Research meta-analysis says gas stoves give off unsafe N02 levels and increase risk of childhood asthma by 34% and are responsible for 12.7% of childhood asthma.
> Some of those Twitter conversations spinning off from this issue are remarkable -- I have never in my life seen a more perfect example of the "this isn't happening, and it's good that it's happening" pathological style of argument than we're getting from the anti-gas side. This should be in a textbook, seriously.
It's not inherently contradictory to say "this isn't happening, and it would be good if it were happening".
The problem with people saying that is that each half happens to be false, but the proof that it's false is not the fact that a given person is saying both.
----
Other solutions to the problem described in the rest of your post:
– Heavily subsidize the stuff the other side has banned, so it's worth producing it even for a few years
– Import it from abroad, from countries where it's never been banned.
Yes. Incandescent light bulbs are the perfect example of why not to ban things. Let the market find the answer. I can still buy incandescent bulbs.... Oh Dang! just reading that they will be banned again? Why? I've got some niche uses for incandescents, but I mostly buy leds for home lighting. OK voting for any party that doesn't want to ban things.
This is not criticism of you or Oster, as you both are obviously already on the "let's look into whether claims about risk/safety are overblown" beat, and do a great job at it, but for everyone else:
Every time something like this comes up, I wonder what [actually serious thing] is going on that everyone would like to ignore and instead hype talk about [gas stoves], which has no relevant reason to be Main Topic this week. Honestly, I hate to give praise to a senator, but Manchin is exactly right: the response to this shouldn't be "yay ban gas!" or "no don't ban gas" it should be: "What vastly more important (or more harmful, or less infringing on freedom) thing are we (or the CPSC) ignoring?" Like when the CDC had vaping and mushrooms as 2 of the 3 topic "epidemics" to fight. If we argue about whether or vaping is actually bad or good, that misses the point, which is: wtf is wrong with this agency's priorities?
not to be Annoying Internet Person, but is pointing out the hypocrisy of this (while certainly true) the best use of our time? What more important thing is being neglected?
I agree! It's a good move, and I do intend to not spend much more time on it, but I actually do think "trying to encourage people to spend their time online more productively, both for themselves and for society" is a (perhaps only minimally) useful - and generalizable - thing to do, whereas even if "anti gas stove people are horrible hypocrites", even if 100% true, doesn't get us much.
Right, and certainly we *can* debate the effect of wood fireplaces, but even with our crazy-bad state of "safety/risk science" surely we can come up with a list of at least 10 higher priority (if terms of amount of risk and amenability to fixing) items and go down that list first?
No! Why do we have to ban anything? Let people make choices. (And my wood fireplace is a godsend when the power goes out. As well as being comfy in the winter.)
Wood smoke from your house does affect neighbors' health. I wouldn't favor a ban on fireplaces except in densely populated areas, but ideally I'd say neighbors with lung disease should have some legal recourse and there should be a strong social norm against burning wood except when the power is out. I have one as well, but it's now only used during outages. I'd rather have the extra life expectancy than the comfort.
OK we live in different worlds. I have sympathy for any lung diseased neighbor, but I don't see how they should have influence over my ability to burn wood. There is some level where what you do on your land effects me and should be discouraged, but burning wood doesn't pass that bar for me. Out here in the country there is a strong social norm *for* burning wood. I use wood to grill food all summer long. And there is something magical about sitting around the bon fire on a summer evening and talking about life. You don't have to come and join us. We all get to make our own choices. As an old man I might choose comfort over longevity... my choice. Why do you want to take peoples choices away?
Clearly we just have different estimates of how harmful wood smoke is to neighbors. I am a big civil liberties guy but on my read of the science, the effects of particulates are severe enough to be over my threshold.
Allowing people to burn wood is the historic default option. If you want to live in some community/ city that bans burning wood, that's fine by me. My neighbors are ~1/2 mile away, and burning wood mostly effects no one but me and my family/ friends. I'm fine with you not burning wood, but why is it ok for you to tell me what to do? (Doesn't burning wood count as green energy, I grow it all on my land?)
I have new neighbors with two wood stoves and it's so much worse than I could have imagined. It's almost as bad as California during the fires on a bad day. I have an air filter in every room and they are blackened in less than a month.
I suspect I got exceptionally unlucky. Bad wind patterns or maybe they are using the wrong kind of wood or something. Some days it's clear and other days I'm wearing an N95 just getting in the car in the morning to minimize the smoke.
I view this as a subset of a problem that's something like "we can only care about one thing at a time". Working theory is that the homogenization of civilization's communication layers into massive, very low friction platforms puts all topics of conversation into a single distribution of attention with one or a very small number dominating the rest. I want some people worried about gas stoves being bad! I don't want everyone worried about it for 48 hours before everyone moves on to the next thing! We, as a civilization, need to be able to care about multiple things at once, and I'm not sure how to get there from here. I think the friction of spatial/temporal gaps between communicators made this the norm before, with largely separate populations able to work independently and linkages between them being sparse rather than ubiquitous.
Isn't Europe using coal for electricity generation because there's a shortage of natural gas? So if gas usage in cooking declined, there would be more available for electricity generation
Even if true, that electricity will be used for cooking. With probably more losses or other inefficiencies on its way: there's a reason the same amount of energy in electricity costs several times as much as in gas. What's the benefit of using the gas to produce electricity, and then use that for cooking, instead of just sending the gas to the customers?
So, instead of using gas to cook with directly, you think its better to use gas to generate electricity to cook with? And that this will lead to greater gas availability?
I just want to mention that induction stoves are pretty nice and IMHO roughly comparable to gas in cooking convenience (well, except for roasting things on an open flame obviously). They are also really nice to clean (since have a flat ceramic surface).
In German-speaking Europe (where I spent most of my life), gas stoves are quite unusual and thus I I never used one extensively, so maybe I am missing some super-convenient aspect of them. But between similar effective energy output (and latency) and the ease of cleaning, I would chose induction over gas if I had a choice.
In reality I live in a rented house with a terrible electric stove that I loathe (not induction but classic resistive heating).
Induction is much better than gas, and, even if the studies showing gas stoves are bad are themselves bad, it's intuitively hard to imagine that combusting methane in your domicile is a great idea overall, particularly when such a good alternative—induction—exists.
The real benefits, climate and otherwise, to eliminating gas come from heating, not cooking, which used an order of magnitude more gas per household. If gas heating becomes uneconomical you won’t have to ban gas stoves in new construction because nobody’s spending money on gas piping just for stoves.
Also? I had to use an induction cooktop for a month while waiting for National Grid to turn on my gas and it was pretty great tbh.
This is a real question, not an attempt at a gotcha: the electricity for non-gas heating and stoves has to come from somewhere. Is the climate benefit that these other sources are less polluting?
Obviously this is true of solar and wind where they are available. But is it true of today's grid?
The main climate benefit is that heat pumps use fewer joules of input energy per joule of heating output than combustion furnaces, because you suck heat from the outside atmosphere instead of just burning your fuel for heat. So even if you are running your heat pump on gas power with generation and transmission losses, you still come out ahead.
The other big benefit is they municipal gas infrastructure is super leaky and bad, tearing it all out would be a huge win just from a methane perspective
Air sourced heat pumps only work when the outside temperature is above freezing. It took me a while to understand this. But the reason is that the outside (in air) coils have to be below the outside temperature to suck any heat from it. And when below freezing the coils ice up, reducing exchange efficiency, so you have to heat up the coils every once and a while to get rid of the ice. This reduces efficiency. Ground water sourced heat pumps get around this, but are more involved.
Huh, OK I'll have to check out the Senville website. I wonder they work when really cold because there is so little water in the air. So there is some 'sour' spot around 40F where they have to defrost more often... more water in the air and coils below freezing... I do really like those mini-splits. Thanks more research needed on my part.
> When choosing where to rent, one absolutely has a choice. We made it a point to ensure our apartment had a gas stove, both when renting and when buying.
I will say this hasn't been my experience - last time I was looking for an apartment in New York I had a preference for an apartment with an electric stove but couldn't find one that otherwise satisfied my preferences (I don't think any of the apartments I visited at all had electric stoves).
I don't in general support banning things but do wish nice modern electric stoves were easier to find in new rental apartments in New York. I suspect this kind of push will help them be seen as high-status in some liberal circles which could help with that (although if it gets to the point of an outright ban that would overdo it and be bad again).
Saying that this proces its being forced on people still seems like an isolated demand for choice. Unless there's equal numbers of all combinations of things that an apartment can contain for the apartments in a given area, then anything overrepresented is by this account being "forced" onto renters.
I wouldn't say "forced" either way, but I while I wouldn't support laws or bans about this, if electric stoves became enough of a hip thing in certain circles that some more nice new apartments had them I would like that outcome.
Ha ha, I think Zvi doesn't really pay attention to appliances and just applies generic anti-regulation logic. Last year it was his dishwasher, which he thought was good because it was illegal but outside that context he doesn’t actually like it:
1/13/22: "Living the dream is also having one of the good dishwashers, which luckily we already have, since they are once again being made illegal." https://thezvi.substack.com/p/covid-11322-endgame
9/15/22: "An argument that dishwashers can actually clean dishes so you mostly don’t have to clean them first. This has not been my experience, which has been more that the dishwasher is the goggles." https://thezvi.substack.com/p/covid-91522-permanent-normal
When I bought my house, my wife and I made certain it had a gas range. Especially as we stir fry in a wok often, we've had terrible experiences with electric ranges. Gas is superior to electric when cooking. It's not even a contest.
I haven't used induction and I'm sure it's superior to the electric coil technology, but I'm not sure how well it would do with a wok. I'm skeptical.
Anyway, this talk of banning gas ranges is stupid. I agree with Manchin: is this really the most important thing to be working on right now?
TBF it makes no sense whatsoever to lump resistive and inductive stoves together as "electric" in terms of how good it is to cook with them --- IME induction ≳ gas ⋙ resistive electric
Here's my problem with your point 1: at some point, indoor air quality does matter. Instead of looking at the studies around stoves, we should analyze the claim itself. How does the amount of no2 compare to other activities and items (standing nearby a car that's running). How much no2 is actually unhealthy?
It could be that this is a good move with bad studies. I'm sure there's good data about relative no2 put off by various things, and I'm sure there's good data about indoor air quality in general. I don't see the dismissal of these specific studies disproving the overall theory.
And... There's lots of things that were superior or cost effective that we no longer use for health reasons. Trans fats is the one to happen in my lifetime.
Here's the thing though: indoor air quality almost exclusively matters for the people in the household. There is no externality here. If you care about indoor air quality _you_ don't have to use a gas range. Other people who care more about cooking performance can get a gas range, and, if they want, get better ventilation or air filters. Stop caring about what other people do, even if they are "harming" themselves.
You could say the same about seatbelts and lead paint and flouride and trans fats. In reality the public (and myself) don't actually know the impact of indoor air quality. If it would raise IQ by a point worldwide then we should really be looking at it, raising awareness, and incentivizing people to switch.
I'd argue that those were mostly unnecessary mandates as well. I'd bet that most of them would have become near ubiquitous on their own because _most people also care about their own safety_.
Lead paint is about the only one that I can see an argument for since it sticks around for decades and is not always obvious it's there, plus the risk is not generally from when it's new, but when it's old and flaking, so the most risk is often not to the person who applies it but to the second/third/nth owner who may not know it's there: this is a clear externality that might justify regulation.
None of the others have this trait.
And I'm all for _incentivizing_ change. Go ahead and give a subsidy to electric ranges (as mentioned in the article), give a rebate on cars with safety features. Have an awareness campaign. Just don't ban things that don't have externalities.
Hell, even for things that _do_ have externalities, banning is often not the right option. Even though fossil fuels more generally have _massive_ externalities, I'm still a believer that carbon taxes are by far the best tool to fix those issues.
-edit- I keep on saying "stove" when I mean range, I don't know why.
I'm sorry - I just don't understand how you could think the ban on trans fats is not justifiable. I don't think we have the same ethics system of utilitarianism.
Why should you care more about someone else's health than they do? What system of utilitarian ethics says you have to force someone else to value something the way that you do?
I'm not a utilitarian—I'm a deontological libertarian—, but if we're considering justifications from variants of utilitarianism, permitting trans fats with appropriate warnings may be justified from preference utilitarianism. Even more so from what I'd call "choice utilitarianism": instead of maximizing people's total utility, maximize the sum of utilities each person *can* achieve by making the right choices. Here, the choices only count if people have the necessary information available to make the right decision: if you have a good choice, but you'd have to dig into studies you can't understand to realize it's the right choice, that doesn't count; but if the government strongly advises you to make a certain choice, that counts—and if you don't understand the matter and decide to make a worse choice, it's your fault, and not considered a moral problem.
Even with conventional utilitarianism, I don't know if banning trans fats, without further policy effects, increases total utility as compared to mandating highly visible warnings on the packaging of products containing them.
Furthermore, a reason to oppose banning trans fats that might be valid even under conventional utilitarianism is that we, the voters, don't have the time to dig into the details of every one of the thousands of products/activities government wants to ban in the consumers' own (supposed) interests, so the only way to prevent overreach (i.e. the government banning even things that are the best choice for some people) is to establish a norm that it's not legitimate to ban anything for the purpose of keeping people from hurting themselves. In this model, the very harm that comes from banning trans fats is that people like you can use it to argue for banning (even) less obviously harmful things.
(You may ask: If we, the voters can't decide whether various things are harmful enough that they should be banned, how can we ever decide whether they are safe enough for us to use? The answer is that if I can decide for myself, I only have to dig into the details around the few things I actually want to use out of the things that are strongly advised against—that, in the current system, would be banned—, rather than all of them.)
> And I'm all for _incentivizing_ change. Go ahead and give a subsidy to electric ranges (as mentioned in the article), give a rebate on cars with safety features.
Why? These are unjustified just like banning the thing. Safe cars (stoves etc.) don't have positive externalities, and unsafe cars don't have negative externalities (beyond those of any car), so people who buy safe cars don't deserve to get money, which presumably comes out of the taxes of people who buy unsafe cars, and of people who don't buy cars (which has the least externality of it all).
The only mandates I may support are informing people. That can be just a warning on the packaging. In more extreme cases, it could even be that you have to go to an office, handwrite that you are aware that you're risking your life and you're doing it consciously; then you get a slip that allows you to buy the product.
For me, stove is for gas or something burning... could be a wood stove. Range is that thing you cook on in the kitchen and could be either electric or gas. But yeah, I have no problem talking about my electric stove... so same thing mostly.
There's any number of things that would "raise IQ by a point worldwide" that are no more invasive than banning a stove type that I strongly, STRONGLY suspect you would find abhorrent.
Ostensibly the worry du jour is *childhood* asthma, and as far as I can remember when I was a child my parents never asked me for any input when deciding what kind of stove to cook on.
A) as discussed in the article, the risk is actually _very_ low, and B) The presumption behind your question is that some people don't care about their own kids' safety and that we need regulation to protect their kids from them, pre-emptively. I just do not buy that so many people care so little about their kids that this is necessary (in fact, the opposite seems to be the case: parents are becoming so overprotective that they are doing any tiny thing to protect their kids from "harm", which increasingly seems to be causing it's own issues, look into Free Range Parenting for more about this).
If you think the problem is informational, then have an outreach campaign, hell mandate warning stickers on gas ranges if you want. Just don't ban them.
I don't quite understand this response to my comment. I certainly don't think that gas ranges are a big enough deal to be worth worrying about, which you seem to be implying?
I am anti-banning-gas-stoves, but note that I don't see the fight in new construction being the meaningful driver here. After all, America is wildly anti-home-building generally, and the parts where you can still build easily apparently are low-gas-stove-usage communities. The real question is whether people start tearing out their existing gas stoves in their existing homes for some whizbang electric superfast induction stove thingamajig.
After all, we live in a world where we have massive investment in electric and battery tech, and there seem to be some cool prototypes out there. I could definitely see a world where gas gets outflanked by innovation and choice here, over time.
That makes sense to me. The electric coil stays extremely hot for a long time. With gas the heat source is killed as soon as you turn the knob. So say you have spillover when deep frying, as soon as the fire is out, any extra oil that spills probably won't catch, but with an electric coil it will keep burning.
My guess would be resistive electric > gas ≫ induction electric in terms of how dangerous they are. (Another reason it makes no sense to lump resistive and inductive together...)
You turn on the wrong burner with the electric stove, don't realize it, because there is no flame, and there is something flammable on top of the 'wrong burner'. (I've done this. :^)
I have an induction hob and it is as good as gas. It's quicker at heating than gas and the control is as good. There's not quite as much freedom for wok cooking but I believe there are options. Eventually gas stoves will be phased out as we abandon fossil fuels. But electric stoves can be extremely good now. Not worth banning gas stoves now but the move away is inevitable.
I don't think that abandoning fossil fuels completely is feasible (much less worthwhile) until we figure out non-fossil ways to produce fuel—some uses of fuels, such as airplanes, are not feasible to replace with electricity. And if we figure that out, we may as well figure out non-fossil ways to produce gaseous fuel, and use that in stoves. It may be too expensive to be worthwhile though.
For the moment, we're nowhere near close to solving that, but we're also nowhere near close do producing all of our electricity from non-fossil sources. If we want to abandon fossil fuels, we should first go after fossil sources of electricity production; only once we're done replacing electricity production with non-fossil sources do we need to go after other uses of fossil fuels, which will be harder to replace.
I disagree it's going to be simultaneous. And there appears to be real downsides to using gas as a combustible fuel in homes and induction hobs remove almost all the downsides to electric stove tops. Similarly heat pumps are going to be good enough to outcompete gas heating eventually.
That's not true. Renewable regularly accounts for more than half of UK energy consumption. Oh no its impossible to 1 make a good electric stove and 2 produce energy out of something other than fossil fuels. Lots of cowards here who seem to think human ingenuity is gonna hit a hard barrier here.
OK, here in the US I've seen projections that we'll still be getting 70% of our electricity from fossil fuels in 20 years (or something... do you want me to find a reference?)
So while I am still firmly in camp "gas stoves are the best" (while stuck with a very old, very crappy electric stove), I have been convinced recently that new induction cook tops go a very long way in closing the gap and, in a few particular ways, are actually better. As far as I can tell, the single way that the lag the furthest behind (and in which I see no way they could ever catch up) is the ability to lift or tilt the pan off the cooking surface and maintain heating, which you might want to do if you are searing a steak and want to baste in butter, or something similar (this may be something you don't care about, which is great for you, it's something that I frequently lament on my current electric coil stove).
But in max temp output, they are apparently basically the same to household gas stoves (although they can't get as hot as very high output commercial/restaurant gas stoves), they are/can be faster for things like boiling water, they are safer, and more efficient, and can also be easier to clean.
However, to reach that performance parity, you have to pay _way_ more. Gas stoves reach their performance peak basically at the ground floor of quality. An entry level gas stove probably has 90+% of the performance of a top end model. When you buy high end gas ranges you are paying for looks more than anything else. In my research, there basically is no such thing as "low end induction ranges" yet, so to get mostly similar performance (with that one glaring weakness in mind), you may have to pay triple or more for an induction stove. Not to mention the fact that most of the current induction models have the absolutely _abhorrent_ inclusion of "smart" features that I would literally pay extra money to remove if that was an option.
-edit- as mentioned in a comment I made elsewhere...my brain keeps inserting "stove" when I mean "range", so if you see stove, replace with range.
I've been reading a lot of very pro-induction takes over the past few days, as indeed I did the last time we had this debate a year or more ago. I know Zvi does, but it seems almost no one remembers that this exact issue (a potential "ban" on gas stoves) has been fought over before. Even people I respect mightily, like Charles C.W. Cooke, appear to have forgotten.
Regardless, many of these pro-induction takes are premised on the idea that induction is superior to gas in every way, even including evenness of heat. I beg to fucking differ.
I started cooking about two years ago shortly after I moved into my first home. I was watching bro chefs on Youtube who frequently recommended induction. I (a right-wing nutjob, to be clear) picked up the exact one used by Josh Weissman, a countertop Duxtop. Excellent reviews, all the good stuff. I used it for about a year. It was and is really good at boiling water and deep frying.
It's garbage at almost anything else. I had deeply bought into the idea that induction provided even heat better than gas. I repeated this claim unprompted several times when discussing it with my brother. This is complete bullshit (or so it seems to me), and finding that out entirely destroyed my confidence in the technology. The tipping point came when I tried to simmer a big dutch oven full of Bolognese on it. The recipe called for 1 hour of simmering to reduce by 20-25% or something. I let it simmer for FOUR HOURS and it reduced not at all. It was also very inconsistent in making things like smash burgers. Also, the countertop burner made a horrible sound when used, which I could actually feel in my teeth, and the fan was incredibly loud as well.
I posted on reddit about the simmering issue, and got a ton of useful comments telling me that induction only heats a small portion of the pan. I thought back, and remembered that, when the sauce was simmering, there were bubbles coming from only two very small points at the center of the dutch oven, and those bubbles were like a rolling boil, so I had to stir constantly to avoid burning in the tiny spot that was being heated.
This pissed me off to no end. I had worked all day on that sauce, and while I did manage to partially salvage it by putting it in the oven, afterward I put the induction cooktop in the pantry and have had zero desire to get it out again (I also repaired the central power burner on my gas stove, which helped).
Still, the quantity of pro-induction takes, many of them containing particularly this claim about evenness of heat stated very stridently, and going unchallenged, plus the lack of reviews or questions on Amazon about my issue, makes me think that perhaps mine was defective. But I really have zero confidence in it as a technology anymore, so I am not at all inclined to try picking up another one or getting the one I have warrantied.
Anyone else have similar experiences? Dissimilar?
Also, all of this is a distraction. The true king of even heat is the oven. It is the tool you need for almost every job that isn't boiling water or frying. I learned this from Kenji Lopez-Alt, and now I put everything I possibly can, particularly slow-cooked tomato-based sauces, in the oven. Bubbles all the way to the edge, better even than gas.
In a comment I made up above talking about induction, I stated that "there don't appear to be any low-end induction ranges". That wasn't entirely correct. There aren't any low end full size oven/range combos. The little counter-top models you describe fill the "low-end" niche for induction as far as I can tell, and yeah I have also heard very mixed things on these products. Supposedly, the full size ones do a much better job, although I'm basing this all on review videos. etc. since I don't actually own one.
I do have an induction stove, and yeah the heat seems to be more evenly distributed than with gas. It makes sense since the magnetic field encompasses all of the pan/pot and the bottom of the pan/pot is supposed to have well ditributed iron or whatever they use to make it heat up.
I would like to say induction stoves make it harder to burn stuff but i think it may depend on the pan. With my good pan, yeah, it is way harder to burn stuff then on a gas stove. But i recently brought a crappy pan and i can burn stuff if i am not careful. Maybe i haven't figured out the right output yet, maybe it would also be crappy on a gas stove since it is so think and light that i fear the heat from a gas burner wouldn't really distribute before getting to the food.
> Some of those Twitter conversations spinning off from this issue are remarkable -- I have never in my life seen a more perfect example of the "this isn't happening, and it's good that it's happening" pathological style of argument than we're getting from the anti-gas side. This should be in a textbook, seriously.
It's called "logique du chaudron" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kettle_logic
It's not inherently contradictory to say "this isn't happening, and it would be good if it were happening".
The problem with people saying that is that each half happens to be false, but the proof that it's false is not the fact that a given person is saying both.
----
Other solutions to the problem described in the rest of your post:
– Heavily subsidize the stuff the other side has banned, so it's worth producing it even for a few years
– Import it from abroad, from countries where it's never been banned.
Yes. Incandescent light bulbs are the perfect example of why not to ban things. Let the market find the answer. I can still buy incandescent bulbs.... Oh Dang! just reading that they will be banned again? Why? I've got some niche uses for incandescents, but I mostly buy leds for home lighting. OK voting for any party that doesn't want to ban things.
This is not criticism of you or Oster, as you both are obviously already on the "let's look into whether claims about risk/safety are overblown" beat, and do a great job at it, but for everyone else:
Every time something like this comes up, I wonder what [actually serious thing] is going on that everyone would like to ignore and instead hype talk about [gas stoves], which has no relevant reason to be Main Topic this week. Honestly, I hate to give praise to a senator, but Manchin is exactly right: the response to this shouldn't be "yay ban gas!" or "no don't ban gas" it should be: "What vastly more important (or more harmful, or less infringing on freedom) thing are we (or the CPSC) ignoring?" Like when the CDC had vaping and mushrooms as 2 of the 3 topic "epidemics" to fight. If we argue about whether or vaping is actually bad or good, that misses the point, which is: wtf is wrong with this agency's priorities?
Hard to believe that gas stoves are anywhere near as dangerous as particulates from wood fireplaces. So that's one good candidate.
not to be Annoying Internet Person, but is pointing out the hypocrisy of this (while certainly true) the best use of our time? What more important thing is being neglected?
I agree! It's a good move, and I do intend to not spend much more time on it, but I actually do think "trying to encourage people to spend their time online more productively, both for themselves and for society" is a (perhaps only minimally) useful - and generalizable - thing to do, whereas even if "anti gas stove people are horrible hypocrites", even if 100% true, doesn't get us much.
Right, and certainly we *can* debate the effect of wood fireplaces, but even with our crazy-bad state of "safety/risk science" surely we can come up with a list of at least 10 higher priority (if terms of amount of risk and amenability to fixing) items and go down that list first?
No! Why do we have to ban anything? Let people make choices. (And my wood fireplace is a godsend when the power goes out. As well as being comfy in the winter.)
Wood smoke from your house does affect neighbors' health. I wouldn't favor a ban on fireplaces except in densely populated areas, but ideally I'd say neighbors with lung disease should have some legal recourse and there should be a strong social norm against burning wood except when the power is out. I have one as well, but it's now only used during outages. I'd rather have the extra life expectancy than the comfort.
OK we live in different worlds. I have sympathy for any lung diseased neighbor, but I don't see how they should have influence over my ability to burn wood. There is some level where what you do on your land effects me and should be discouraged, but burning wood doesn't pass that bar for me. Out here in the country there is a strong social norm *for* burning wood. I use wood to grill food all summer long. And there is something magical about sitting around the bon fire on a summer evening and talking about life. You don't have to come and join us. We all get to make our own choices. As an old man I might choose comfort over longevity... my choice. Why do you want to take peoples choices away?
Clearly we just have different estimates of how harmful wood smoke is to neighbors. I am a big civil liberties guy but on my read of the science, the effects of particulates are severe enough to be over my threshold.
Allowing people to burn wood is the historic default option. If you want to live in some community/ city that bans burning wood, that's fine by me. My neighbors are ~1/2 mile away, and burning wood mostly effects no one but me and my family/ friends. I'm fine with you not burning wood, but why is it ok for you to tell me what to do? (Doesn't burning wood count as green energy, I grow it all on my land?)
I have new neighbors with two wood stoves and it's so much worse than I could have imagined. It's almost as bad as California during the fires on a bad day. I have an air filter in every room and they are blackened in less than a month.
I suspect I got exceptionally unlucky. Bad wind patterns or maybe they are using the wrong kind of wood or something. Some days it's clear and other days I'm wearing an N95 just getting in the car in the morning to minimize the smoke.
Literally everything I do "affects neighbors' health." My very beliefs affect my neighbor.
This does not extend the purview of the law to everything do I and think.
I view this as a subset of a problem that's something like "we can only care about one thing at a time". Working theory is that the homogenization of civilization's communication layers into massive, very low friction platforms puts all topics of conversation into a single distribution of attention with one or a very small number dominating the rest. I want some people worried about gas stoves being bad! I don't want everyone worried about it for 48 hours before everyone moves on to the next thing! We, as a civilization, need to be able to care about multiple things at once, and I'm not sure how to get there from here. I think the friction of spatial/temporal gaps between communicators made this the norm before, with largely separate populations able to work independently and linkages between them being sparse rather than ubiquitous.
Isn't Europe using coal for electricity generation because there's a shortage of natural gas? So if gas usage in cooking declined, there would be more available for electricity generation
I doubt that the volume of natural gas used in cooking has any relevance at all to the power generation market.
Even if true, that electricity will be used for cooking. With probably more losses or other inefficiencies on its way: there's a reason the same amount of energy in electricity costs several times as much as in gas. What's the benefit of using the gas to produce electricity, and then use that for cooking, instead of just sending the gas to the customers?
So, instead of using gas to cook with directly, you think its better to use gas to generate electricity to cook with? And that this will lead to greater gas availability?
Cooking directly with gas probably uses less gas than producing electricity with gas and then using that electricity for cooking, though
If the marginal electricity production is done with fossil fuels, electrifying cooking increases fossil fuel usage.
I just want to mention that induction stoves are pretty nice and IMHO roughly comparable to gas in cooking convenience (well, except for roasting things on an open flame obviously). They are also really nice to clean (since have a flat ceramic surface).
In German-speaking Europe (where I spent most of my life), gas stoves are quite unusual and thus I I never used one extensively, so maybe I am missing some super-convenient aspect of them. But between similar effective energy output (and latency) and the ease of cleaning, I would chose induction over gas if I had a choice.
In reality I live in a rented house with a terrible electric stove that I loathe (not induction but classic resistive heating).
Induction is much better than gas, and, even if the studies showing gas stoves are bad are themselves bad, it's intuitively hard to imagine that combusting methane in your domicile is a great idea overall, particularly when such a good alternative—induction—exists.
The real benefits, climate and otherwise, to eliminating gas come from heating, not cooking, which used an order of magnitude more gas per household. If gas heating becomes uneconomical you won’t have to ban gas stoves in new construction because nobody’s spending money on gas piping just for stoves.
Also? I had to use an induction cooktop for a month while waiting for National Grid to turn on my gas and it was pretty great tbh.
This is a real question, not an attempt at a gotcha: the electricity for non-gas heating and stoves has to come from somewhere. Is the climate benefit that these other sources are less polluting?
Obviously this is true of solar and wind where they are available. But is it true of today's grid?
The main climate benefit is that heat pumps use fewer joules of input energy per joule of heating output than combustion furnaces, because you suck heat from the outside atmosphere instead of just burning your fuel for heat. So even if you are running your heat pump on gas power with generation and transmission losses, you still come out ahead.
The other big benefit is they municipal gas infrastructure is super leaky and bad, tearing it all out would be a huge win just from a methane perspective
Air sourced heat pumps only work when the outside temperature is above freezing. It took me a while to understand this. But the reason is that the outside (in air) coils have to be below the outside temperature to suck any heat from it. And when below freezing the coils ice up, reducing exchange efficiency, so you have to heat up the coils every once and a while to get rid of the ice. This reduces efficiency. Ground water sourced heat pumps get around this, but are more involved.
My understanding is that there have been significant advances in air source heat pumps over the past decade: https://www.consumerreports.org/heat-pumps/can-heat-pumps-actually-work-in-cold-climates-a4929629430/
Huh, OK I'll have to check out the Senville website. I wonder they work when really cold because there is so little water in the air. So there is some 'sour' spot around 40F where they have to defrost more often... more water in the air and coils below freezing... I do really like those mini-splits. Thanks more research needed on my part.
> When choosing where to rent, one absolutely has a choice. We made it a point to ensure our apartment had a gas stove, both when renting and when buying.
I will say this hasn't been my experience - last time I was looking for an apartment in New York I had a preference for an apartment with an electric stove but couldn't find one that otherwise satisfied my preferences (I don't think any of the apartments I visited at all had electric stoves).
I don't in general support banning things but do wish nice modern electric stoves were easier to find in new rental apartments in New York. I suspect this kind of push will help them be seen as high-status in some liberal circles which could help with that (although if it gets to the point of an outright ban that would overdo it and be bad again).
Saying that this proces its being forced on people still seems like an isolated demand for choice. Unless there's equal numbers of all combinations of things that an apartment can contain for the apartments in a given area, then anything overrepresented is by this account being "forced" onto renters.
I wouldn't say "forced" either way, but I while I wouldn't support laws or bans about this, if electric stoves became enough of a hip thing in certain circles that some more nice new apartments had them I would like that outcome.
Ctrl+F: "induction" - zero matches.
Ha ha, I think Zvi doesn't really pay attention to appliances and just applies generic anti-regulation logic. Last year it was his dishwasher, which he thought was good because it was illegal but outside that context he doesn’t actually like it:
1/13/22: "Living the dream is also having one of the good dishwashers, which luckily we already have, since they are once again being made illegal." https://thezvi.substack.com/p/covid-11322-endgame
9/15/22: "An argument that dishwashers can actually clean dishes so you mostly don’t have to clean them first. This has not been my experience, which has been more that the dishwasher is the goggles." https://thezvi.substack.com/p/covid-91522-permanent-normal
Induction's mostly fine, but it's irrelevant to whether the government shoud actively BAN gas stoves.
When I bought my house, my wife and I made certain it had a gas range. Especially as we stir fry in a wok often, we've had terrible experiences with electric ranges. Gas is superior to electric when cooking. It's not even a contest.
I haven't used induction and I'm sure it's superior to the electric coil technology, but I'm not sure how well it would do with a wok. I'm skeptical.
Anyway, this talk of banning gas ranges is stupid. I agree with Manchin: is this really the most important thing to be working on right now?
I have a counter top electric wok I got from a thrift store 15 years ago and it works fantastic.
Can you lift it in the air and shake what’s cooking inside and the heat doesn’t cut out?
Yes
TBF it makes no sense whatsoever to lump resistive and inductive stoves together as "electric" in terms of how good it is to cook with them --- IME induction ≳ gas ⋙ resistive electric
(except that most moka pots do not work on induction)
Oops, never gonna fly in Miami
Here's my problem with your point 1: at some point, indoor air quality does matter. Instead of looking at the studies around stoves, we should analyze the claim itself. How does the amount of no2 compare to other activities and items (standing nearby a car that's running). How much no2 is actually unhealthy?
It could be that this is a good move with bad studies. I'm sure there's good data about relative no2 put off by various things, and I'm sure there's good data about indoor air quality in general. I don't see the dismissal of these specific studies disproving the overall theory.
And... There's lots of things that were superior or cost effective that we no longer use for health reasons. Trans fats is the one to happen in my lifetime.
Here's the thing though: indoor air quality almost exclusively matters for the people in the household. There is no externality here. If you care about indoor air quality _you_ don't have to use a gas range. Other people who care more about cooking performance can get a gas range, and, if they want, get better ventilation or air filters. Stop caring about what other people do, even if they are "harming" themselves.
You could say the same about seatbelts and lead paint and flouride and trans fats. In reality the public (and myself) don't actually know the impact of indoor air quality. If it would raise IQ by a point worldwide then we should really be looking at it, raising awareness, and incentivizing people to switch.
I'd argue that those were mostly unnecessary mandates as well. I'd bet that most of them would have become near ubiquitous on their own because _most people also care about their own safety_.
Lead paint is about the only one that I can see an argument for since it sticks around for decades and is not always obvious it's there, plus the risk is not generally from when it's new, but when it's old and flaking, so the most risk is often not to the person who applies it but to the second/third/nth owner who may not know it's there: this is a clear externality that might justify regulation.
None of the others have this trait.
And I'm all for _incentivizing_ change. Go ahead and give a subsidy to electric ranges (as mentioned in the article), give a rebate on cars with safety features. Have an awareness campaign. Just don't ban things that don't have externalities.
Hell, even for things that _do_ have externalities, banning is often not the right option. Even though fossil fuels more generally have _massive_ externalities, I'm still a believer that carbon taxes are by far the best tool to fix those issues.
-edit- I keep on saying "stove" when I mean range, I don't know why.
I'm sorry - I just don't understand how you could think the ban on trans fats is not justifiable. I don't think we have the same ethics system of utilitarianism.
Why should you care more about someone else's health than they do? What system of utilitarian ethics says you have to force someone else to value something the way that you do?
I'm not a utilitarian—I'm a deontological libertarian—, but if we're considering justifications from variants of utilitarianism, permitting trans fats with appropriate warnings may be justified from preference utilitarianism. Even more so from what I'd call "choice utilitarianism": instead of maximizing people's total utility, maximize the sum of utilities each person *can* achieve by making the right choices. Here, the choices only count if people have the necessary information available to make the right decision: if you have a good choice, but you'd have to dig into studies you can't understand to realize it's the right choice, that doesn't count; but if the government strongly advises you to make a certain choice, that counts—and if you don't understand the matter and decide to make a worse choice, it's your fault, and not considered a moral problem.
Even with conventional utilitarianism, I don't know if banning trans fats, without further policy effects, increases total utility as compared to mandating highly visible warnings on the packaging of products containing them.
Furthermore, a reason to oppose banning trans fats that might be valid even under conventional utilitarianism is that we, the voters, don't have the time to dig into the details of every one of the thousands of products/activities government wants to ban in the consumers' own (supposed) interests, so the only way to prevent overreach (i.e. the government banning even things that are the best choice for some people) is to establish a norm that it's not legitimate to ban anything for the purpose of keeping people from hurting themselves. In this model, the very harm that comes from banning trans fats is that people like you can use it to argue for banning (even) less obviously harmful things.
(You may ask: If we, the voters can't decide whether various things are harmful enough that they should be banned, how can we ever decide whether they are safe enough for us to use? The answer is that if I can decide for myself, I only have to dig into the details around the few things I actually want to use out of the things that are strongly advised against—that, in the current system, would be banned—, rather than all of them.)
Thank you, what I wanted to say, but better.
> And I'm all for _incentivizing_ change. Go ahead and give a subsidy to electric ranges (as mentioned in the article), give a rebate on cars with safety features.
Why? These are unjustified just like banning the thing. Safe cars (stoves etc.) don't have positive externalities, and unsafe cars don't have negative externalities (beyond those of any car), so people who buy safe cars don't deserve to get money, which presumably comes out of the taxes of people who buy unsafe cars, and of people who don't buy cars (which has the least externality of it all).
The only mandates I may support are informing people. That can be just a warning on the packaging. In more extreme cases, it could even be that you have to go to an office, handwrite that you are aware that you're risking your life and you're doing it consciously; then you get a slip that allows you to buy the product.
Re: range vs. stove: English is not my native language, but I though they were more-or-less the same thing. What's the difference?
For me, stove is for gas or something burning... could be a wood stove. Range is that thing you cook on in the kitchen and could be either electric or gas. But yeah, I have no problem talking about my electric stove... so same thing mostly.
Banning those was also wrong—if not for any other reason, then because it gets used to justify banning gas stoves, or other such further bans.
There's any number of things that would "raise IQ by a point worldwide" that are no more invasive than banning a stove type that I strongly, STRONGLY suspect you would find abhorrent.
Ostensibly the worry du jour is *childhood* asthma, and as far as I can remember when I was a child my parents never asked me for any input when deciding what kind of stove to cook on.
A) as discussed in the article, the risk is actually _very_ low, and B) The presumption behind your question is that some people don't care about their own kids' safety and that we need regulation to protect their kids from them, pre-emptively. I just do not buy that so many people care so little about their kids that this is necessary (in fact, the opposite seems to be the case: parents are becoming so overprotective that they are doing any tiny thing to protect their kids from "harm", which increasingly seems to be causing it's own issues, look into Free Range Parenting for more about this).
If you think the problem is informational, then have an outreach campaign, hell mandate warning stickers on gas ranges if you want. Just don't ban them.
I'm not sure I agree with that being the worry DU jour. That's my point - what about other indoor air issues.
I don't quite understand this response to my comment. I certainly don't think that gas ranges are a big enough deal to be worth worrying about, which you seem to be implying?
I am anti-banning-gas-stoves, but note that I don't see the fight in new construction being the meaningful driver here. After all, America is wildly anti-home-building generally, and the parts where you can still build easily apparently are low-gas-stove-usage communities. The real question is whether people start tearing out their existing gas stoves in their existing homes for some whizbang electric superfast induction stove thingamajig.
After all, we live in a world where we have massive investment in electric and battery tech, and there seem to be some cool prototypes out there. I could definitely see a world where gas gets outflanked by innovation and choice here, over time.
What should we make of the claim that electric stoves/ranges have higher risks w.r.t. fires and associated injuries? (e.g. https://twitter.com/charlescwcooke/status/1613167585863802880)
That makes sense to me. The electric coil stays extremely hot for a long time. With gas the heat source is killed as soon as you turn the knob. So say you have spillover when deep frying, as soon as the fire is out, any extra oil that spills probably won't catch, but with an electric coil it will keep burning.
My guess would be resistive electric > gas ≫ induction electric in terms of how dangerous they are. (Another reason it makes no sense to lump resistive and inductive together...)
You turn on the wrong burner with the electric stove, don't realize it, because there is no flame, and there is something flammable on top of the 'wrong burner'. (I've done this. :^)
I have an induction hob and it is as good as gas. It's quicker at heating than gas and the control is as good. There's not quite as much freedom for wok cooking but I believe there are options. Eventually gas stoves will be phased out as we abandon fossil fuels. But electric stoves can be extremely good now. Not worth banning gas stoves now but the move away is inevitable.
I don't think that abandoning fossil fuels completely is feasible (much less worthwhile) until we figure out non-fossil ways to produce fuel—some uses of fuels, such as airplanes, are not feasible to replace with electricity. And if we figure that out, we may as well figure out non-fossil ways to produce gaseous fuel, and use that in stoves. It may be too expensive to be worthwhile though.
For the moment, we're nowhere near close to solving that, but we're also nowhere near close do producing all of our electricity from non-fossil sources. If we want to abandon fossil fuels, we should first go after fossil sources of electricity production; only once we're done replacing electricity production with non-fossil sources do we need to go after other uses of fossil fuels, which will be harder to replace.
I disagree it's going to be simultaneous. And there appears to be real downsides to using gas as a combustible fuel in homes and induction hobs remove almost all the downsides to electric stove tops. Similarly heat pumps are going to be good enough to outcompete gas heating eventually.
Yeah but the electricity is still going to mostly come from fossil fuels. (unless we get our nuclear house in order.)
That's not true. Renewable regularly accounts for more than half of UK energy consumption. Oh no its impossible to 1 make a good electric stove and 2 produce energy out of something other than fossil fuels. Lots of cowards here who seem to think human ingenuity is gonna hit a hard barrier here.
OK, here in the US I've seen projections that we'll still be getting 70% of our electricity from fossil fuels in 20 years (or something... do you want me to find a reference?)
So while I am still firmly in camp "gas stoves are the best" (while stuck with a very old, very crappy electric stove), I have been convinced recently that new induction cook tops go a very long way in closing the gap and, in a few particular ways, are actually better. As far as I can tell, the single way that the lag the furthest behind (and in which I see no way they could ever catch up) is the ability to lift or tilt the pan off the cooking surface and maintain heating, which you might want to do if you are searing a steak and want to baste in butter, or something similar (this may be something you don't care about, which is great for you, it's something that I frequently lament on my current electric coil stove).
But in max temp output, they are apparently basically the same to household gas stoves (although they can't get as hot as very high output commercial/restaurant gas stoves), they are/can be faster for things like boiling water, they are safer, and more efficient, and can also be easier to clean.
However, to reach that performance parity, you have to pay _way_ more. Gas stoves reach their performance peak basically at the ground floor of quality. An entry level gas stove probably has 90+% of the performance of a top end model. When you buy high end gas ranges you are paying for looks more than anything else. In my research, there basically is no such thing as "low end induction ranges" yet, so to get mostly similar performance (with that one glaring weakness in mind), you may have to pay triple or more for an induction stove. Not to mention the fact that most of the current induction models have the absolutely _abhorrent_ inclusion of "smart" features that I would literally pay extra money to remove if that was an option.
-edit- as mentioned in a comment I made elsewhere...my brain keeps inserting "stove" when I mean "range", so if you see stove, replace with range.
I've been reading a lot of very pro-induction takes over the past few days, as indeed I did the last time we had this debate a year or more ago. I know Zvi does, but it seems almost no one remembers that this exact issue (a potential "ban" on gas stoves) has been fought over before. Even people I respect mightily, like Charles C.W. Cooke, appear to have forgotten.
Regardless, many of these pro-induction takes are premised on the idea that induction is superior to gas in every way, even including evenness of heat. I beg to fucking differ.
I started cooking about two years ago shortly after I moved into my first home. I was watching bro chefs on Youtube who frequently recommended induction. I (a right-wing nutjob, to be clear) picked up the exact one used by Josh Weissman, a countertop Duxtop. Excellent reviews, all the good stuff. I used it for about a year. It was and is really good at boiling water and deep frying.
It's garbage at almost anything else. I had deeply bought into the idea that induction provided even heat better than gas. I repeated this claim unprompted several times when discussing it with my brother. This is complete bullshit (or so it seems to me), and finding that out entirely destroyed my confidence in the technology. The tipping point came when I tried to simmer a big dutch oven full of Bolognese on it. The recipe called for 1 hour of simmering to reduce by 20-25% or something. I let it simmer for FOUR HOURS and it reduced not at all. It was also very inconsistent in making things like smash burgers. Also, the countertop burner made a horrible sound when used, which I could actually feel in my teeth, and the fan was incredibly loud as well.
I posted on reddit about the simmering issue, and got a ton of useful comments telling me that induction only heats a small portion of the pan. I thought back, and remembered that, when the sauce was simmering, there were bubbles coming from only two very small points at the center of the dutch oven, and those bubbles were like a rolling boil, so I had to stir constantly to avoid burning in the tiny spot that was being heated.
This pissed me off to no end. I had worked all day on that sauce, and while I did manage to partially salvage it by putting it in the oven, afterward I put the induction cooktop in the pantry and have had zero desire to get it out again (I also repaired the central power burner on my gas stove, which helped).
Still, the quantity of pro-induction takes, many of them containing particularly this claim about evenness of heat stated very stridently, and going unchallenged, plus the lack of reviews or questions on Amazon about my issue, makes me think that perhaps mine was defective. But I really have zero confidence in it as a technology anymore, so I am not at all inclined to try picking up another one or getting the one I have warrantied.
Anyone else have similar experiences? Dissimilar?
Also, all of this is a distraction. The true king of even heat is the oven. It is the tool you need for almost every job that isn't boiling water or frying. I learned this from Kenji Lopez-Alt, and now I put everything I possibly can, particularly slow-cooked tomato-based sauces, in the oven. Bubbles all the way to the edge, better even than gas.
In a comment I made up above talking about induction, I stated that "there don't appear to be any low-end induction ranges". That wasn't entirely correct. There aren't any low end full size oven/range combos. The little counter-top models you describe fill the "low-end" niche for induction as far as I can tell, and yeah I have also heard very mixed things on these products. Supposedly, the full size ones do a much better job, although I'm basing this all on review videos. etc. since I don't actually own one.
I do have an induction stove, and yeah the heat seems to be more evenly distributed than with gas. It makes sense since the magnetic field encompasses all of the pan/pot and the bottom of the pan/pot is supposed to have well ditributed iron or whatever they use to make it heat up.
I would like to say induction stoves make it harder to burn stuff but i think it may depend on the pan. With my good pan, yeah, it is way harder to burn stuff then on a gas stove. But i recently brought a crappy pan and i can burn stuff if i am not careful. Maybe i haven't figured out the right output yet, maybe it would also be crappy on a gas stove since it is so think and light that i fear the heat from a gas burner wouldn't really distribute before getting to the food.
The real rosebud in this is the child welfare aspect. It's always always to protect the children.