it's completely serviceable to cook a meal. Even the shitty old coil ones do the job. I've used those too, as have most people in America who've ever rented a home. There is pretty much nothing you can ONLY make on one kind of stove.

Sorry, but this is simply not true. As someone who cooks, I'd rather grate my own face than use an electric stove. They don't get hot enough, they take forever to heat up, and they take forever to cool down. After cooking on gas, there is no way anyone would ever want to go back to electric. Induction is a lot better than electric of course, but gas is still preferable.

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?

If we were going to ban gas stoves the obvious way to do it would be to forbid sale and installation of new ones, not to mandate that everyone immediately replace their existing stoves.

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.

I've been stuck with an electric stove for the past 4 years. There's no way to ever get used to it, it simply sucks.

No, it's not comparable and are you kidding me? This is utter nonsense. There are 12 ships that produce more co2 than all the gas fed home sin the world.. Quite getting off in telling other how to be.

The point isn't that a stove uses more than a container ship -- where did you get that idea? It's that "I can't figure out how to work an electric stove" is a relatively frivolous reason to burn fossil fuels.

... Thats disingenuous, its not I don't know how to use an electric stove its that its simply better, they don't even compare. The response time on a gas stove is unbeatable and makes a big difference in how you cook. Also try using a wok on an electric stove.

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"

Ultimately I just find these conversations frustrating. People say they're concerned about the environment but then go into fits at having to make even trivial sacrifices like putting up with electric stoves which are better than they've ever been. And in the process they point at vital industries like shipping and agriculture and say we should do away with those first. If you compare the sacrifices people made, say, to win World War II, just on the home front -- gas rationing, donating household goods for scrap metal, etc.-- it makes us look quite unable to meet the historic moment to see people have fits about using a paper straw.