My grandmother in India cooked for many years with coal, then with a tank of liquid petroleum gas. As a child in California, I lived in an apartment with an electric stove, then in a house with a gas connection. In London, last summer, I stayed in an apartment with an induction stove that glowed red in an instant. In Kenya a few years before that, I spent hours talking to women cooking dinner in smoky kitchens, over charcoal.
I say all this to remind us that cooking fuels change all the time. Change is normal. Rarely is it as political as it has been this week in the United States, with a firestorm over gas stoves.
I’ve been trying to piece together why, and also, beyond the rhetoric, what impact gas stoves have on our health and the health of the planet.
Regular readers of Climate Forward will know that by gas, I mean what is often called “natural gas,” whose main ingredient is methane, a potent greenhouse gas responsible for global warming.
Why are we talking about gas stoves again?
The latest spark was a suggestion by a member of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Richard Trumka, Jr., to consider new regulations on gas stoves.
It came against the backdrop of a policy fight over the future of gas in homes across the United States. Over the last few years, as climate concerns have intensified, many local governments, including New York City, where I live, have enacted laws that require new buildings to be free of gas.
There’s been pushback. At least 21 Republican-led states have responded with pre-emptive bans on city gas bans, according to a tally by the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group. All this at a time when the Biden administration is offering ordinary consumers billions of dollars in tax rebates to switch from polluting gas appliances to electric ones.
We’re a divided country when it comes to using gas stoves.
But it’s not in the way you’d think. A majority of Americans use electric stoves. The states with the highest gas stove use are California, Nevada, and states in the Northeast and around the Great Lakes, according to Statistia, a consumer data company. It’s not a red-blue state divide.
But it’s weirdly become part of the U.S. culture wars.
The gas industry doesn’t like gas bans. In 2021, Rebecca Leber, reporting for Mother Jones at the time, documented the gas industry’s fingerprints on a variety of efforts to challenge gas bans.
This week, Republican lawmakers falsely claimed that the Biden Administration was proposing to pull gas stoves from people’s homes, prompting the Commission’s chairman, Alexander Hoehn-Saric, to say there was no such plan, and that the commission is looking into “health risks.”
How bad are the health risks?
A study published in December was part of the kerfuffle this week. It said gas stoves were associated with 12.7 percent of childhood asthma cases in the United States.
As Emily Oster, a Brown University economist, explained this week in her newsletter that the December paper is a meta-analysis of other papers. Meaning: The authors looked at a combination of other studies from around the world estimating the risk of asthma among children in households with gas stoves. They then applied that number to make an estimate about risks in the U.S., based on an additional estimate — the number of American households with gas stoves.
I should tell you that Oster, who has cast herself as a vetter of risks for parents, is also criticized by public health researchers. (She is not one.)
She points out that while the previous studies show a positive correlation between gas stove ownership and asthma incidence, the results aren’t consistent. She also points out that some U.S. states, like Pennsylvania, with moderate gas stove ownership have high childhood asthma rates. Other states with higher penetration of gas stoves — like New York and California — have lower asthma incidence. Could other environmental factors explain that mismatch? Probably.
There’s no question that gas stoves emit nitrous oxides. That’s linked to respiratory illness. Gas stoves also emit methane, even when stoves are off, and methane heats up the Earth’s atmosphere really fast.
How do they compare with other pollution sources, like fossil fuel-burning cars?
I cook on an old gas stove in a windowless kitchen. I can smell gas when I turn on the oven. I often open my living room window to let in fresh air., but that means letting in a lot of pollution from the street. How do I know what’s worse?
I haven’t found a study that answers that question.
Living near traffic is associated with higher asthma rates. Reducing pollution from cars and trucks could have very large effects on children’s health, especially the health of poor children, who are disproportionately exposed to air pollution.
Oster pointed to a study in Sweden that showed that reducing traffic, by putting in place a congestion tax, had measurably reduced acute asthma attacks in young children.
So as a practical policy matter, would it help to reduce traffic and invest in clean public transportation and safe bike lanes? Hugely. It would have all kinds of health benefits, especially for the most marginalized children in our cities.
Would getting rid of gas stoves make a huge difference for the climate?
Buildings account for around 13 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States; transportation is double that share. Most buildings emissions don’t come from gas stoves, though. They come from the gas boilers used for heating and hot water.
Replacing your gas boiler with an electric heat pump would have a far bigger impact on your climate footprint.
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Before you go: Trying to live a day without plastic
It’s all around us, despite its adverse effects on the planet. In a 24-hour experiment, one journalist tried to go a full day without using plastic products — or even touching plastic. The trouble started before he even put his feet on the floor in the morning.
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Manuela Andreoni, Claire O’Neill and Douglas Alteen contributed to Climate Forward. Read past editions of the newsletter here.
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