After a long most of it involved with both state and federal law making, I found that capitalists chiefly blunted the law, ensuring that change was glacial.
Sure. If you can’t get your laws passed, it’s easier to blunt/water down/lobby well-meaning laws.
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Surprisingly, I just heard that it is not that small. My understanding is that it is about 10%.
I don’t see the point in comparing your neighbors behavior to anyone else’s behavior. What would be the point? If we want to continue to have a habitable planet, we have to get away from fossil fuels. I don’t think any sensible person is making the argument that one should switch from gas to electric for efficiency reasons. It’s all about getting away from fossil fuels. And any kind of move like that typically happens incrementally.
The point is that we all have a carbon footprint. Someone who flies and drives constantly is burning metric tons of JP-1A and gas. The neighbor keeps to home and cooks two plates of food a day on a gas burner. Same thing applies to countries on a macro scale. There’s a profound inequity in even “incrementally” banning all gas stoves without taking the entire context into account…
If your point is that there’s no room in anyone’s footprint for burning hydrocarbons, that is truly radical. Hundreds of millions would starve if NG couldn’t be burned to make ag fertilizers. Most of humanity’s chemical needs couldn’t be met.
Yes, in fact that’s a commonly-made argument. But I agree it’s not sensible.
10%? As in what? As in 10% of residential usage of gas is for cooking? Residential usage of natural gas is 15% of the total natural gas usage. So if 10% of the residential use is for cooking. Then we are talking about .15 X 0.10 = .015 = 1.5%
I think any sensible person should in fact talks about efficiency. Right now most of US electric actually come from fossil fuel. Coal and gas make up 65%. Nuclear power makes up another 20%. 85% right here.
Hydroelectric is not exactly environmentally friendly and all dams eventually die and cause their own problems. Let’s count hydro, wind, solar…etc. that is 15% of US power plant output. So when a person switch from gas to electric, on average, he is still burning coal, gas, oil, or using nuclear power. This isn’t exactly addressing the problem by switching from a gas stove to an electric stove.
In its simplest term, electricity is not “free”. Electricity comes from somewhere, and ignoring its source and ignoring its efficiency is a problem.
That being said, I am not against electric stoves. I actually am quite for electric stoves for more of a safety angle. I just think the entire environmental argument for electric stoves are… at best exaggerated, at worse, false.
There are several ways to slice and dice this, and all of them lead to very, very small numbers associated with cooking with gas.
Of ALL residential energy uses in USA, a tiny 1.3% is attributable to cooking. More energy is consumed powering TVs (2.6%) and computers (1.7%). Heating water and interior spaces, cooling spaces and other uses total 81%. https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/built-environment/residential-buildings-factsheet
But wait, ALL Residential and Commercial building use COMBINED is only 13% of US energy. It’s thought that Residential’s share is about 1/3, so only about 4.3%. If you do the math, 1.3% of 4.3% , we’re talking about 0.0731% of total energy consumed that’s in cooking.
But wait, what’s the share attributable to gas? Only 35% of Americans cook on gas appliances, and most of them are dual-fuel already. You’d have to back out electric ovens, MWOs and countertop appliances.
There are FAR more meaningful targets to take aim at than gas stoves. But as the recent spate of internet BS proves, the little blue flames that constitute <1% of even household GGEs is irresistible.
Might as well go after the other indoor pollutant devils, candles and incense. https://nepis.epa.gov/Exe/ZyPDF.cgi?Dockey=P1009BZL.txt
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I know. Again, I actually quite like induction as a technology. I just believe if you want to sell something, then don’t over exaggerate too much. I think any gas banning of sort is more symbolic. It is placing the cart before the horse. We need to have better efficiency and/or environmental friendlier power plants first. Only then, we can have a discussion about switching from gas to electricity. It makes very little sense to go the other way around – which is all the recent talks.
As for natural gas in-house, I actually do agree there is natural gas pollution, and I think each consumer should make that choice. However, like you have implied, natural gas pollution is still rank low to the overall in-house pollution, so it seems again a bit out of order – if we are talking about legislating it.
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The primary point is that we MUST get away from fossil fuels, and the argument for changing from gas to electric isn’t a question of efficiency, but of source fuel. Yes, at the moment much if not most electricty comes from burning fossil fuels. But that is changing and will continue to change, while a gas stove will always burn gas.
I’m not militating against gas stoves, BTW. Just pointing out that efficiency is a silly metric to use for a reason to change from gas to electric unless you’re a commercial operation. I also acknowledge that residential gas range usage is a minor contributor to climate change. But even at the 1.5% number cited above, that’s not trivial. That’s 1/70th of the pie.
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What is the value of pointing out that everyone has a different carbon footprint? Sensible policy decisions are made on a statistical basis, not an anecdotal one. I’m not advocating for the banning of gas stoves, and that’s clearly just not going to happen. At least not any time soon.
I think you’re substantially overstating your case to say it would somehow be a profound inequity to do so though. I’ve nearly always had a gas stove, and prefer them over electric stoves. But I sure wouldn’t lose any sleep over having to use an electric range as a result of legislation aimed at mitigating climate change. Radical policy changes in that direction are LONG overdue, but our legislators are venal and cowardly, and so appropriate changes have not been made, and don’t even seem to be in the works. We should have a clear schedule for the elimination of internal combustion engines to the extent practical. But we don’t. We should be on a massive campaign to improve efficiency in all things, but we’re not. We should stop all public investment in petroleum exploration, but we haven’t. We should have strong regulation of all sources of leakage of greenhouse gases into the environment. But we don’t… We should have substantial carbon taxes that go up every year to reflect the actual cost of fossil fuels. But we don’t. Climate change presents us with an existential problem, and we continue to act as if radical measures aren’t called for. It says a lot about our race and our society, none of it good.
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The gas stove debate is a Feel Good distraction. The volume of NG burned in cooking is FAR less than 1.5% of home enegy useage.
Since you’re so serious, why not just ban all NG combution in homes? How about power plants? Chemical plants? Get serious about that, first. Want to ban indoor smoking entirely?
He’s got a lot of really good, informative content. He showed me how to refurb the electricals on the 1950s Sunbeam toaster I got for $8 (IIRC) at a thrift store, which I gifted to one of my daughters.
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Our electric induction kettles (all 1500 watts) boil water in exactly the same time as our microwave (also 1500W). Go figure! 
