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Americans love their gas stoves. It's a romance fueled by a decades-old "cooking with gas" campaign from utilities that includes vintage advertisements, a cringeworthy 1980s rap video and, more recently, social media personalities. The details have changed over time, but the message is the same: Using a gas stove makes you a better cook.

But the beloved gas stove has become a focal point in a fight over whether gas should even exist in the 35% of U.S. homes that cook with it.

Environmental groups are focused on potential health effects. Burning gas emits pollutants that can cause or worsen respiratory illnesses. Residential appliances like gas-powered furnaces and water heaters vent pollution outside, but the stove "is the one gas appliance in your home that is most likely unvented," says Brady Seals with RMI, formerly Rocky Mountain Institute.

The focus on possible health risks from stoves is part of the broader campaign by environmentalists to kick gas out of buildings to fight climate change. Commercial and residential buildings account for about 13% of heat-trapping emissions, mainly from the use of gas appliances.

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The gas utility industry is fighting to preserve its business by downplaying existing science on gas stoves and indoor air quality. It points out that federal regulators have declined to regulate gas stoves more stringently. And it is investing in a range of campaigns to remind customers that cooking with gas is cheaper.

This battle is aimed at influencing your decision the next time you buy a new cookstove.

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Josiah Kephart is an environmental epidemiologist at Drexel University in Philadelphia who researches indoor air pollution from cookstoves in Latin America. On a sunny summer morning we met in his kitchen to test the pollution from his family's gas stove.

If you have an electric stove, the energy for cooking may come from fossil fuels, but the combustion happens at a power plant far away, Kephart says. "When you have a gas stove, that combustion is actually occurring right in your kitchen — you can see the blue flame down there," he says. "There is no smoke-free combustion."

The most common pollutants from gas stoves are nitrogen dioxide (NO2), carbon monoxide and formaldehyde. Advocates now are mostly focused on NO2, which the Environmental Protection Agency says is a toxic gas that even in low concentrations can trigger breathing problems for people with asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

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Federal agencies, including the EPA and the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), say they are paying attention to the gas stove pollution issue. But none has moved to regulate potentially harmful emissions, a point the gas industry emphasizes to dismiss concerns about possible health effects of stoves.

"Someone's going to have to claim this issue and really make a change, because I think as more consumers learn about it, you feel upset," says Seals with RMI.

RMI and three other environmental groups issued a report last year labeling gas stove emissions a threat to human health. They called on policymakers to regulate them more strictly and provide incentives for Americans to switch to electric.

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The gas line out the back of your stove is connected to a production and supply chain that leaks methane from start to finish.

Gas stoves emit pollution into your house and they are connected to a production and supply system that leaks the powerful greenhouse gas methane during drilling, fracking, processing and transport.

"Methane, which is what natural gas is made of, just really wants to leak," says Seals with RMI. That's a problem because methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than even carbon dioxide, though it doesn't linger in the atmosphere nearly as long.

President Biden's climate plan includes a goal to cut the carbon footprint of buildings in half by 2035 through incentives to retrofit homes and businesses with electric appliances and furnaces.

The AGA says methane emissions from gas utilities account for 2.7% of all greenhouse gas emissions, and they've declined nearly 70% since 1990, even as utilities have added customers. But the rest of the supply chain also leaks methane, including drilling, fracking, processing and transport. Some equipment is designed to vent, but much of the gas that escapes is unintentional and has been linked to tree deaths in places such as Boston and Philadelphia.

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To encourage more people to ditch natural gas, environmentalists are focusing on the gas stove. At first it may seem like an odd choice because other gas-burning devices in the home consume more fuel, notably furnaces.

But the stove is seen as a "gateway appliance" that drives the building of a vast fossil fuel infrastructure from wellhead to home. Talk to builders and real estate agents and many will say buyers want a gas stove. And gas utilities have helped fuel that assumption.

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It's not just environmental groups signing on to widespread electrification. The New England Journal of Medicine recently published an opinion piece by three physicians who recommended that "new gas appliances be removed from the market," along with ending industry subsidies and banning new gas hookups in buildings.

The Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, wants the federal government to offer incentives to switch from gas to electric appliances, water heaters and furnaces.

LINK

I'm a foodie and love to cook. Always have since high school. Always had a small double propane burner to fry fish and cook outside with gas. Now our current home has a gas stove, first time I've had one, and I love it.

These enviro-socialists trying to ban gas stoves can kindly eat shite.

This post was edited on 10/10/21 at 12:57 pm