On Cooking With Gas

Zvi have you actually tried induction? They have completely different and favorable properties.

You can buy an induction burner off Amazon for a paltry $50-$100.

They are the choice of rich people for new builds.

The inverse argument is that we know burning things indoors is bad, per the same physics you cited. It's hard to tell HOW bad - some have argued that secondhand smoke if you live with someone 40 years who smokes right next to you "only" reduces your expected lifespan about a year - but it's still bad.

And we know the stoves and plumbing also leak methane, which causes a lot of the warming, and they are a general fire hazard. Banning the stoves and gas supplies to homes would force everyone to switch to the superior alternatives...

(There is also a climate case to made in either direction, depending on where the marginal electricity is coming from, since often, as in Europe, the answer is ‘coal’ which is way worse than a gas stove.)

I don't believe this is true, that is, I don't believe that, in Europe, often, the marginal electricity is coming from coal. Of course this depends on what often means.

Digging into this question isn't easy, but I found a few things

• Coal produced about 15% of the electricity in the EU in 2020, and the trend is going down. This is obviously not an indication of the marginal electricity source.
• Within the EU, 13 of the 27 member states do not have a single coal plant.
• Even when coal plants are running, this doesn't mean that coal is the marginal source of electricity. Electricity from gas is more expensive, therefore whenever a gas plant is running, gas is the marginal source of electricity.
• I found this paper computing the marginal electricity source in Spain (see figure 2), between 2015 and 2021. Coal is the marginal source of electricity only a few percents of the time.
• I also found this paper computing the marginal electricity source in the EU as a whole in 2010 (see figure 1b). Back then, coal was the marginal source of electricity slightly below 60% of the time. Given that this was 13 years ago, this number must be lower now, how much though I don't know.

This doesn't undermine your points. Indeed:

• Coal is a dirty source of electricity, dirtier than gas and basically everything else.
• If we want to discuss the climate implications of gas stove vs electric stove, we should take into account the climate implications of the marginal production of electricity.
• If the marginal electricity source on the grid is gas, the advantage of using an electric stove isn't obvious.

I would agree with many commenters here about induction stovetops.

I used to have one, living in Russia, and now I have a gas one in the US (wasn't much choice here TBH). The induction was clearly superior. It cooked faster, had a timer, and was much easier to clean.

I should add that I had the cheapest induction one we could find back then.

However, banning gas stoves, and even talking about banning them, is clearly stupid now. We shouldn't ban stuff willy-nilly. We should have an extremely high bar to ban anything, not like "Hey somewhat had a paper that probably says something is somewhat dangerous".

I guess eventually, gas stoves would need to be priced out, or something, though. Once a majority of our electricity comes out of renewables.

P.S. I do agree that those old electric stovetops are just awful. I don't understand how come so many places still have them. And I did see good electric (non-induction) stove tops that have reasonable response time and can boil water faster than gas ones. Not sure how come you don't have them everywhere. Are they that new? I wanna see some explanation here. Because I'm confused!

Zvi this argument appears symmetrical to any other big government efficiency requirements.

Induction stoves are more efficient, both in energy usage and in their safety profile.  (no open flame, none of these combustion emissions, no chance of leaked methane leading to a fire or explosion).

LED bulbs are vastly more efficient.

Some air conditioner models are vastly more efficient.

Despite this, stupid individuals and greedy landlords will always purchase the cheapest product sold or what they are used to using.  So you have to literally make gas stoves, incandescent bulbs, and inefficient air conditioners illegal to be sold if they are below some empirical standard.  

This works.  It also drives market share to the superior product which gets cost reduced until it's often offered at a superior price point in terms of total cost than the product it replaced.  (example: LED bulbs are a couple dollars but are so much more efficient than incandescent they pay for themselves within a few months and theoretically last for decades)

This seems like a win/win use of government power.  The only losers are people who make up uninformed and ignorant objections like the one you just posted.  (not that improved products don't have tradeoffs, they do.  )

Some context from across the pond. In the Netherlands almost everyone had a gas stove, because we had lots of natural gas, and all houses were heated with natural gas.

Now all the rich people (and new houses) have started to switch to induction cooking whenever they have the chance, it's very much seen as the fancy, more expensive option that is desirable. There are some people who prefer gas, but if you're getting a new kitchen or new house, people generally want to go to induction cooking.

Is the difference between propane and natural gas meaningful here? The Internet(TM) seems to think that "gas" specifically refers to methane, whereas propane seems to show up as "LPG" in a few of those charts.

The Internet(TM) also seems to think that propane is cleaner-burning but more expensive than "gas" aka methane.

However, propane is colloquially referred to as "gas", in the sense that I have a gas stove but it runs propane and would require special conversion to safely burn methane. I wonder how much this distinction confounds reporting about how many households use "gas"?

A glance at https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=4070 suggests that propane might be more of a rural thing, which would make sense as its higher BTUs per volume compared to methane make it more economical in areas where much of the actual cost is the expense of bringing out a truck to refill one's tank of it.

My ideal stove (which I don't think anyone makes, for various practical reasons) has three burners, one gas, one induction and one electric.

• Induction because induction is interesting, efficient, clean, and works well with ferrous cookware
• Gas because induction doesn't work with some cookware, and sometimes you need an actual flame
• Electric because gas burners suck at low temperature operations -- they get hot spots -- and induction doesn't work with some cookware.

Three burners because that's the most I can effectively use at one time. But maybe having four burners (with a second induction or gas burner) would make sense.

>I have been in otherwise quite nice Airbnbs with electric stoves so slow and terrible that they made me not want to cook breakfast. I have yet to see a good one.

Technology Connections said he was surprised to discover electric stoves are actually not slower than gas. Not induction, just old electric stoves, like his parent's 15 year old range. Gas stoves are quick to heat up and cool down, they have less thermal inertia. So gas feels faster than electric. But actual cooking time is same or slower.

I'm so surprised by this I wonder if he got something wrong by testing with water only. Some other commenters suggest maybe he had the gas turned up too high, so he was losing heat from it going around his pan.

Other commenters agree and suggest the reason people think electric is slow, is because some pans are not flat or smooth, so they don't make contact with the flat surface of an electric range. This can be a huge loss of efficiency.

Ahh, further down the comments, somebody mentions cheap apartment blocks sometimes install electric stoves in non standard configurations (less than 240 volt three phrase power) and run the stoves at 50 to 75 percent capacity. Because maybe the apartment was split into two units, and they didn't upgrade the power. Underclocked stoves, essentially.

Thanks for this post.

I saw the study. Then I saw that some prominent elites were talking about it and that various people I appreciate consider it as a big sinister agenda to ban gas stoves.

And I wasn't sure the subject really became a widespread talking point, whether people were needlessly freaking out, or whether the study was even good or not. But It also didn't seem important enough to dive into and research. So this post definitely answered my questions.

I would have thought that toasters would cause more indoor air pollution than gas stoves? I’m not sure if this is the most accurate way to measure air pollution but toasters smell fume-y whereas gas hobs don’t.

I also wish to point out that the flame on a gas hob is blue all the time, except for the first second or two after ignition. Whereas the bunsen burners we used at school were put on a sooty yellow flame much of the time. I wonder whether chemistry teachers have an unusually high rate of asthma?

Agree with the other induction converts, after switching to induction, cooking with gas feels like riding a horse to work. Faster and so easy to clean. The ease of cleaning makes cooking less work so I do it more.

No opinion on banning gas, but I would 100% support efforts to ban wood stoves. My neighbors have them and if the wind pattern is just right it's a nightmare. I suspect they are using wet wood or something because it has to be breaking some kind of ordinance.

Funny, I had no idea that so many houses used electric stoves, I've only ever seen gas (except in very new buildings). This was in Minnesota, the UK, and Massachusetts. 

Even among my Twitter followers, quite a few want to ban gas stoves, with a strong partisan effect.

To be fair, you phrased this as “new construction” in the Twitter poll.

I would like to see them throttled (perhaps not banned but discouraged) in new residential construction, not in existing residential dwellings. Then it sort of works like alcohol licenses in Colorado. They can be inherited but it’s hard to get new ones (approvals in this case, not the actual stoves).

That goes against some other libertarian leanings I have, but I’m intrigued by the scarcity it would create/maintain. I think it would improve/keep urban character. Gas stoves have character and if you just let anyone have them, they’ll lose their je ne sais quoi. I like that they pair well with old neighborhoods and wood floors. I don’t want the suburbs to mimic that and cheapen it—to their own detriment. Being a suburb that’s poorly attempting to mimic urbanity is just ugly and is a bad substitute for coming up with novel ideas.

I know this sounds strange, but Denver suburbs have this trend where they have these little pockets that try to create an artificial sense of urbanity—including urban restaurants opening franchises—in these fugazi pockets of inorganic city, but with massive parking lots and no sense of walkability. It’s just gross. It’s tacky and it’s poor taste.

Commercially, I’m okay with new and existing restaurants using them.