Banning something at construction time has by far the least regulatory impact of any intervention.

If anyone was proposing turning off existing methane infrastructure, that would be quite different.

Also, just because searing protein produces bad indoor pollution, doesn't mean that any other pollution should therefore be automatically ignored. It is purely optional whether you want to use your stove to sear protein (e.g., you won't find any vegans using it for that purpose), but you don't really have an option if the only thing installed is a gas stove to heat your tea water or saute your onions...

A cheap electric kettle or standalone burner is an option, isn't it?

And doesn't the research indicate that fume hoods help regardless?

And what about when you want to bake or broil something?

& yes, fume hoods do help, with "help" doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. They also need to be turned on to work (not likely every time you heat a pot of tea), and are noisy, and waste even more heat, blowing out cubic meters of already heated/cooled air to exhaust milligrams of pollutants. Always better to never generate the pollutants in the first place.

And for the societal-level goals of reducing climate change and improving public health, it is best to do it at a societal scale, not making every individual go and spend resources to redo and workaround the work that has already been done. Far better to just not install the polluting infrastructure in the first place.

Europe found itself in a huge conundrum last year when Russia cut off the gas supply, highlighting our dependency on cheap Russian gas. It meant households went cold and lost their primary means of hot water and cooking - not so much because there was no gas, but because it was unaffordable.

But in my neck of the woods, removing dependency on gas had been ongoing for a while already for various motivations. One reason to do more with electricity, for example, is because people have cheap solar panels on their roofs now, using that to heat their house is (seems?) more self-reliant, cheaper, and less environmentally impactful in the long run.

And sure, one house won't make a difference, neither will a thousand. But it'll start to make an impact at scale.

There is no one fix for climate change, it will take tens of thousands of small changes and legislation over the span of decades.

2. Would you consider spreading awareness a suitable solution to knife crime? No? I wonder why.

Also, personal health is not something that's generally regulated by the government, despite the potential to cause additional state spending.

There is plenty of evidence that a 100% phase out of natural gas is necessary but not sufficient.

i also dont understand why we can't have legislation that says "you can only have a stove cooktop if its properly vented"..

In the winter, when i lose electricity, i can run my house on a small amount of power because i have natural gas heat, cooktop, clothes dryer, and two natural gas fireplaces. I'm not particularly interested in giving up that safety or luxury.

Monoculture is risky in all domains. Heating is not exempt

2. There is a relevant difference between doing something bad for you (like smoking - legal but the government tries hard to let you know it's bad) and murdering others with a knife.

Are you saying that if we got rid of all gas burning appliances in homes, that would not have much effect on climate change?

The heat transfer and energy loss of electrical appliances generally makes them less efficient than natural gas appliances, thus actually increasing the amount of natural gas that will need to be burned to accommodate this policy. This is literally going to increase the amount of natural gas that needs to be burned to maintain existing cooking patterns.

This policy and ones like it are why people can't take environmentalists seriously.

And a heat pump is superior to gas even if the grid consists 100% out of gas.

Further, you don't build a building built for gas when have to switch to electricity in the future anyway when the grid is even cleaner.

I don't know who told you this. Can you point to any large city that is running on purely wind & solar right now? As far as I'm aware, there's not even a large regional city that has demonstrated this can work with current battery technology. I would be really happy to be wrong on this, but as of right now, it's not an option and we need to be realistic about that.

"The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) says nuclear power plants had a capacity factor of 92.6% in the US during 2022. This compares to 36.1% for wind energy and just 24.8% for solar photovoltaic technology. To a rough approximation, it takes three times as much wind capacity and four times as much solar to produce the same amount of electricity as a nuclear power plant over a given period. This is complicated by seasonality. Solar, for example, is particularly ineffective during the winter months when energy needs in the northern portion of the country are highest."

[0] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

Regarding seasons: in our country wind is strong when solar is weak and vice versa

That wasn’t their claim at all, so it seems questionable to demand they prove this.

It’s like if someone said “cheerios are good for the heart”, and you asked someone to demonstrate that nobody ever had a heart attack while eating cheerios. You’re challenging an exaggerated version of the claim that was made, not the actual claim.

That is a fair criticism.

But major cities are getting close.

Adelaide, Australia went from 100% carbon energy in 2007 to ~30% today, and looks to hit at a net 0% by 2028.

https://opennem.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=all&interval=1M

Even in the furnace case you need fairly ideal numbers for the heat pump to overtake the loss of 50% you're taking just in the generation step.

And I don't know what's up with your claim about solar and wind energy.

This go-nowhere attitude and is why people can’t take fossil fuel apologists seriously.

If nothing would make you happier, make that point in your comment. “Maybe this will make a difference in 20 years” or “nuclear advancement is what we need” would completely change the tone.

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/methane-leaks-era...

[2] https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.1c04707

Yes. (Also, I welcome strong evidence to the contrary.)

The 2nd figure accounts for carbon footprint of electricity generation used in the home as well as gas combusted in the home. The 4th chart from [1] suggests this is about a 50/50 split (if we bring grid emissions to 0 but don’t exchange these natural gas devices, carbon intensity remains at half of what it is today). Therefore, we can conclude that these 4 appliances in residential properties account for 10% of US carbon footprint.

You could potentially make an argument that stoves are not the lions share of those emissions - but even if they only represent 10% of residential building emissions, that’s still 1% of US carbon emissions annually (which is a huge number when expressed in tons of CO2)

[1] https://www.rewiringamerica.org/policy/bringing-infrastructu... - Chart 4 [2] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1922205117

If you're telling me that fully eliminating gas stoves in the U.S. (something that will not happen in our lifetimes and will come at great political and personal cost) is going to reduce U.S.-specific emissions by just 1%, I think I'm even more convinced that this regulation should not have been passed.

What am I missing?

I know you'll disagree, but my take is that the upside (<1% savings over the course of, say, 30 years) is outweighed by the downside (lack of ability to cook or boil water during a power outage, far worse cooking experience).

Additionally, the energy cost of creating new stoves with significantly more complex internals (both due to the constant march of technology and the relative complexity of electric or induction cooktops versus gas) can't be overnighted.

Not sure where you’re coming up with this - the average modern gas stove is expected to last 13-15 years [1]. Obviously there are exceptions but we can expect 95%+ of this infra to be replaced in 20 years just due to equipment failure. Seems reasonable to expect that effectively all gas stoves in the US will be replaced at least once in the next 50 years.

> great political and personal cost

This assumes that installing new gas infra has no cost. It also ignores the long term health impacts (and costs) of burning natural gas indoors. Additionally, IRA subsidies partially cover the cost of stove replacement in the US. Upfront cost may be higher with induction today, but lifetime cost is lower due to the lower cost of electricity.

This frame also ignores the climate impacts, which I would argue have both significantly greater political and economic costs than not allowing gas infra in new buildings.

> What am I missing?

I agree that it is not viable to say “we must replace all gas infra today.” However, by allowing it to be built in new buildings, we’re locking ourselves into at least 15 years of additional CO2 production from this hardware at a time when we need to be reducing CO2 emissions as much as possible. CO2 not produced today is CO2 that we won’t have to draw down from the atmosphere in the future - something that also costs money. Not installing infra that produces CO2 is the easiest way to ensure we stop producing CO2

Beyond that - I’m not quite sure what your argument is. Is it just that 1% is too small to make a difference (or be regulated) - I’d ask you what is the cutoff at which it is viable for you? And what is the strategy for addressing emissions that don’t meet your cutoff?

[1] https://www.hrblock.com/tax-center/lifestyle/how-long-do-app...

I am stuck using an electric stovetop, and will replace it with an induction one soon, but I would switch to gas in a heartbeat if it were available.

Ceramic ones suck a bit less, induction is pretty damn good.

Meanwhile, you seem to be using different definitions of household emissions. Your first source about 95% seems to be talking about direct emissions, ignoring the impact of electricity generation. Your second source about the size of the problem (20%) seems to include electric production.

> The 2nd figure accounts for carbon footprint of electricity generation used in the home as well as gas combusted in the home. The 4th chart from [1] suggests this is about a 50/50 split (if we bring grid emissions to 0 but don’t exchange these natural gas devices, carbon intensity remains at half of what it is today). Therefore, we can conclude that these 4 appliances in residential properties account for 10% of US carbon footprint.

To your first question - the answer is yes; replacing gas appliances with modern electric appliances is less carbon intensive, even if the electricity is produced by fossil fuel combustion. This will become increasingly true as the grid gets greener over time and the carbon intensity of electricity production continues to drop

Still the drops make a full bucket in the end

That does not suggest that anyone is taking the environmental effects of their choices very seriously, and that they just want to lower peoples' standard of living and intrude on our lives. If that's what this is really about, then how about none of it?

I'm sure you understand that if people continue getting inconvenienced in the name of climate change while governments and big corporations go on pumping CO2 into the atmosphere at industrial scale, that's what's going to happen: instead of everyone making the changes they need to make, the vast majority of people will do nothing. The hypocrisy is not lost on anyone.

Just keep in mind, things aren't always always that simple. E.g. Russia stopped shipping Germany gas, because they helped defending Ukraine which Russia started a war on. At the same time Germany relied on that Gas, and hat to quickly move to alternatives to keep the country running.

As to Germany, why did they rely on gas? Oh right, because they shut down their nuclear plants. So in the span of 3 years, Germany has gone from getting its base load from nuclear to gas to coal. If you really believe that atmospheric CO2 is an imminent threat to civilization, the tradeoffs are obvious and clearly biased in favor of ramping your nuclear industry significantly rather than hoping for a future breakthrough in battery technology that can allow you to run your base load off solar and wind.

Like solar panels before they reached scale, this will start off as an incredibly expensive proposition, but it will get cheaper with scale. France seems to get it - they are building 50 new plants - but nobody else does.

Instead of lobbying for impactful changes at this scale, we have plenty of activists going after ersatz plastic items, gas stoves, and gas-powered cars (all of which emit less CO2 than the top 20 biggest shipping vessels). It's not clear to me that these stupid little inconveniences actually take less political capital than anything else, but they certainly do wear down public tolerance for the program, which is fatal in the long run.

Nuclear was phased out because of the potentially catastrophic risk as well as the unwillingness go provide permanent storage for nuclear waste.

Further, traditional nuclear power plants don't scale well, see the costs in France (even though it's not represented in electricity prices and this although France is already heavily invested in nuclear power plants), problems with heat waves/dry climate, as well as the fact that economic uranium sources are limited.

France is building new plants, planning close to 50, however the long term trend will be a reduced share of nuclear power in the grid, because old reactors will have to shut down as well, and renewable energy build out will shadow everything else.

This is in terms with the estimates in the IPCC report that cover cost and potential avoidance in CO2 emissions.

Personally, I see activists mainly going after the government's to implement a strategy to reduce emissions, but surely almost everyone doing this will call out plastic items and fossil fuel usage where avoidable. Rightly so, if this reduces tolerance for whatever program (doing what? Reduce emissions?), I don't see the problem there, but rather at NIMBYism, mis information and green washing. There's nothing wrong with going after these things.

I feel like you are more interested in preventing actions from being taken than shedding light on things that are missed - I hope I am wrong though and calling out hypocrisy of climate activists isn't the primary part.

That kind of personifies the eco-hypocrisy I have mentioned: The Germans want what they want, but they want other people to bear the cost and the risks of it. If they aren't willing to pay the costs for cutting carbon emissions, do they really want to do it? I think they have revealed that the answer is "no."

> Further, traditional nuclear power plants don't scale well, see the costs in France (even though it's not represented in electricity prices and this although France is already heavily invested in nuclear power plants), problems with heat waves/dry climate, as well as the fact that economic uranium sources are limited.

The people who say this have no clue whether it is actually true. Since Chernobyl, there hasn't been a serious effort to build out nuclear power plants at scale. Previously, the Soviets did a pretty good job demonstrating the scaling laws here, but they also cut too many corners.

As to the whole idea that renewable energy will overshadow other sources of power, renewables are not dispatchabale on-demand without several significant advances in power storage technology (which will come from batteries before anything else - nothing else scales well enough right now).

Meanwhile, the obvious consequences for nuclear reactors on shipping vessels will be radioactive debris spreading terrorist attacks.

Also, you may need to learn more about modern nuclear technology. Shipboard nuclear reactors these days are very safe, and there are plenty of available reactor technologies out there that are impossible to turn into bombs.

Meanwhile, shipboard nuclear reactors have radioactive material. They can be cut open, so the radioactive material can be taken out. It can then be distributed throughout NYC by a terrorist with conventional explosives, killing millions.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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)

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

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

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’.

> 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.

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.

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

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.

The full half of new yorkers who rent - almost 20 million people - mostly get whatever theirlandlord picked. So when I read posts like this, decrying government overreach, I wonder if you've ever been poor? Have you ever lived here? Do you know what youre talking about at at all? Because the government has never been my problem. It's always a person a few rungs on the economic ladder above me. A boss, a landlord, making my life just a little worse in order to make theirs a little wealthier.

This is the same kind of "green"-feeling hypocrisy as the plastic bag bans. After Australia banned plastic bags, they found an increased amount of plastic in their landfills. Why? Because people used to re-use them as trash bags and were now buying much thicker dedicated plastic bags for the purpose.

This is true and entirely misses the point.

A gas stove emits NOx. Cooking some foods at high temperature emits particulates. Different cause, different poison. Also, an air filter can easily remove particulates, but getting rid of NOx with anything other than outright replacement of the air is not so easy.

edit: NOx is for real, and calling it a “green” issue is disingenuous. As far as I know, NOx emissions from stoves are not a particular threat to neighbors or overall outdoor air quality. But they are substantial when concentrated in a house:

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.1c04707

(Seriously, look at the last graph in the supplementary material. Admittedly it’s an oven, not a stove, but those levels are no joke and the operating time needed to hit them is low. Baking a pie or cooking a big pot of pasta with a gas oven or stove in a kitchen without proper ventilation is quite unhealthy. And those recirculating carbon filter vents won’t help.

The studies on this are questionable at best regarding the health effects, and it is disingenuous to say that the science on this is anywhere near settled - plenty of refutations exist out there. If you're worried, open a window.

> A corrected version of Figure 3 is below, where in Panel A r2 = 0.59 is changed to r2 = 0.58.

Also, if you want to see some well-cited posts on the tenuous evidence of health effects of NOx, other posts in this comments section have plenty of sources. Even the link to asthma is pretty tenuous, apparently.

But NO2 is certainly toxic, and it looks like stoves product about 1/4 as much NO2 as total NOx.

(I also recall reading that stoves, with no pot or pan on them, produce minimal CO, but that gas ovens produce lots of CO. Also, residential gas ovens are IMO really quite bad at cooking.)

And yeah, the cheap residential gas ovens really suck, and likely put out a lot more of the bad stuff (both CH4 and CO, but also probably the NOx compounds too) than stovetops. Mixed fuel is now the hot thing in ranges: gas burners and electric ovens.

Really depends on how you cook. If you're not frying, this isn't really a problem.

> This is the same kind of "green"-feeling hypocrisy as the plastic bag bans. After Australia banned plastic bags, they found an increased amount of plastic in their landfills.

But a big part of this was to reduce plastic litter. Plastic in landfill isn't really a problem (oil being dug from the ground being put back into the ground). But putting a (small) price on plastics makes people a little less careless with them.

Motte, meet bailey. There is more plastic polluting the environment in Australia thanks to plastic bag bans, and they have been replaced by paper bags which emit 10x more CO2 per bag (or reusable bags that break even on CO2 after a few hundred to a thousand uses). This should be considered a huge L for the "environmentalists" who pushed it, on all fronts.

Do you have a source for this? Specifically, plastic litter (not in landfill)? Preferably attributable to plastic bag bans and not just following a pre-existing trend?

> they have been replaced by paper bags which emit 10x more CO2

First up, who is giving you paper bags? I haven't come across one store that has replaced plastic bags with paper. Second, this argument was never about atmospheric CO2.

I know we're supposed to, but I've not changed one bit because of these new bags. A typical shop is now 1$ more expensive with the bags, that's where I stop thinking about it.

When I'm out, and my wife calls me to ask me to pick up something at the shop, I don't have my plastic bag with me, so I buy another one. And it ends up in the bin. Now instead of a thin bit of plastic, I've got a bag that's easily 5 times thicker, and took way more to produce.

It's performative.

They are really thick, almost as nice as hardware store bags, but they all get thrown away.

They should have require a standardized bag/crate with deposit that you would use instead, make it durable enough and people would bring it back or just throw it on the sidewalk and enterprising youths could collect them for the deposit.

Do you have a citation for this?

What's the purpose of an outright ban then? Why not just ban it from rental properties?

> I wonder if you've ever been poor?

What do you think the median income for home ownsership is? I'm sure you make plenty of money more than most homeowners if you're renting in New York.

Or maybe they've been poor, and now they're not, so they're speaking from prior experience. Or they have friends or family or acquaintances that are poor. It's not like a wealthy person can't have contact with folks less wealthy.

Read the newspiece before posting questions that you would have the answer to if you had read the first paragraph.

Anyway, yes I'm a New Yorker and also rent.

Probably depends where you are, as this is very much not the case for everyone.

We can't build new stuff which is practically obsolete on day 1 and a burden just 10 years from now.

It also seems like a bit of a weird reason to me as a big reason. But maybe you get a lot more power outages than I do. (I would imagine somewhere with a gas main, where gas heating can be economical, would not have very frequent or problematic blackouts. With no gas main, you use butane/propane which is not so economical). Plenty of people have camping stoves lying around which can be used in a pinch.

My gas furnace will not ignite without power and the power necessary to run the blower is 15 amps or so, wiring in a portable generator would be simple.

The water heater works without any power whatsoever.

The stove has electric ignition but you can light it without power. The oven needs power (I think? never tried it).

Gas is also often more reliable than electricity as gas is practically always buried while electricity has many overhead lines in the mix.

My water heater does, but the little recirculation pump on it doesn't so it takes longer to get hot water at a distant faucet.

My central heat does not.

Yes. The gas stove does not need any electricity, same for the gas water heater. It's nice to be able to cook and have hot water showers during blackouts.

The gas furnace does require electricity to run the fan, but it's not much. So running the furnace to heat the house during a blackout is easy to do with a small generator to power the fan while all the heating BTUs come from gas.

Here in PG&E land (might be the most expensive electricity in the country, but at least it's the most unreliable!) these are nice advantages.

So while I fully believe your lived experiences and preferences, a relevant question is: why are your electricity supplies so unreliable that having gas as well is even an important concern?

I don't understand the claimed causal relationship.

FWIW, I'm paying rent for my current apartment, we don't have a gas supply, and I've never had a power cut.

Indeed, while I am rich and do own an apartment back in the UK, roughly three quarters of the 16.5 years since I've last experienced a power cut was in property I pay rent for, and only about 4 years were in the flat I own and began collecting rent on when I left the country. Which, ah, also doesn't have a gas supply.

In any case, not sure what this is suppressed to have to do with reliably of the electricity supply — it's not like landlords get free shares in local power grid companies (or if we do, I missed the memo).

Sorry but this is nonsense. Your local power utility monopoly is what it is, completely unrelated to whether you rent or own.

Might be different in the UK.

I have never lived anywhere where blackouts weren't fairly regular. Currently in the backwaters of silicon valley and blackouts are the norm every time it rains, or there's any wind. Or forecast of wind or fear of rain. Thanks PG&E.

Practically all of the US has some renewable mix, so all the US already away from fossil fuels generating "all" the electricity (renewables + nuclear being 0%).

Over 30% of the electricity in my home is from wind and solar alone.

You also really shouldn't be using your stove to provide warmth in your home since you're probably not venting out the NOx, CO2, and CO emissions. CO poisoning kills a lot of people doing what you're claiming is a benefit.

Your comment reads like someone swearing smoking has no health impact because they never felt ill or victimized for smoking.

Meanwhile, even the World Health Organization produces reports on health risks of household air pollution, where stoves are the primary pollution source.

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/household-a...

You’ve either misunderstood or deliberately linked an article that doesn’t support your claim about using natural gas cooking.

“Around 2.4 billion people worldwide (around a third of the global population) cook using open fires or inefficient stoves fuelled by kerosene, biomass (wood, animal dung and crop waste) and coal, which generates harmful household air pollution.”

Open fire/stove cooking is the primary cause of COPD in the developing world, in the developed world its smoking. The WHO is not worried about US homes with gas stoves. This article is not about natural gas stoves. The article is about open fire/stove cooking.

I hope others aren’t misled by you. What a shame.

"It is essential to expand use of clean fuels and technologies to reduce household air pollution and protect health. These include solar, electricity, biogas, liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), natural gas, alcohol fuels, as well as biomass stoves that meet the emission targets in the WHO Guidelines."

It isn't, and you clearly failed to read the paper because you're oblivious to its context. The "alternative" was open-flame coal and wood stoves, as well as querosene stoves, which cause extreme levels of indoor pollution and health hazard and are in widespread use in underdeveloped nations.

Natural gas stoves pollute less than open-flame coal and wood stoves, yes, and are therefore a preferable alternative. However, unlike your clueless claim, this does not mean that gas stoves do not lose a health hazard, or that electrical stoves are not far preferable. The WHO report refutes the bullshit claim that gas stoves don't present a health hazard due to the type and levels of indoor air pollution they create.

This article discusses people in developing nations cooking indoors with indoors burning wood and dung. It isn't clear that this also applies to the amateur chef using natural gas in a mini-mansion.

Nobody is holding a gun to your head. If you're unhappy, make different choices.

This sentiment is often on display here and alway out of touch with reality. Plenty of people will never have the right opportunities, no matter their effort, to make any choice they want to put themselves in any social/wealth class of their choice.

This sentiment is the modern equivalent of "let them eat cake".

But there are other costs associated with that, especially for those with family/support network in an area.

This whole argument that “you oppose a forced choice so you must hate poor people” is just a straw-man. Just because you prefer things one way doesn’t mean govt has a business telling me how I should cook my food.

Banning gas stoves would be a huge blow to all the immigrants who rely on cooking techniques (like woks) that don’t work well on resistance coils, and require expensive special equipment to work on induction.

If I were in a minority community in one of these places I would support a ban on ovens and see how they like it. It’s not just Asian people who indulge in energy wasteful cooking techniques, but of course only one of those is under the ban hammer.

As for those who claim that gas stoves are needed for wok cooking w/ specific techniques, most people who I've actually asked about what they cook on the wok is basically "fried rice", or even worse, they don't actually have a wok at all, and are using the issue as a strawman to complain about government overreach.

The issue isn’t whether you can use Asian cooking techniques on cheap electric ranges. People in China are poor and will put up with a lot of adversity. The issue is whether the burden is differential. Is going from an electric resistance range to a gas range a bigger step down for Asians than for white people? And I think the concerns about that are real.

What’s galling about this is that, in NYC, which is driving this madness, white people mostly don’t even cook at home. They shouldn’t get any say in this gas stoves issue.

Citation for this?

What's clearly the case is that homes in China do not generally have the ultra-powered gas wok burners that restaurants do, which is what people are talking about when they talk about what's distinctive about cooking on a wok.

Now, it's possible that the small number of good, experienced cooks should not be catered to by society because the vast ocean of the unwashed, of which you are a part, are needlessly destroying the earth's atmosphere by using gas to no benefit, which argument, if you made it, I would listen to. But you very obviously don't cook anything with sophisticated preparation whereby you tilt the pan to control the temp with one hand while whisking with the other, or similar in a round bottomed wok.

you're a passionate lefty, just own it and make that be your argument

source: passionate former lefty, I could have written your playbook

Here's the thing, one of you is lying and it is clear which one it is.

Had you spent any actual time in China, and not a major metropolis you would realise two things:

1) Their electric system is.. lets just call it "shitty". 2) The vast majority of the population cant afford an electric stove, or the electricity needed to run it.

So tell us, from your decade of experience in China how do they cook?

I've been married to a Chinese for 25 years, own a home in China and have been there many times...

Our house in China lacks an electric stove, and in fact NO ONE in our entire apartment complex has an electric stove. Probably because the complex itself almost certainly cant support the power draw to run all those electric stoves.

I never checked, but i'd guess the kitchen doesnt have the hookup for an electric stove...

Not helpful.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Edit: we've had to ask you this more than once before:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32655788 (Aug 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24256585 (Aug 2020)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23950934 (July 2020)

Worse, it looks like you've been using HN primarily to post this kind of thing. Please stop! We have to ban accounts that do that and I don't want to ban you.

In Hong Kong, it was really down to personal preference. My first apartment came with a normal resistive stove that the landlord swapped to an induction cooktop at my request, and that building (on HK island) didn't even have plumbed gas. It'd been disconnected during a renovation years before I moved in.

> But they are far from ubiquitous and common in the country overall, of that I can assure you.

I actually agree with you here, I was just making a point about the precariousness of using personal anecdata to support a position as broad as "people in China rarely have electric stoves." In a country that big, even the outliers make for an enormous group.

Before I moved to the UK I had literally never seen an electric stove in my life, much less used one, as gas was ubiquitous in the Netherlands. I'm sure you could find it, but it was rare. In the last few years things changed rapidly though, and when I moved back last year there were a number of apartments that had electric or induction) stoves.

Cant you just put a steel plate under any pan, and then it’s induction compatible?

Ideally you’d have compatible pans, but you don’t have to.

I understand not everyone wants to buy or can afford new cookware, but cast iron pans are very cheap. Also see brands such as t-fal that make affordable non-stick aluminum cookware with a small steel bottom to make them induction compatible.

I'd assume nobody would install a resistance stove in a new apartment (since this only applies to those)

The price difference between a resistive 4 element resistive and a inductive cooktop is like 20€ maybe 30€ tops. So a cheap one will cost you between 200€ to 250€

(maybe the pricing in US is totally different but that is what you pay for the cheap stuff here in Finland)

Also induction stoves are quite cheap nowadays (in relation to the overall cost) so it would seem absurd for me to get a resistive one even if you could save $100-200

But if it were 30 apartment units, then the cost difference on paper would amount to $3000-$6000 (and it would probably be judged in this way, rather than the cost difference per unit).

I still like looking on gas a lot better.

New Zealand is ludicrous marked up in terms of consumer goods, and I’ve just checked pricing. The cheapest is resistive electric. Then fractionally more is gas. Induction costs approximately double for 4 hobs (for 2 hobs it’s about 50% more than resistive).

If you count installation, both electric options are going to be less expensive than gas. If the big cable needs running for induction, the cost might be similar to gas.

Not factored in, cleaning. My god is induction nice to maintain.

Gas indoors is now considered a health hazard even with range hood, and while you can still buy gas cooktops, I haven't seen a new build with gas in a long time.

When I was in college, I bought a portable induction cooker off Amazon for $60. It was the best. I could boil a large pot of water in about the same time as the gas stove I had at home. (I never timed it, but it felt basically the same.)

I could have bought four of those induction cookers for less than $250. If I ever built a house (I currently rent an apartment and am stuck with gas), I would at least be tempted to literally do that, instead of spending the money on a "real" cooking range.

Why are full ranges so expensive?

Resistive is just fine. No way I'm throwing out my 20 years old stove to save 2 minutes boiling water. Once the coil is red hot there's virtually no time difference with induction.

That said, upgrading for this reason would be very silly.

A normal electric stove isn't even going to be two minutes slower to boil. Depending on the stoves in question, the resistive stove might even be faster to a boil than the gas stove, even if the gas stove is rated for more BTUs.

I generally prefer induction to gas, but there is one disadvantage - uneven heating of large thin pans. On induction, a part of pan directly above coils can be > 50 degC hotter than its border. This can be mitigated by using pans with thick bottom with good heat conductivity, but then you get higher thermal inertia.

I get liking gas stoves (I used to until fairly recently as the health effects became so clear to me), but the argument has to go beyond “govt no good” in an argument about whether it is ethically the right thing to do. You could make some American legal argument against it probably but hey, state govt.

Maybe try to cook first?

If we talk about say poppadoms. Doing that without an open flame produces… it produces something…

All of north India eats rotis made this way as their staple.

So then I asked my Indian co-workers who said they do sometimes use the gas stove to do some stuff but they avoid it as it’s not healthy. They said never finish things like roti on gas stove but they do things with eggplants (and some other vegetable) and peel them after. They said it’s better to use a fire and it tastes better.

If the goal is to fight health risks there’s way to mitigate those risks scientifically in other ways that allows people to keep their preferences. Just saying “science” in a sentence doesn’t make your point scientifically valid, we don’t need to turn science into religion.

Or too take cigarettes example; ban cigarette sales completely instead of banning smoking indoors.

I hope you see the nuance now.

From a climate perspective and also from a safety and health perspective.

Gas should be opt-in, not opt-out.

And I'm perfectly fine with this being regulated because the free market sold us leaded gasoline 60+ years after they introduced it maliciously, themselves, for example.

"You don't need it, so you can't have it" is a dangerous argument.

My point is that you need to weigh the advantages and disadvantages. Some individuals wanting baba-ganoush in NY should not be the reason to avoid electrification for the others.

I appreciate that forced illegalisation is off-putting, but like others have said, renters don’t get a choice and landlords will avoid all expenditures. We need a way to help the majority wean off gas.

What stops the others from having an electric stove, while natural gas infrastructure is still available? Are there living units in NY that have natural gas, but no electricity?

> renters don’t get a choice

Electric stovetops are about 30 dollars for two-plate solutions, if you decide for yourself that natural gas is not for you.

And that's setting aside all the other possibilities a torch opens up, like flan or crusting cheese, which are best done from the top.

and the butane torch isnt gonna put in harmful chemicals more than my gas flame?

I haven't made baba ganoush this way so take it with a grain of salt, but the way I've approached fruits with similar water content (i.e. squash or apples) is to bake for an amount of time (which is going to give you a more consistent cook all the way through than roasting anyway) and then finish with the butane torch, for a crispy roasted exterior. If you're using a toaster oven without covering, that will already give you some crispiness on the exterior, so you'll likely be able to get the exterior you want with under a minute of active torching.

The sources I can find seem to indicate that butane actually burns at a lower temperature than natural gas, but you make up for this by putting the flame directly on the food, so I'd guess that the food gets hotter (I wouldn't trust sources that say this confidently, as I can't think of a good way to experimentally verify this). It seems like this gives a higher temperature contrast which gives a higher texture contrast between the interior/exterior of the food. It's subjective whether that's a good thing but I personally think it's better.

> and the butane torch isnt gonna put in harmful chemicals more than my gas flame?

I don't know, and I would distrust most sources that claim to know. Natural gas is used for a lot of things besides cooking, so I'm not sure how much effort is put into the purity of the natural gas mixture, and that's putting aside all the piping between source and destination which could introduce all sorts of stuff from molds to plastics. I'm not aware of anyone making claims about the safety of natural gas flames and food. In contrast, butane torch fuels are often explicitly intended for culinary use, and advertising makes lots of claims such as "Near zero impurities" and "No residual oders"[1] (the misspelling is theirs). Without any credible independent verification, I personally don't think these claims are worth anything.

That said, natural gas is a much more complicated mix of stuff than butane, and the chemical reaction of combustion is much more complicated. Butane, in a perfect combustion, should produce CO2 and water, while natural gas, in a perfect combustion, will produce CO2, CO (carbon monoxide), water, NOx and SOx compounds (the latter mostly due to additives to give it an odor). Perfect combustion is a hypothetical reaction that doesn't exist in real life, however, so I can't say how well that hypothetical reaction translates to practical reality.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Culinary-Universal-Cocktails-Charcute...

I thought it meant both. I'm not entering in an useless argument, bye!

I assume they exist somewhere, but I've yet to see one.

The main thing that makes electric stoves hard for a professional kitchen is ultimately speed and space. You need every single burner during a rush, and you need to be reacting quick, and there is usually very limited space. If I need to stop the heat on my pan, I need to stop it now. An electric top requires you to actually move the pan off the burner to somewhere else, but good luck finding a spot without butting in on the garde manger or grill guy. A gas stove offers the flexibility of being able to leave food there until its ready to plate.

Is this true of induction? I've never used induction for anything more complicated than pasta, but I would have thought that since the surface (basically) doesn't get hot, turning it off would function the same way as a gas stove.

Please let me know what you’re willing to bet and we’ll take this forward.

Yeah, but not many more relevant ones to the actual cooking.

> I bet if you did a blind tasting you'd not be able to tell the difference.

You can't do a blind cooking. How often do you cook food on the stove yourself? If you do cook quite often and still insist that gas and electric stoves are equivalent, I'd be very surprised.

Now I definitely don't want to say that I definitely can't do without gas stoves — if they have a negative health and environmental impact, I could be easily convinced to switch to induction stoves, for example. But electric really don't cut it in my experience.

Just because you theoretically have more choice in a free market doesn’t mean you actually do, depending on how desperate you are.

But those would be too good of solutions and spoil the current sneaky plan. Too many goal posts are shifting for justifying a performative-feel-good-climate fight (the point the top-level comment is trying to make).

There is no pure free-market anywhere (and it's a good thing). Let's not justify govt overreach in the garb of imperfect market-capitalism.

eg : https://www.alamy.com/preparingindian-rotifulkachapati-puffe...

I have lived with induction cooktop (in Europe) for 3 yrs and resistive cooktops (in US) for ~3yrs as well.

Practically speaking how would a building do this, without costing thousands. Who do you think the land-lord will pass that cost to?

I grew up in Canada with electric stoves (in multiple rentals). Never once did I have an issue cooking.

This is very much the same as Mac vs. PC debate.

It's 100% preference. The average Mac user will go insane if made to switch to windows, and vice versa. The reasons why are almost entirely personal preference, and a quite strong preference at that.

But we are talking about new construction here like the title says, no?

Read the article. Health concerns are an issue, buy they are not the reason why New York is banning natural gas in new constructions.

Also, the poster is correct that it's not the function of government to tell people what type of kitchen appliances they can use in their own home. We would typically consider that governmental overreach. It's telling that society is becoming so accepting of being told by the government what they can and cannot do in so many areas of life.

Have you seen construction codes?

This stuff happens all over the world and in places with solid democracies. Turns out safety and efficiency need to be mandated because the free market will kill people with 0 remorse and the average person has ~0 market power.

Progress is many people working together, through ever more complex communal initiatives such as corporations, NGOs and yes, government.

In a solid democracy making real progress, the onus is on the one introducing the regulation to prove that safety and efficiency will in fact be advanced via said regulation. I don't think that bar is passed here.

Just subjective opinion.

This is a very common argumentation tactic, and it usually exposes that the first argument(s) are just a front for our actual axiomatic belief (which hasn't been disclosed). The core principle is often something that we know is much more controversial.

The truth is that when you dig into the details, nothing is going to have much effect on climate change at all.

People alive today with any ability to affect change aren’t bothered enough by climate change to make any meaningful changes.

When you say "dig into the details", do you mean read some libertarian propaganda funded by fossil fuel interests that can barely acknowledge the existence of climate change and hate every single policy ever proposed to deal with it?

We are phasing out fossil fuels.

Some, like airplane fuel are hard to phase out, and we're still going to do it.

Phasing out gas for cooking and heating is a no brainer.

Climate change is one. Induction stove powered by the latest generation of gas plants are actually more efficient than gas stoves. Of course, they can run off renewable or nuclear energy too.

For health, it is not great, and not all building are equipped with proper ventilation. And yes, it matters to the government, because even the US government will spend money to keep you alive if you are sick, and in the case of gas stoves, it is not just you, it will impact everyone who lives with you, possibly including your children.

And the last one is safety. I don't know the relative fire hazard of electric devices over open flames, but I'd go with the open flame. And sometimes entire buildings blow up because of (sometimes voluntary) gas leaks.

All these may be small effects, but they are real. And electric stoves are good now, especially induction. Gas stoves still have a few advantages, but not as much as they once had. I've even seen clever battery powered stoves, the batteries allowing them to have greater burst power than what the electrical installation can supply, they can even be used as a backup power supply.

Note that I have a gas stove, and I like it very much. But the reason I have it is that we already had gas. If they banned gas for the entire building, I would have no problem switching to something else (induction).

27 years from now, when we're supposedly going to be "net zero", do we really want to be supporting a bunch of natural gas infrastructure?

Or should we start making that expensive infrastructure not necessary?

1. Most homes built now will be around in 27 years, and still in good shape.

2. Building and maintaining natural gas infrastructure to homes is expensive.

3. Gas heating is easily replaced by heat pumps, even in cold climates. It should be difficult to justify any gas heat installs in new homes. (Though, more support should be provided in terms of power redundancy in very cold climates.)

4. It's just not worth it to support gas infrastructure just for gas stoves.

If you look at the big picture, and the medium to long term is just doesn't make sense to build out gas-dependent housing. And it really doesn't make sense to build out all of that infrastructure just for gas stoves.

My oven/cooktop is gas, along with my on-demand hot water heater, and fire place. I also have a connection outside that I use for my grill. I think my heatpump has gas backup for when it's really cold.

Gas powers a lot more than just stoves.

If you want to achieve carbon neutrality in 20 years it's ambitious and you need a plan. Phasing out the gas-infrastructure is one of them. And housing and its infrastructure is so permanent, our gas heating is as old than I am, at least it looks this way.

Nobody has explained to me sufficiently in plain language how carbon dioxide is bad for the environment. I've heard plenty of good explanations for water control, but my limited biology understanding has me presuming that more carbon emissions is advantageous to plants.

The IPCC reports have it all. Their models include plant growth already. Google it.

This claim has been contested a few times in this thread below.

> Building and maintaining natural gas infrastructure to homes is expensive

Can you quantify this? How does this compare with the cost of replacing it all and powering it all with zero emissions power sources?

That being said, backup power is still vital in extreme climates.

So you’re going to handwave away the justification for the main crux of your argument.

In fact, the most anyone has come up with in this thread is the number 0.0028 (or about 0.3%) [0].

If you have more compelling data, please share it.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35757522

Yes! This would probably raise the air quality in buildings in general. I've seen studies showing that air quality has a direct correlation to test scores in school buildings. Imagine the benefits across a large city like NYC...

This is the wrong question to be made. You should ask what should be the safety standards you need to adhere to ensure health risks are mitigated.

The reason why this sort of thing must at all times be regulated, without any exception, is that the personal interest of a corporation investing in real estate by selling it off right away are not aligned with the interests of those who actually have to be exposed to the health risks created by said corporation.

To put it more broadly, just because you are ok with your home causing health problems to its occupants, that doesn't grant you the right to subject everyone around you to them, or even whoever will live in that house after you live.

To make it clear, let's consider doors. You might feel you have no use for a wide corridor and you're ok with custom narrow, submarine like doorways. Except that a wheelchair or a stretcher can't go through. Therefore thanks to your shortsighted and ignorant "why should the government tell me how to be safe" point of view, you needlessly screw over your future self and/or everyone that may possibly live there.

Regulation is not a conspiracy. Regulation reflects hard lessons learned with pain and suffering, and ensures that easily avoidable problems can be avoided easily. We learned lessons from fires and mobility constraints, and thus we have regulation ensuring each and every utility in your home is safe. Instead of having to reinvent the wheel each time anyone needs to build something, we only need to check what's the regulation and what are the constraints.

Air quality is starting to be noticed as a major health problem, specially with higher occupation densities, and thus we have safety lessons that need to be learned to avoid these issues. And no clueless naive spur of the moment bootstrappy individual has a clue about them. Hence the need to impose regulation, because these arrogant morons think they know best when they know nothing. I mean, does it make sense to risk our health just because an amateur didn't even wanted to bother doing his homework?

Second, none of this is an argument to ban natural gas appliances. what is the harm? Is the harm acceptable? Should a person be allowed to except the harm? Can the harm be mitigated by education or change in behavior? And who has the jurisdiction to implement these regulations even if natural gas stoves are in unreasonably dangerous to the occupants who are you to tell me that I can’t do that to myself?

Your comment goes way beyond being wrong. You clearly do not know a) what a conspiracy is, b) how standards and regulations are specified and adopted. You clearly are trying to comment on subjects you're entirely oblivious about.

> Second, none of this is an argument to ban natural gas appliances.

Except it does. Again, you seem completely oblivious to what regulations and standards accomplish. You're trying to reject well established concepts and mechanisms that you know nothing about, and filling in your ignorance with conspiratorial make-believe.

For your information, builders are also forced to comply with regulation on thermal insulation in particular and climate confort in general. Why? For the very same reason NY banned natural gas in new buildings: mitigate the environmental and economic impact of climatizing ineficcient, sub-standard homes.

> what is the harm? Is the harm acceptable?

I invite you to read the regulation. You are clearly commenting on stuff out of ignorance.

Today I found out that the following are conspiracies:

- corporations

- NGOs

- all government activity

- sports teams

- most human hobbies

- ...

:-))

You're going to be quite shocked when you learn about building codes and building inspections that you already get the benefits of.

It seems to me you are switching to a third argument, which is societal (rather than personal) harm, along the lines of second-hand smoke. I haven't seen this argument made in a serious journal, but maybe I've missed it. Can you point me to a rigorous analysis of this?

I will also point out that, as I mentioned above, it seems fine to me to require vented fume hoods in new buildings with gas stove lines. I'm hoping that addresses at least some of your argument.

There have been many unintended consequences to what this experience taught me including dehumidifiers, indoor plants, air filters, ventilation schedules, and yes, eliminating natural gas.

NO2, CO2, CO, PM2.5, and VOC would go up to unhealthy levels even with a hood vent and windows open. It would persist for hours even if I opened 5-6 windows, and would permeate the entire house even though I use a Japanese door hanger to keep air in the kitchen isolated. There was simply no choice other than to go electric.

As an aside, i switched from a high end $3k American gas stove to a $80 Japanese induction unit and $500 Toshiba steam/convection oven with automatic recipes and infrared sensors and my control over cooking and cooking speed have both been so much better.

The gas lobby has been working for decades to trick Americans into thinking gas is somehow better. Idk how these people sleep at night knowing they are unnecessarily subjecting people to greater expense, greater pollution, and an inferior cooking experience.

But maybe most gas company employees drank the koolaide

I'd rather people install heat pumps in new construction, and I'd agree that you should discourage use of natural gas for heating, I think there are ways to do that with market incentives, not by bans.

Yet nobody seems to talk about real solutions and we’re content to focus on stupidly useless things instead. I find it frustrating. Are we really in a crises? If yes, then fucking act like it and let’s see some ambitious solutions.

In the movies and books you see something threaten the survival of the human race and the whole world comes together and engineers something impossibly amazing to save the world. I think in reality we’d argue about plastic straws, or who pays for it, or gas stoves until the apocalypse kills the species too dumb to save itself.

Because the same climate activists who keep harping on the "climate crisis" and successfully push policies like in OP, are also irrationally opposed to nuclear energy.

Since these folks are calling the shots, we're heading into an energy crisis in which:

1. More and more demand is placed on our power grid due to moves like banning natural gas for heating.

2. This same power grid is rendered less and less capable and reliable due to being increasingly based on unreliable energy sources like wind and solar.

Companies that are planning new nuclear units are currently indicating that the total costs (including escalation and financing costs) will be in the range of $5,500/kW to $8,100/kW or between $6 billion and $9 billion for each 1,100 MW plant.

Installing a solar farms will cost about $0.80 to $1.36 per watt. Solar farm costs can be estimated by energy output (megawatts) or size (acres). One megawatt is the power equal to 1 million watts, and one megawatt will power about 164 homes. ~$800-$1360/kw

Battery: $152/kWh Now, BNEF expects the volume-weighted average battery pack price to rise to $152/kWh in 2023

I've long maintained here on HN, however, that under-investment in nuclear has made it not cost effective compared to renewables + storage (remember you don't need 100% storage.) At current market prices, nuclear doesn't make much sense. It could have really helped if we'd started earlier with it though, before renewables were in the picture.

I believe that Vancouver banned gas for home heating but left the door open to allow gas for cooking, but when I read articles about this at the time of the change, contractors quoted said it would be really silly to go to all the effort to create a gas hookup just for cooking. Likely would be very little uptake, and only by super wealthy enthusiast cooks who demand gas for some reason.

I couldn't find the source but I think there actually might be a carve out to continue to allow for natural gas for cooking, but in practice, no one but the foolish super rich (or perhaps some professional commissary kitchens) is going to go to the bother of doing a nat gas hookup for for a stove, so gas stoves are going to become deprecated as a side effect of the more impactful change around home heating.

[Citation needed]

But the real issue is that I’ve been unable to find any convincing data showing that this will have meaningful impact relative to its cost. I think the burden of proof is largely on the people who want to establish this regulation under the banner of saving the planet.

> Agreed that 1% of the United States' 28% of global CO2 emissions is negligible in the grand global scheme.

This is incredibly ignorant of the "death by 1000 cuts" issue of climate change. 1% or 28% of global CO2 emissions, if this statistic is even true, is huge. Very few climate change interventions are this effective.

The more effective climate change interventions include strict supersets of this, like "banning all new fossil fuel construction", which, if implemented in the US, still only gets you a few percentage points on the larger problem, and would get much greater pushback from people who don't care about climate change and will always cite government overreach for any regulation.

What do you think would be a non-negligible difference? Do you even believe in human-caused climate change? I'll be happy to provide more, real citations, but it's hard to tell what level of burden of proof I should be taking on if I don't know what you think I need to prove.

Correction: 1% of 28%. If we trust that number, that means that the best we can hope for from this change is 0.0028 (0.3%, rounding up) of global emissions. And that number is a ceiling: it assumes that not only do new buildings not have gas stoves, but that all old gas stoves and infrastructure in the United States are removed as well.

This negligible (IMO) improvement comes at the cost of 1) being vulnerable to power outages, 2) having a far worse cooking experience according to many, and 3) generating significant political backlash that will hinder more meaningful changes.

One of my favorite climate change books is How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, by Bill Gates, in which he gives perspective about where the biggest opportunities lie. His approach seems far more practical and likely to make a dent in the problem.

This is one of your favorite books, and it literally, explicitly disagrees with what you're saying?

One of the core points of that book is that reducing emissions is not enough--we have to eliminate emissions, not reduce them, and investing in reduction solutions may in fact prevent eliminating emissions. Natural gas is literally the example he gives of this. He notes that natural gas is a minor carbon emitter compared to other fossil fuels, but continued investment in natural gas means that we'll still be emitting carbon in 2050, which is his target date for eliminating carbon emissions. That reduction won't be enough--elimination is the only solution.

I mean, dude, it's in the Wikipedia summary. Why would you cite this without at least putting in 30 seconds to investigate whether it supports what you're saying?

This means starting with high-impact changes that people will buy into, and prove to them that the change is worth it. Removing gas stoves is a terrible move at this stage.

Now it’s less important than saving money and improving the electric grid.

2. Gas stoves leak when turned off. These leaks equaled 76% of their total methane gas emissions. These are pollutants that are harmful to humans and the atmosphere. Many fume hoods just recirculate air into the living space.

I'm not libertarian or even conservative and am surprised at an ad-hominem attack like this.

I don't see this policy as having much of an effect against climate change but it is another step in making people aware of climate issues. Congress does not have the ability - right now - to ban cow meat or eating fish, but this would be a much better policy to aim for.

2. Burning methane in your house is going to cause some pollution. Methane isn't pure, so other stuff is likely getting burned too. I mean, just logically lighting a fire in your house is probably not going to be good for your health in general.

As for "should we regulate this". It depends on perspective. The gas lobby has worked hard and spent a lot of money to trick people like you into to thinking gas stoves can compete with induction ranges. They cannot. Induction ranges are cheaper, more energy efficient, safer, and healthier than gas stoves. Installing a gas stove in 2023 is using an inferior technology either because of ignorance or Nostalgia.

Now, you could argue that it's the right of each citizen to choose to make bad decisions. In this case, however, that bad decision perpetuates an unsustainable energy apparatus. So I would argue the public good outweighs the homeowner's (or more likely, corporate landlord's) ability to make bad decisions.

If people want the natural gas debate to be about climate change but it’s really about personal health and a city’s right to govern risk in that place, that itself doesn’t change because other people are saying, or blogging, “climate change” for this given thing.

[1] https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2021/10/21/leaked-climate-l...

[2] https://medium.com/@CollapseSurvival/overshoot-why-its-alrea...

When Vancouver banned natural gas hookups in new buildings in 2022 the justification was that they pointed to the fact that 54% of CO2 emissions in the city came from home heating. The next biggest source was transportation, I think 39%ish.

It's a clear reasonable move, as just like when you're trying to improve performance of a computer program, you start with the biggest numbers and see if you can make it smaller.

Presumably other cities in areas that use natural gas for home heating as much as Vancouver are also seeing home heating be a very large percentage of their CO2 emissions.

If we can trivially, simply through some minor regulations cut over time the emissions of every city in NA by 50% that's clearly a massive improvement and well worth doing?

If this is not worth doing in an effort to tackle the climate change problem I do not know what is.

To me this feels like one of the easiest low hanging fruit things we can do there is.

Regulating ventilation is far less effective than simply making ventilation no longer an issue (by disallowing gas stoves in the first place).