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.