- "Environmental epidemiologist Josiah Kephart studies pollution from cooking. In this 2021 photo he measured nitrogen dioxide levels from cooking in his kitchen. At right: A nitrogen dioxide air monitor shows 0.159 parts per million, or 159 parts per billion. That's above the World Health Organization hourly guideline of 106 ppb. Kephart has since replaced the gas stove with an electric one."
That's *barely* above the 1-hour guideline, and as evident in that photo it's an (illegal?) stove with no hood or ventilation. This just reinforces my prior beliefs—that this is a complete non-issue for normal, code-compliant stoves.
(Was NPR unable to take a photo of a NOx meter next to a normal stove?)
I've used a consumer grade air quality meter and never found use of my natural gas stove to be an issue, even if doing a lot of cooking, but my oven does impact air quality quite a bit after a couple of hours. No idea if running the hood fan would impact the emissions from the oven. Since it's a rental, I haven't gone searching for a cause. In general, the only time I need the oven for an extended period of time is when cooking a turkey. For most other things, the oven is inferior to various countertop devices.
I believe you should run the fan for all uses, you are in all cases combusting indoors whenever you are using the gas stove/oven, unless you are glancing at the time.
I don’t know about the ones you’ve had, but I’ve installed a few not “real” range vents in my house over the years, and they vented into the wall, not the room itself.
I promise these didn't. No vent connected to one that was supposed to have it, easy to see in the cabinet above it. The other two were microwaves that eject the air straight out the front. They're designed to do that.
Everyone has an agenda, so it’s a good thing to discuss exactly what the competing agendas could be, and whether they are nefarious.
NPR makes money by publishing articles, so obviously they will make more money by publishing content that people are likely to read. Those articles can be in some arbitrary continuum between fluff articles with sensationalistic headlines (aka clickbait) to highly technical articles with tons of references and/or transparently-documented original research. I’d put this one more towards the latter: the intended audience isn’t highly technical, so it includes approachable interviews with key people, but links to the more technical research are clearly called out. Importantly, the substance of the lede is mostly backed up by the supporting research.
On the other hand we have an industry with deep connections to the oil industry that, according to the article, has used a well-known playbook of disinformation to stop or reduce regulation of their industry in multiple areas, with apparent success. States have recently passed laws to protect them, and the article also cites regulation that has been stopped or changed. The article also cites the health impact of natural gas and gases that are created by burning it, with general population statistics and studies about specific groups of people. It also cited evidence that the gas industry has funded research to combat these studies, and hidden the fact that this research was funded by them. Their motive for doing this would obviously be the negative impact that regulation could have on their ability to make a profit, which could impact jobs, the price of appliances, or even the choice of products that are available for purchase.
Add in the background noise of trillions in subsidies to oil and gas companies, the almost complete capture of the leasing agency in the Federal government back in the early 2000s, and the chronic underfunding and understaffing of inspectors, and it _seems_ really obvious who is actually “winning” in this struggle.
Am I missing something? Because the facts as I understand them seem to indicate an industry playing the regulatory capture and PR game on level 1000, while the regulators are playing with both hands behind their back, blindfolded.
I provided examples of why I didn’t think this was poor journalism, and why I thought this was an important story. Can you provide some examples of why you think this is shoddy journalism? Otherwise you’re really just shutting down the conversation.
I don't think "shoddy" is the correct term to use here. NPR/PBS, just like e.g. SVT/SR in Sweden, the BBC in the UK, NOS in the Netherlands and ARD/ZDF/NDR in Germany are better characterised by the term agenda-driven journalism - they tailor what they publish and how they publish to fit their desired narrative. They are certainly not alone in this but the difference with commercial actors is that these public broadcasters mostly use tax funds and/or special unavoidable levies to finance what comes down to poorly masked propaganda. NPR actually gets most of its funding from corporate sponsorships and donors but it does also receive state funding.
But what, specifically, is their "Agenda?" What is "The Narrative?" These threads always seem to bring out people pointing their fingers at The Narrative, but they don't say what that narrative is. You can't just say "It's Their Agenda" and "It's The Narrative" and just leave it at that!
OP's point at least makes sense: The thing that actually seems to motivate journalism companies is to "make money by publishing articles." Where is The Narrative in that motivation?
Just shouting that someone has an “agenda” is enough to make some people uncritically drop any facts that are uncomfortable.
In this case it’s honestly silly. News publications started widely publishing articles on gas stoves when research papers came out a couple of years ago indicating they posed health risks. They didn’t all simultaneously develop an anti-gas stove “agenda”. At worst you could argue that they’re being sensational for clicks.
This compared to gas industry publications. They actually have a pro-gas agenda because when people buy gas they make money. They and the people they lobby have an actual financial stake in making sure people use gas stoves.
Who are They? I am one person, not a group or cabal. There are others who notice the same pattern, also individuals. Realise that the they is just a applicable to those pushing the current thing.
> News publications started widely publishing articles on gas stoves when research papers came out a couple of years ago
Yes, a couple of years ago. Not decades ago, not even 10 years ago. Recently.
As to the gas industry it is worth knowing that cooking stands for only a tiny fraction of gas use so even if people stopped cooking on gas they would see much of a dip in profits. What is really at play here is that people really like cooking on gas stoves and are not about to give it up without being forced to do so. Rising gas prices will not do that because cooking only uses small amounts of gas. What was needed was some other means to get those pesky gas cookers off the market. Once the gas cooker is gone it will be easier to wean people of gas-fired central heating and gas-fired clothes driers given that most people have less of a preference for those but are likely to keep on using them as long as they need to have a gas hookup for their cookers anyway.
The gas companies know this as well of course so it is not surprising to see them react. While cooking may be only a small part of their income heating does represent a sizeable fraction.
With propaganda from "both" sides it is imperative to use your head when dealing with the issue of air quality inside the home. If you have an air quality meter/monitor you can use that as well but even without one the solution is clear: use ventilation when cooking. Use it no matter which heat source is involved. Problem, solved? From what I gather the answer to that question is mostly, "yes".
OK, that all's great, but what specifically is NPR's agenda? What specifically is "their desired narrative?" Are you saying that NPR is in the pocket of the Oil and Gas industry? Or are they in the pockets of someone (who?) against Oil and Gas? It's hard to tell.
You said:
> NPR/PBS, just like e.g. SVT/SR in Sweden, the BBC in the UK, NOS in the Netherlands and ARD/ZDF/NDR in Germany are better characterised by the term agenda-driven journalism - they tailor what they publish and how they publish to fit their desired narrative.
I have a gas range, gas water heater, gas logs, and gas backup heat. My gas bill is around $15 a month. My home has proper ventilation to the outside and I have no intention of converting a cheap gas bill into a high electric bill.
Fortunately, I live in one of the few countries which don't subsidize gas (Sweden). When I visit the continent and see a gas stove, it feels like going to a museum. Induction stoves are so much better.
We should let people decide what sort of stove is best for themselves rather than pushing one from the top down. Also, most people who are pressed to prematurely replace their stove will choose the cheapest option, which if pushed away from gas would be resistive electric not induction.
If there’s a negative externality to the fuel it should be priced-in, which is really all carbon tax is intended to do. You can still use gas but you have to pay for the environmental cost upfront. The carbon footprint of electricity usage would be taxed as well, but if it’s overall more efficient it would have a lower carbon tax.
Even electrical resistance heating is more carbon efficient than burning gas at home. This doesn’t even require a high-renewable grid - it produces less CO2 burning gas for electricity to run an electric stove than it does burning gas at home due to the efficiency of a modern gas power plant and the dreadful waste heat of a gas burner.
I live in Sweden as well, I used to live in the Netherlands. The former is close to gas-free while the Netherlands is (or was) one of the most gas-dependent countries in Europe owing to the discovery and exploitation of large gas reserves in the north of the country and the North Sea. I have used gas, resistive electric, halogen electric, induction electric as well as wood stoves for cooking. I wrote a sizeable comment on the virtues and vices of induction earlier in this thread and found out one of its parents had been killed, most likely due to its author's clearly stated preference for cooking on gas. This is what I wrote on the subject in reply to a comment very similar (but much shorter) than yours which simply proclaimed induction to be 'superior':
That all depends on what you're cooking. I have used just about all types of cooking contraptions there are ranging from an open fire through a pit fire, several types of "cultivated" fires (wood-fired stoves, BBQs etc), propane/butane/methane gas burners of various types, coil/cast_iron/ceramic/halogen electric and induction stoves. I normally cook on a wood-fired stove seeing how as I live on a farm in the Swedish countryside with plenty of forest on my doorstep which I also use to heat the house and whose branches I cut up for the stove. I do have one of those cast-iron resistance heated electric ranges next to the wood-fired stove but I only use it as a parking lot for pans etc. I also have a few single-hob induction plates around which I sometimes use outside when we're not supposed to light fires due to extreme drought etc. When I lived in the Netherlands I bought a "gas-free" house which meant I had to use electricity for cooking. Induction was supposed to be the bees knees so I built myself a range with an induction cooker on top and a hot-air oven underneath it. The thing worked fine for some types of cooking but it royally sucked for e.g. stir-fry cooking using a wok. Even the flat-bottom version I got did not come close to the real thing on a gas stove or wood fire.
Now, more than 20 years later I regularly use my mother's new induction stove when I visit her in the Netherlands. That thing still sucks for stir-frying, no matter which pan I use. There is just not enough power to be had on a residential induction cooker to reach the quick heat needed to make a good nasi goreng (i.e. Indonesian-Dutch fried rice). On the wood-fired stove here at home I use a Chinese wok which hangs directly in the fire and as such is close to perfect. The sad part of this is that my mother's previous range had a special wok burner which, while not as capable as the wood-fired stove, at least made it possible to quickly reach a good heat and keep it. Alas, she felt she needed to go with the flow and had that range swapped out for an anaemic induction cooker which is supposed to be able to run 2 plates at max power (~2 kW) at the same time but does not even seem to be capable of that without dropping one of them a notch down.
If you're comparing commercial induction cookers to gas stoves the comparison might hold. There are special induction plates for using a round-bottomed wok which may also lead to better results. Those are not what most people will get at home when they replace their "dangerous" gas range though.
Induction's pro's are its reaction speed, cleanliness, electrical efficiency and sometimes price (single-hob plates at e.g. IKEA are dirt-cheap) but that is about it. Its cons are the lack of power in most residential ranges, the lack of fine-grained control, the sensitivity of the ceramic top plate - it gets scratched easily when you have an 'active' cooking style as well is liable to break when confronted with heavy cast-iron skillets in the hands of inexperienced users, this is true for all ceramic cookers and not specific to induction - and the power electronics (I have repaired two induction cookers already, one of them (a commercial single-hob plate) had a blown out capacitor (literally - loads of black smoke blew out off the thing), the other (Siemens) suffered from a whole bank of broken power transistors (RJH60T4 IGBTs). Finally, confusingly in the light of my remark about single-hob plates being cheap, its often high price. Induction still seems to be priced as a "luxury" good while in reality it is fairly cheap to produce, the only relatively expensive part being the power electronics (where "expensive" means "a few tens of euro's for the requisite transistors and capacitors as well as the copper induction coils).
Depends. When the electricity comes from a gas power plant, it is way more efficient, to use the heat of the gas directly, instead of heating water and steam, running through a turbine, transmit lossy overland, convert to household power -> turn the electricity into heat again.
But when you have renewable sources, it is a different story. I believe you have mostly nuclear power in sweden?
(And the above even generously assumes the generation is not CHP which would make induction look better still, and ignores the extra energy needed for chilling your house)
The low efficiency of transferring heat from gas to the cooking vessel kills the odds for the gas range in the competition, most of energy goes to heating air instead of the kettle.
(But we shouldn't generate electricity from gas of course, fossils need to be left in the ground to avert worst of the climate disaster)
You are ignoring the cost of laying millions of miles of natural gas pipes to each and every home. And the leaks through all these pipes, which is 9%.
Electricity is the first utility and all homes have it. Of course, you can be off grid and have no utilities, just have solar+batteries, electrification works perfectly in that scenario.
"I have a gas range, gas water heater, gas logs, and gas backup heat."
With the electricity equivalent.
Makes sense when all is powered by green energy, but it does not makes sense to switch all that and power it with electricity from coal. Then the CO2 costs are higher.
The idea that energy bills need to be higher is sure to be a political winner. I encourage any politician who believes in that idea to openly run for office on it rather than trying to hide it and do it once they're already in office.
You say you're in South Carolina which is 30% coal generation, not "mostly", and which is set to plummet rapidly over the next few years as several of the increasingly uneconomical coal plants are shut down.
The target is really industry. If no one has to pay the cost of emissions no one has any incentive to change.
Look to the oil crisis of the 70s for examples - it was a bad time but the cost of fuel spurred a surge in sale of small cars because fuel efficiency finally mattered. On another front it spurred the cycling culture of the Netherlands - they didn’t take up cycling and build infrastructure to support it out of altruism, they did it because their fuel supply was nearly cut off entirely.
Innovation only happens when there is a reason to innovate. If carbon emissions don’t cost the emitter anything then there’s no reason to invest in ways to emit less.
If the costs can be passed on, then there is potentially no incentive to innovate, either. It might also still be more cost efficient to innovate less to reduce costs than to actually innovate to reduce costs. Predicting where these things go is quite tricky.
But if the costs can be passed on then that’s a means for emitters to differentiate on cost. If manufacturer A emits more and passes the tax onto the consumer, manufacturer B can undercut on them on price if they’re more efficient.
Right now there’s minimal financial benefit to being more carbon efficient. If anything it’s disincentivised because efficiency is itself costly, so it’s cheaper to just emit.
But only if undercutting isn't too expensive/pays back fast enough. The issue is that from a revenue perspective things always look simple, from a profit perspective it gets more complicated, especially if things have switching costs/limited fungibility, are oligopolies and other structured markets. It might work like you outline but I would not be surprised if there are a lot of unexpected or undesirable results, too.
Impose a law that forbids the constructions of new fossil fuel power plants, and any existing plants must be decommissioned when their current planned operational life-time has expired.
Either the market will start to invest in non-fossil fueled alternatives when demand exceed supply, or people will elect governments that step in and invest in non-fossil fueled alternatives. Either way, the coal, oil and gas plant can not continue to be part of the European energy grid.
Yeah, it will totally be $16 to reflect the minimal carbon used for the utilities GP mentioned.
I don’t think a carbon tax is economically efficient, but I’m starting to think it is emotionally efficient to just let people do all the minimal little things that I don’t think warrant discussion (paper straws, dishwashers, gas logs).
Do you really believe it's more likely that gas companies are paying people to say they want a gas stove on HN than someone genuinely believing it? I've met some many normal people in real life that say the same thing about gas stoves, including family members that have nothing to do with any Big Gas plots.
Could you elaborate a bit on this. There seems to be a genuine group of people who are against burning fossil fuels. Burning natural gas causes health issues in cities, create water pollution that kills lakes, rivers, and ocean, and it causes global warming. Fossil fuels are also a major contributing to geopolitical instability in Europe, with all the recent wars having major aspects of fossil fuel politics in them.
It sucks for individuals that removing fossil fuels in Europe will have a negative impacts economically in the short term until either nuclear or alternative solutions can replace existing fossil fueled infrastructure. Replacing existing infrastructure is always costly, and core infrastructure is even more expensive. That said, the current wars and current problems from fossil fuels also cost a lot of money. The longer we wait on upgrading existing infrastructure the more it will cost in the long term.
I guess the internet might be a more interesting place if everything you read goes through the lens of a conspiracy theory, so who am I to tell you that these are likely just people with different opinions to you. I don't know either obviously, but I choose to live life using a different lens than that. Maybe I'm wrong and naive but feels more relaxed!
I'm sure it is more relaxed. I remember when conspiracy theories were kinda fun but mostly harmless BS.
That was before the last 7-10 years, where government and media played whack-a-mole with emerging information, dismissing everything as conspiracy theory or misinformation.
And it worked ... for a while.
Problem is, now there's a record, a significant recent history of these things that were described as such for months and years until it was no longer tenable to deny and deflect.
Meanwhile, we've seen exactly how organized and cynical the "misinformation" campaigns run by NGOs and other stakeholder groups can be.
Yeah I get it, I just decided to care little about what I read online and give it as much credence as if I overhear a random conversation in a café. Even if they're doing some psyop its not like I'd change my life based on random hearsay. Thanks for the replies, it was easy to be defensive and I was really curious. Have a great holiday season!
I assure you that I am just a normal software engineer that happens to live in South Carolina. This is a matter of practicality for me. If induction became more practical for my family, I would make the switch. The incentives just don’t add up yet where I live.
Since you mentioned that you have backup heating, I assume you don’t live in a very cold climate, in which case a heat pump for your backup heat and water heater is your most efficient lowest cost option, not a gas system.
Part of your gas bill is just paying the gas company for a line. Your bill would be around $10 even if you use 0 gas. So basically having two different bills costs you extra money already.
Then there’s the fact that you can get a solar system and generate your own electricity, which you can’t do with gas. Solar systems can have a payoff period in the 5-10 year range which is very reasonable. If you pair it with an electric car you’re almost never paying a utility or oil company for your fuel needs.
I’m not saying you should run out and retrofit your whole home because that would never pay itself off, but in your climate I would never touch gas in a new build.
People pitching induction always mention that they boil water faster, and it's true. But in my experience with induction, which I admit is not a lot, it seems like that is the only thing it's better at.
Induction is really nice in terms of speed and responsiveness but it's harder to do the tiny adjustments that you can do with gas because the induction is digital rather than analog.
Totally agree, thank you for the balanced response. Most builders where I live install gas by default. I may have considered induction if I was building from scratch, but it’s really not worth it for us right now. Especially knowing the sources of our electricity at the moment.
If somebody installs something that requires a fee and extra connection when building with something semi-permanent like house appliances, kind of makes me think there is some sort of kickback scheme for them to do so.
Having gas appliances where I live is seen as a liability, as you have yet another maintenance item, and it contributes negatively to indoor air, so you have to have much more care regarding air handling in your areas where it is used. (unsurprisingly, demand for gas and gas appliances has plummeted ever since Russia started with their fuckery so people have been converting in droves as well.)
> I assume you don’t live in a very cold climate, in which case a heat pump for your backup heat
Like OP, I also live in South Carolina. My primary heat is a modern, efficient electric heat pump. When it’s cold enough outside that the heat pump is no longer more efficient than gas (maybe 8-12 weeks/yr where I am), the system switches fuel sources and runs a natural gas furnace instead.
Heating up water quickly is almost never a use case. It is not on the critical path for optimizations either. Unless you subsist on boiling noodles when you’re late for a meeting.
Making spaghetti/tortellini/noodles, coffee, malt-o-meal, oatmeal, etc seems common enough for most to not be a "almost never use case". At least on stoves I've seen.
> Heating up water quickly is almost never a use case.
It'd be helpful for my household for hot water for coffee and tea, and it'd also help us for heating up some extra water for grits or risotto when they need more.
Also, isn't boiling water just the measurable outcome of the test but what matters is that the pot is coming to temp sooner? Pots and pans heating up more quickly is helpful all the time.
Its like having a car with outrageous acceleration. In the case of a car you are wildly careening all over the road doing cruisin usa wheelies backflips barrelrolls and all. In a pan it means scorched butter and half cooked bacon compared to burnt bacon on the same pan.
Electric kettles are great for heating water quickly.
Pans coming to temp sooner would be useful if the gap was measured in large units of time but it isn’t. I care more about the properties of the pan and fire more. For instance cast iron pan is used to hold a lot of heat but isn’t very reactive. A copper pan can heat up quickly but more importantly it can change temps quickly. This is known as reactivity.
For instance maybe I want to sear a pork chop on high heat and then drop the burner and toss in butter and herbs. I need reaction (in this case the pan cooling quickly) for this basic technique or else I have burned my butter.
Main thing induction seems actually worse for is being able to lift the pan above cooking surface and differentially heat different parts of the pan, particularly useful for Chinese/wok cooking.
I guess you don’t cook? The main function of a stove is to work with your pans/etc to create the heat you desire. Different applications have different requirements. I may use a cast iron pan to store a lot of heat and release it over some time. I may have another where I want to change temperatures in the pan quickly, which is far more common for me.
For example I may use high heat to sear meat and then drop the heat to add butter and herbs and then use the pan drippings to make a sauce which requires intense heating to deglaze and flambé to enhance flavor and then reduce heat quickly to mount the sauce. Copper is the best material for this and it doesn’t work with induction. High quality steel just doesn’t perform.
You're downvoted because people who aren't enthusiasts just don't have the experience to understand.
It's like the EU ban[0] on lead paint. Fine artists said "wait but what about Flake white? It's a critical paint! Nothing else compares! We know how to use it safely!" And the response was "Just substitute Titanium white. It's brighter anyway!" But Ti is absolutely not a substitute. It's like telling sculptors to substitute plaster for marble.
[0]I can't recall if the ban was lifted. I live in the US.
EDIT: Don't take my word for it. Here's Michael Harding on the subject, he makes paints that are among the very very best available:
This point is making the opposite case that you think it is though: the artists are basically a tiny population that benefits from keeping lead paint legal while the larger population suffers.
To me, this sounds like an argument largely built around the idea that you don't want to learn how to use a new product. Many people have convinced themselves they can't adapt, and I think this follows from the marketing ploys described in the article.
When it heats it faster, there is less loss into the environment before all of it gets up to the required temperature. Efficiency gains is _always_ the desired optimization when you look at what new energy policies are trying to do.
Electric kettles are even quicker at heating up water and use less power to do so. They are also cheap and can last for decades if taken care of reasonably well.
While I can make no comment about your pots, cast iron, and many types of stainless steel are compatible, so any pots purchased recently should work. What I can say is it turns out all my pots worked and I didn't have to repurchase any when I got my induction stove. And it was worth it. Induction is better than gas!
You can purchase copper pots and pans right now and they won't work still, it's not the time of purchase but the material. Non-ferrous materials won't work with induction. Copper, aluminum, clay, stone, glass etc. won't work no matter when purchased.
A big point of the article seems to be that standard ventilation does not/did not adequately get rid of the nitrogen dioxide generated from a gas stove. Is your ventilation just really good, or is this not a concern for you?
Most people have no clue because you cannot see or smell it. So people tend to underestimate it. After all, they’ve been doing it for decades, so how bad could it really be? So, you’ll get feelings and intuition as replies if you ask this kind of question, not anything solid.
We are fucking terrible at risk analysis and management.
I have a fan with 5 speeds that sucks a lot of air. The stove is on an exterior wall and vents directly to the side of my house. I’m not really concerned about it.
Interesting, anecdotally, the builder of my town home was convinced by promo dollars to install a gas range, gas heat for a half the house, and a gas fireplace.
I pay approximately $33 a month in service fees, $1 for gas 9 months of the year, and $30 for gas 3 months (we've sort of embraced the fire as a way to make some use of the fees)
If you're doing the math, we're paying $360 a year in fees for $70 (5x the fees as the use)
Oh and the game of carbon credits a $6 a month fee that the gas company then gives us a promo credit for each month
Do you source your own gas? I live in Texas, fossil fuel and natural gas state, and gas bill is between $50 - $255/month. This is with barely any cooking.
How much friggin gas do you use? Do you own greenhouses or something? Is that your bill on the months where there is a surprise freeze and the whole state poops its pants? Something is obviously missing from your consumption figure.
Sounds like they should be held responsible for environmental harm, perhaps part of their their restitution could be installing a bunch of renewable energy sources (kind of like dieselgate). Seems awfully dumb to let them not do anything about it, but doesn't seem like a valuable counterargument to stay with a energy method that directly contributes to poorer health.
They're superior for lots of things, but inferior in ways that are very important for many cooks. I cooked professionally so I've got a whole lot more experience than most using stoves— including induction stoves at work.
If a typical home cook was buying a stove for their house, I'd recommend induction without thinking twice, especially if they have kids or can't have a hood that vents outside. Even without considering environmental concerns, I'd choose induction for restaurant pastry work— the precision and consistency are really great. It's also nice to not have all of the heat from 30 90k BTU burners all the time in a small room, too.
But for most uses, having a flame you can see, hear, and feel affords much more expressive heat control than digital displays and pan temperature alone. Most pan work is about feel rather than "heating something at x temperature for y time." Also, being able to pick the pan up a few inches to jostle the contents while still getting nearly the same heat transfer is really important for high heat sautées. It's also much much more expensive to get an induction burner that doesn't have a tiny hot spot in the middle of the pan— even with a relatively small burner, the gas flame still spreads out more, which is critical for things like searing large cuts of meat properly. In many ways, gas is a better tool from a functional perspective, environmental issues aside.
My dad is a retired mechanical engineer— he was the chief engineer at a fairly large company for years, and he knows a lot about heat transfer. He won't even entertain the idea that induction stoves are inferior to gas stoves in any way. He's probably also used a stove about two dozen times in his life and standing in front of one he vibes like someone learning to drive. It's the equivalent of his arguing I should use a compass, French curve and drafting templates when figure drawing. Induction being more precise and efficient on paper doesn't make it better in all use cases, and some use cases are really important to some people. Ultimately, the emissions and efficiency make induction the way to go, and I've only seen glib countetarguments against that. But the people telling others— even ones with vastly more experience cooking— they're wrong for preferring gas as a cooking tool are saying more about their own understanding of cooking than the other person's.
That’s what people say about EVs. The short answer is that it doesn’t matter.
Switching out billions of stoves, cars … to electric counterparts is going to take a long time. The thousands of power plants are much easier to convert.
Seeing how "pro-gas" comments tend to get greyed-out reminds me very much of the way those who went again the "current thing" were treated during the SARS2 pandemic. Why do many people here have to be so religious about these issues? Why has "supporting the current thing" been turned into something resembling a mantra? I wrote a fairly long comment [1] on my experience with different types of heat sources for cooking. Once I hit the "reply" button I noticed the comment a few levels upstream had been killed [2], probably for bluntly stating the author's preference for gas cookers. This comment section is full of all sorts of hyperbole about hurting children and destroying the planet and such by those who insist on using gas stoves but those comments are left alone - why? Until 2 years ago people could choose their own cooking appliance without the risk of being considered morally bankrupt but now that the current regime has made gas cookers into a "current thing" this has suddenly changed into a choice with decided moral implications.
In other words, it seems like the tactics used by the current regime are successful in that gas stoves have been turned into a "current thing".
Its really weird, when you look at the backlash after the Ukraine war. Gas (the cheapest way to heat and cook) was extinguished (pun intended) overnight. So now lets rally for electric, which is quite expensive in California, and I know, lets shut down nuclear power plants, sack coal, and remove renewable clean hydro at the same time. What could possibly go wrong? If that doesn't look like a conspiracy (at least to those in CA) I dont know what does. Make the poor suffer even more, so you can point to the government "programs" and "rebates" you offer to "offset" the high cost of energy, and use their suffering against republicans who put their foot down about sabotaging their own constituents. It's sick.
> "In my field, we know who those groups are, and we know that work that's done by those groups is not really trustworthy because they have never taken a stance on the side of public health," says Laura Vandenberg, professor of environmental health sciences at University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Notice how she does not criticize their methods or analysis, but rather the conclusions.
Sounds like some groups have a preferred outcome and will not tolerate any dissent and engage in ad-hominem attacks and innuendo (for example see the title of the article).
Even better, she effectively says that anyone who does not advertise the "correct" bias is untrustworthy. Do these people have no shred of self-awareness?
Many of the comments here just don't care about the potential harmful effects called out in the article. But I think there are two important questions:
1."Should I be worried about Nitrogen Dioxide from my stove?"
2."In the absence of trustworthy, detailed research, how would I know to be worried about Nitrogen Dioxide?"
I feel the focus should be on the second question -- "big stove" seems to have prevented us from making an informed decision on the topic, and that should make us all concerned regardless of the particular dangers of Nitrogen Dioxide. Personally, I'd like to know whether it matters for my health. With the existing data, I can't tell.
Really? The natural gas pipeline in San Bruno exploded in 2010, killing 8 people, and is far from the only disaster with natural gas, and you find it strange that people care what your house uses?
I don’t think anyone claims that infrastructure doesn’t have costs. Of course it does. But the argument is that the benefits are worth the cost.
Brining up a gas pipeline explosion as relevant to a discussion about stoves isn’t useful unless you quantify what portion of that pipeline went toward cooking.
The argument that all gas should be eliminated because 8 people died in 2010 is too simple.
Well, houses with gas stoves rely on gas. Households relying on gas likely make it less likely that other uses of gas are more accepted regardless of negative consequences.
I’m not a gas-proponent in any shape or form but this is at the very least an insufficient response. All forms of energy and infrastructure have accidents - a cost in blood. You could argue that gas has a higher total cost of life than other energy forms, perhaps. But it’s not like installing rooftop solar, maintaining windmills or dams are free from accidents. The safest energy in terms of deaths per Wh is fission IIRC. If you’re sitting on statistics that belongs to this discussion, please share it.
I'm responding to the notion that it's strange that people might not want to die. I don't have stats on the number of people that don't, apologies, I hate coming from a place where I have don't have data to support my views, but still, I imagine it's common enough not to be considered strange.
I mean the significance. People die with all infrastructure projects.
Any loss of life is sad. But 8 lives is important depending on the value from their loss. If it’s 8 lives in 100 years to allow 300 million people to have gas then that may be acceptable. Just like the loss of life from building hydro dams and solar arrays and whatnot.
The simplicity isn’t in the loss of life, it’s in not performing the analysis to know if it’s meaningful or not. I suspect it’s not meaningful.
With any sufficiently large industry if that industry produces externalities powerful lobbies will emerge to make the harms as unclear and detached from the industry as possible.
We only see the failures of this activity. There are many more big lobby success stories, where the externalities a line of business produces are removed from public discourse. In some cases, veggie libel laws for one, the lobby is so successful that criticism is practically illegal.
It's surprising that one of the most obvious solutions is generally only seen in both extremes of wealth: outdoor kitchens! Although I can see that still being an issue for people who live in places with terrible weather conditions. And with modern innovations like induction stoves it has probably become a less attractive alternative...
Edit: gas is also really important for places without reliable access to electrical power.
Even with extremely high CFM on your range hood, a meal prep session is likely still going to make your house smell like a restaurant for an entire afternoon.
For me, the type of heating seems irrelevant after a certain point when we are talking about air quality. If you make a big pan full of oil and other stuff hot for a long time, it doesn't really matter how it got there.
This just means adequate ventilation isn't practical. It is, however, something that is more relatable to most folks than greenhouse emissions, which is arguably the bigger problem.
I’ve never once seen a gas stove with adequate ventilation. New or old build. You’d need something resembling a lab fume hood with a blind you can pull down and negative air pressure in the enclosed space.
> "In my field, we know who those groups are, and we know that work that's done by those groups is not really trustworthy because they have never taken a stance on the side of public health," says Laura Vandenberg, professor of environmental health sciences at University of Massachusetts Amherst.
This sounds like we disagree with any science that disagrees with our preferred policy.
Notice how she does not criticize their methods or analysis, but rather the conclusions.
I have gas-everything and no ventilation except for bad construction and bathroom fans.
Ideally I'd like both induction and gas eyes on my countertop. Resistive stoves just suck and putting the elements under glass panels is the worst of all worlds.
Having a gas oven (like the one integrated into my unit) is stupid, slow, and smelly. I try to remember and open the window if I'm using it for very long.
Induction limits how I can cook compared to gas burners. There are fewer techniques and methods available and is unacceptable for how I like to cook. Induction is great for some people but for many people it comes up short. Cooking anything inside requires proper venting as cooking byproducts are harmful.
Cooking isn’t just about getting a pan hot quickly.
The issue isn’t that there are some cases and users where gas is the default it’s that for most cases and users it shouldn’t be.
And there is significant cost to the default being gas that hasn’t been caught by our current legislative regimes. And that the gas companies are using dodgy tactics to keep it that way.
The easiest terrorist attack is getting a few people to rent apartments with gas across a city, leave the gas open on the stove for a day or whatever, and then simultaneously ignite.
Piping an explosive gas all over cities just seems like a generally bad idea.
No one has ever done that. But I imagine if someone does we will all need licenses for gas stoves, or have to take our cast iron pans out of our luggage when traveling, or some other dumb thing.
I have an electric stove, and the emissions just from the amount of swearing I do for how obnoxious it is to cook with have got to be approaching a small dairy farm.
Electric stoves may at least help us solve the obesity crisis by avoiding letting anyone have food worth eating.
Gas-stoves are easier to scale that is mostly the reason why most restaurants still use them. 15 fires on full throttle is much easier to achieve than on induction purely of how our current electricity network has been built.
But for a normal household? It really doesn't matter. My father had his own restaurant and at home he used induction because it was much faster for one family dishes.
They're superior for lots of things, but inferior in ways that are very important for many cooks. I cooked professionally so I've got a whole lot more experience than most using stoves— including induction stoves at work.
If a typical home cook was buying a stove for their house, I'd recommend induction without thinking twice, especially if they had kids. Same for anyone in a house without a stove hood. Even in a restaurant, I'd choose induction for pastry work— the precision and consistency are really great. It's also nice to not have all of the heat from 30 90k BTU burners all the time in a small room, too.
But for most uses, having a flame you can see, hear, and feel affords much more expressive heat control than digital displays and pan temperature alone. Most pan work is about feel rather than "heating something at x temperature for y time." Also, being able to pick the pan up a few inches to jostle the contents while still getting nearly the same heat transfer is really important for high heat sautées. It's also much much more expensive to get an induction burner that doesn't have a tiny hot spot in the middle of the pan— even with a relatively small burner, the gas flame still spreads out more, which is critical for things like searing large cuts of meat properly.
My dad is a retired mechanical engineer— he was the chief engineer at a fairly large company for years, and he knows a lot about heat transfer. He won't even entertain the idea that induction stoves are inferior to gas stoves in any way. He's probably also used a stove about two dozen times in his life and standing in front of one he vibes like someone learning to drive. It's the equivalent of his arguing I should use a compass, French curve and templates when figure drawing. Induction being more precise and efficient on paper doesn't make it better in all use cases, and some use cases are really important to some people.
I keep reading the same experience as you did but it's really difficult to imagine it being so without actually having access to an induction stove to try it out. What I care about most is the rapid adjustment from high heat to low heat and vice versa within seconds; this is really important for many Asian cuisines. What I care about next is the amount of heat output at its highest and lowest setting. Of course I can't verify these attributes by looking at induction stoves in a store.
Asia is the largest market for induction cooktops, I wouldn't worry about its ability to cook Asian cuisines. They even make ones that are perfectly shaped for woks.
Are they cost effective? I suppose in the long term you save money by paying for electricity instead of gas, which could offset price differences. I strongly prefer gas stoves over conductive electric ranges, but haven’t tried an induction stove yet.
Probably don't make that much of a difference. I know it does not in my country. If anything, at the same price of gas and electricity, gas is less efficient so induction should be cheaper. Imma say this again : Gas is not efficient.
And since it probably don't make much of a difference, if you have the financial room for it, maybe you can make the sensible choice for society ?
Electricity means a single network and can be clean, gas can't. Gas stoves is the gateway drug to gas heating and the industry knows it which is why they spend so much lobbying for it even though it's a very small part of the gas they sell.
I still find it funny that there is such a fuss about when a mentally ill person finds a ideology to die for and blow themselves up for the cause when it's just as likely and deadly than gas accident but barely no one is able to remember last year street explosion because of gas. Both are fact of life and can be mitigated for but one is apparently very meaningful while the other... "oh well".
I'm definitely not an expert, but I would say nothing of note has changed with our utility bill since we replaced the gas cooktop with an induction cooktop.
The marketing will tell you it's more efficient because all the energy goes into the cooking (heating the pot) instead of heating the room as with gas. But hey, that's marketing.
One other concern was control: we did find out that the power levels on our model were not linear. The first 5 were all low power for low power needs (eggs, sauces, etc) and then 6 through 9 were much larger increments for high power needs (e.g. frying).
Our experiment before committing was using a plug in cooktop. We got a good one, and even though it was "only" 1800W it made many meals. It's power settings were linear but offered us 0-100% in 1% increments (amazing control! Love that thing.)
To be fair, there are losses with induction charging, and I imagine there are similar effects here. But it makes sense that induction cooktops would generate less waste heat than a gas range.
Induction is better than electric but it isn’t as good as gas in my opinion. You can’t use copper cookware, you are very limited on how you apply heat, you can’t use techniques like flambé, you can’t hold food directly over a flame to singe like you can with gas, etc.
Induction is fine for some people but not for everyone. Not to mention in many places they are more expensive to buy and operate. Besides, venting your stove makes gas perfectly safe. The process of cooking creates more harmful gasses anyhow. Burning toast will freak any monitor out.
Just use a portable stove for those rare occasions you need one for a specific technique. Why breath in those nasty gases when making something simple for dinner?
That all depends on what you're cooking. I have used just about all types of cooking contraptions there are ranging from an open fire through a pit fire, several types of "cultivated" fires (wood-fired stoves, BBQs etc), propane/butane/methane gas burners of various types, coil/cast_iron/ceramic/halogen electric and induction stoves. I normally cook on a wood-fired stove seeing how as I live on a farm in the Swedish countryside with plenty of forest on my doorstep which I also use to heat the house and whose branches I cut up for the stove. I do have one of those cast-iron resistance heated electric ranges next to the wood-fired stove but I only use it as a parking lot for pans etc. I also have a few single-hob induction plates around which I sometimes use outside when we're not supposed to light fires due to extreme drought etc. When I lived in the Netherlands I bought a "gas-free" house which meant I had to use electricity for cooking. Induction was supposed to be the bees knees so I built myself a range with an induction cooker on top and a hot-air oven underneath it. The thing worked fine for some types of cooking but it royally sucked for e.g. stir-fry cooking using a wok. Even the flat-bottom version I got did not come close to the real thing on a gas stove or wood fire.
Now, more than 20 years later I regularly use my mother's new induction stove when I visit her in the Netherlands. That thing still sucks for stir-frying, no matter which pan I use. There is just not enough power to be had on a residential induction cooker to reach the quick heat needed to make a good nasi goreng (i.e. Indonesian-Dutch fried rice). On the wood-fired stove here at home I use a Chinese wok which hangs directly in the fire and as such is close to perfect. The sad part of this is that my mother's previous range had a special wok burner which, while not as capable as the wood-fired stove, at least made it possible to quickly reach a good heat and keep it. Alas, she felt she needed to go with the flow and had that range swapped out for an anaemic induction cooker which is supposed to be able to run 2 plates at max power (~2 kW) at the same time but does not even seem to be capable of that without dropping one of them a notch down.
If you're comparing commercial induction cookers to gas stoves the comparison might hold. There are special induction plates for using a round-bottomed wok which may also lead to better results. Those are not what most people will get at home when they replace their "dangerous" gas range though.
Induction's pro's are its reaction speed, cleanliness, electrical efficiency and sometimes price (single-hob plates at e.g. IKEA are dirt-cheap) but that is about it. Its cons are the lack of power in most residential ranges, the lack of fine-grained control, the sensitivity of the ceramic top plate - it gets scratched easily when you have an 'active' cooking style as well is liable to break when confronted with heavy cast-iron skillets in the hands of inexperienced users, this is true for all ceramic cookers and not specific to induction - and the power electronics (I have repaired two induction cookers already, one of them (a commercial single-hob plate) had a blown out capacitor (literally - loads of black smoke blew out off the thing), the other (Siemens) suffered from a whole bank of broken power transistors (RJH60T4 IGBTs). Finally, confusingly in the light of my remark about single-hob plates being cheap, its often high price. Induction still seems to be priced as a "luxury" good while in reality it is fairly cheap to produce, the only relatively expensive part being the power electronics (where "expensive" means "a few tens of euro's for the requisite transistors and capacitors as well as the copper induction coils).
A proper extractor fan mitigates the problem entirely.
For a lot of cooking, gas is simply superior in almost every way to induction or electric. Induction has a few advantages in certain situations, but not many - gas is more flexible.
Now there is something to be said about people using insufficient extraction or not maintaining their ventilation/extraction systems for sure, or grossly underspeccing them so that they aren’t worth a shit.
A simple Airthings or Awair air quality monitor shows you the VOC rate in the home and it is easy to see how a fan keeps the levels at zero or even just opening a window drops the pollutant rate to almost zero very very quickly after cooking.
It’s a requirement in rentals in Ireland - though the code hasn’t historically been properly enforced.
Our landlady recently had our extractor serviced and checked by a contractor (among other much neglected tasks) as the city council was finally beginning to conduct inspections.
I repair rental homes and most of the homes I work on have a proper fan vented to the outside. These homes I work on are all single family detached homes.
Roasting/charring peppers is one I find much easier to do with a gas stove. A lot of the food I like to cook involves this step - fire roast some peppers, let them steam, remove the charred skin, and so on. Adds a real depth of flavour.
I could break out a blowtorch, or kinda badly do it in an oven (the taste is not the same/as deep as with fire), but the ability to just pop it on the flame for a minute is the best.
I’ve also found that I have much easier time controlling temperature with flame than even the really nice induction stoves, even with a LOT of practice.
Where induction is amazing IMO is delivering a lot of heat fast, so boiling water or getting a pan up to a high temp for searing.
Honestly, my preferred setup if I was building a kitchen would be a hybrid setup - one side gas, the other side induction.
Resistive heating? Sure. Those things are nasty. But otherwise... nothing beats 7.2 kW of inductive energy transfer straight into the bottom of your pan.
Current place I rent has those awful resistive heating stovetop, previous place had induction. I miss gas - for some stuff I now have to either use a small camp stove type gas thing or a blowtorch, electric (resistive or induction) simply is no fucking good at all for some cooking tasks.
Resistive sucks, induction does not. If you have induction pans, they will heat up faster than any gas stove. Boil water in less than 2 minutes. No gas or resistance electric range can come close to the energy transfer.
You absolutely can. You just need a roasting pan compatible with induction. An induction cooktop beats any other type in my experience. 1) I’m not breathing in harmful chemicals. 2) I’m not waiting around for the pots to get warm. 3) I feel like induction cooks faster than gas but I don’t have evidence. 4) While it’s more expensive to get into, it’s a lot healthier for you in terms of air quality and cooking quality.
And what about their kids that didn’t choose to get asthma?
And what about the adults who wouldn’t have chosen a gas stove if they had balanced and factual information rather than information tainted by corporate influence?
When my daughter was younger, I thought she might have respiratory issues from being born premature due to mild coughing fits almost her entire life. Tested for allergies and nothing came up.
When she was 5, we moved to a new house. When I read the recent research, I realized that this coughing declined around when we moved.
The difference? The old house had a microwave over the stove and vented inside. The new house vented outside.
Anecdotal, but the research connected the dots for me.
Even then people don’t turn their vents on universally. I’ve had to train the whole family on the habit because nobody is motivated to turn them on when they’re heating up water for Mac and cheese or something that seems “clean.”
I could maybe be more okay with gas stoves not being banned in new builds if there was automatic venting that turned on as soon as a burner turns on.
That's *barely* above the 1-hour guideline, and as evident in that photo it's an (illegal?) stove with no hood or ventilation. This just reinforces my prior beliefs—that this is a complete non-issue for normal, code-compliant stoves.
(Was NPR unable to take a photo of a NOx meter next to a normal stove?)