Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Hobgoblins in your kitchen, to frighten you into switching to a climate friendly electric cooker.
Your Natural Gas Stove Is Fueling Climate Change And Harming Your Health—And It’s Worse Than Scientists Thought
Jeff Kart
Contributor SustainabilityFor those of us who enjoy cooking meals with natural gas, there’s a warning from scientists at Stanford University.
You may have heard that natural gas stoves generate carbon dioxide by burning natural gas as a fuel. It makes sense.
But natural gas stoves also leak unburned methane into the air, a greenhouse gas that’s 86 times as potent as carbon dioxide (CO2) over a 20-year period. Researchers found that this leaking has a climate impact comparable to the carbon dioxide emissions from a half-million cars.
Home methane leaks contribute to a third as much warming as the carbon dioxide generated by combustion during cooking. Gas stoves also can expose users to respiratory, disease-triggering pollutants like nitrogen oxides (NOx).
…
Read more: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffkart/2022/01/27/your-natural-gas-stove-is-fueling-climate-change-and-harming-your-health-and-its-worse-than-scientists-thought/?sh=718329222c63
Food chemistry is great fun if you don’t enjoy peace of mind. Nitrous oxides and nitric acid produced from gas flames is nothing compares to what happens to the food IN the cooker. Frying is especially naughty – deep frying at high temperatures, and likely pan frying, creates dioxane and acrylamide, and a host of other chemical nasties.
Of course, if you think about all this too much, the worry is more likely to kill you than any actual toxins in your food. Stress is bad for your heart.
You know what? I think I’ll keep my gas cooker, and keep enjoying life.
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Forbes has obviously jumped the shark into full up Green Blob insanity.
And Forbes is a “conservative” publication. They should ask for sustainable government.
Was! Deep progressive ownership has corrupted both Forbes and SciAm ….not to mention PopSci, Wired…and others…
I told SciAm to cancel my subscription years ago. Too liberal and always pushing the Green scam.
Plus they kept adding syllables to my name. If they can’t get that correct, it’s pretty obvious their accuracy is in question.
Sadly there are no good science magazines around these days. I gave up on Sci Am over a decade ago due to the AGW garbage they kept peddling. All I have now is a subscription to Discover. It, like all of the others, toes the AGW line, but for the most part they only devote perhaps a page or two out of a 90+ page magazine to it.
not just that
all the Engineering Magazines are the same
Australia (IEAust)
UK (IChemE)
America (ACheme)
they think engineers are illiterate so they keep publishing ESG bs and other crap because they hire Politically Correct morons
Sustainable government – we already had that when Carl Schmidt declared elections were not necessary, the best one was already in place!
It went to hell after the Forbes family sold it.
B. C. and Malcolm Forbes are rolling over in their graves and I suspect Steve Forbes and the rest of the family regret selling to the yokels who now own it.
Sadly, Scissor, there is a great deal of buy-in to AGW and woke investment economics by allegedly conservative groups and individuals. The draw is that there are huge profits and rent-seeking positions available to early adopters and for virtue signaling support for impossible programs and agendas. Mike Bloomberg and Tom Steyer are just two examples.
I’ve never seen either of those names in the same sentence with the word “conservative”.
I believe the majority owner of Forbes is a Chinese company.
Somebody ought to break it to them that gas cookers emit far less CO2 than the, so-called, ‘green’ electricity. It’s a con job once again – “conform, conform!”
Get ready. It’s just a matter of time that we are asked to stay indoors, isolate to flatten the global warming curve.
Yeah, indoors with the window open in the blizzard!
Chaplin – the Gold Rush :
Thanks, bonbon.
That clip reminded me of W.C. Fields from the movie The Fatal Glass of Beer, saying “It ain’t a fit night out for man nor beast,” each time he opened the cabin door.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOJVk79N_t4&ab_channel=joemckechnie
Regards,
Bob
I will take my steak medium rare from my gas grill, thank you very much!
I’m with you.
I had the pleasure to enjoy an excellent medium rare filet mignon at the Capital Grille Houston Galleria earlier this week. I understand that they pan sear then finish off in an oven.
That’s how I cook most of my steaks in the wintertime. In the summer, I use the outdoor propane grill. However, in my community there is some absolute azzhole who sells “PurpleAir” air “quality” monitors … and he claims that Co2 spikes occur at dinner time in the summer … and scolds everyone to STOP firing up their BBQ’s because … the children. Think of the children’s health …
and the polar bears
I find that a plastic bag over my head, cinched at the neck, keeps all that bad ol’ air out.
Perhaps you should suggest it to that neighbor if he’s so afraid of breathing.
Just charcoal for me, thank you!
Too many “spare the air” days in CA … the army of air quality sniffers will find you and FINE you for fouling the air with your DIRTY bbq.
If a Commisar of the People’s Republic shows up, trying to interfere with my BBQ, I’ll simply make a citizen’s arrest for trespass. I can still do that in Arizona.
(I think that you can simply shoot them in Texas?)
Sure, the gas grill is great, but to do justice to a 3cm thick rib-eye :
Dumas, Chef, Quebec:
https://youtu.be/Kd80mYv8Z2M?t=280
Think what the alarmists do when you light the Cognac!
OK. I want to go next time I am in Quebec. Delicious.
and the more flatulent the bullock the better
I could get an electric BBQ, but the electricity comes from a natural gas power station at most of the times I want to grill, and it really tastes a lot better done with gas….
I actually have a Phillips countertop infrared grill, and love it. Cooks like an outdoor grill, and cleans up by putting the grill and drip pan in the dishwasher – and that’s it. The cook is even, predictable, and controllable. For just my wife and me, it is ideal for a quick steak with garlic toast.
That said, I can’t stand cooking on an electric or induction cooktop. It’s gas, and nothing but gas for me.
I believe in the civilising effect of cooking with fire and don’t like my food partly raw so it is very well done for me.
I once confused a waiter in Singapore by say that my Australian steak was still moo-ing and please to take it back to the kitchen and cook it.
Ah yes, when i was in australia i noticed that the steak was cooked until dust comes out of it, the english disease.
I had to send steaks back several times for new ones, no one particularly happy
Well it had to be worse than they thought. But probably not as bad as cooking using cow or chicken dung, or even wood.
Why only Greens always are farting ut of their brain ??? 😀
First they came for the gas cookers…
This is just the opening salvo. Home cooking is energy intensive no matter how you do it and most of the energy goes into heating the appliances and the pots and pans and water that gets discarded, not the food. Mark my words, next we will be exhorted to eat only in canteens, or failing that, to microwave prepared foods. Once they manage that, they don’t even need to try to persuade us to go vegan because we’ll only be able to eat what we’re given.
It’s all part of the ‘edge of the wedge’ . .
Spoylent Green
Funny thing happened. My wife and I have always loved gas stoves, and we could never imagine cooking on anything else. We moved into a new house a couple of years ago, and it had an electric cooktop. We immediately began to plan on how we were going to replace it with gas. But, the electric cooktop was induction, and we have grown to love it, especially since the top is so easy to clean. That said, gas is probably still better for cooking overall, and I won’t lose any sleep over it destroying the planet.
We have a gas range and will keep that until one of two things happens:
1 – We become forgetful and there’s a serious chance we might forget to turn off the gas burner. The induction cooker is way better in that regard.
2 – One of the valves on the gas range fails and we can’t get a replacement.
Our children have induction ranges and they’re a delight to cook on. For some things they’re actually better than gas.
On the other hand, our winter gas bills are large and our summer gas bills are tiny. Most of our summer gas usage is for the water heater. Cooking consumes a tiny amount of the natural gas we use.
Going after gas stoves would have about the same effect on greenhouse gases as forbidding night lights in the baby’s bedroom. Something like that.
they’ll come for those night lights next….
or the kids?
Induction ranges are good until you need a pacemaker.
Sounds like you lucked out. Every place I’ve lived in the last 20 or so years has had a glass cook top (non-induction) and my experience is that they are hard to clean and if you choose to use cast iron pans you have to be very careful not to crack the glass. Also, unlike the old coil-style burners, glass cook tops take forever to heat up and cool down. If I was stuck with electric, I’d opt for the coil burners.
Ive been wondering about infrared stove tops. They are a single sealed top, very much to my liking. They claim rapid heating and precise temperature control. I don’t know anyone who has used one, however, and couldn’t find any reviews that compared them with other options.
Electric stoves are not clean. They emit ultrafine particles in quantities comparable to gas stoves. The mechanism however is completely different. In the gas stove, UFPs are created in the flame. For electric stoves, they are (probably) created from a surface film of semivolatile organics (in every home from plastics, furniture, etc.), which boil off as the temperature increases, reach saturation a few cm above the stove, and then nucleate to form UFPs.
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.6b03248
Dammit – no matter what we do we’re F-d!!!
Such is life.
ES&T is going down in quality apparently. Much of the data given in the table in the supporting information consist of 17 and 18 significant figure cell entries.
Al foil was exposed for 3.5840277777824667 days.
Never underestimate nanoseconds. They must be using some fantastic quality timers.
Forget nanoseconds, he’s down to femto seconds.
I think the intention is to have us allowed only electric stoves—and then to turn off our electricity.
You mean with a “Smart” (i.e. hopelessly stupid) meter?
Make sure you boil the water when the power is out.
They won’t actually turn your electricity off unless you vote for the wrong candidates, or engage in other egregious examples of wrongthink. But it will of course be intermittent and highly rationed, and you will be obliged to engage in spontaneous public demonstrations of gratitude when your ration is increased from 10 kWh to 12 kWh a week.
Don’t forget – you will own nothing and you will be happy. Or else!
i find ufps to be a flavor enhancer.
This complete bull crap is beginning to make me regret not spending the $30K+ to get a gas range, propane tank installed and plumbed, and a whole-house propane generator…better get going on that…
A juvenile ignoramus farts.
Another article from the same Jeff Kart:
“A technology company called Our Next Energy (ONE) says it’s demonstrated a prototype battery in an electric vehicle that traveled 752 miles without recharging. The experimental battery, retrofitted into a 2021 Tesla Model S, drove across Michigan in late December at an average speed of 55 mph, ONE says.”
That is a pretty good trick! Hard to believe it.
Because of improvements in battery chemistry and motor innovations, such feats will be possible. The one you mention, link is below.
Thus, “range anxiety” will not be a problem for EVs individually. All other criticisms still apply.
“Our Next Energy” Tests Its 750-Mile Range Prototype Battery In A Tesla Model S – CleanTechnica
that site shows a photo of the battery but no dimensions, no cost, and didn’t mention the weight- it’s still just a prototype so I don’t suppose they can offer a cost when its in production
And a fairly high price for the Model S. Now try it in a low end EV- the kind that we peons will have to buy unless we learn to live with a mule.
Unless they have invented a new element, major improvements in battery chemistry are unlikely.
Electric motors have been around 90% efficient for 100 years now. Even getting them up to 100% efficient (utterly impossible) wouldn’t result in a doubling of range.
“The results were validated by a third party using a vehicle dynamometer where the test vehicle, a Telsa Model S retrofitted with an experimental battery, achieved 882 miles at 55 mph.”
It’s a start. The trip across Michigan, about 170 miles, is more of a real world demonstration.
I wonder how many sticks of dynamite it’s equivalent to if it blows up.
I can’t imagine driving 7-800 miles at 55 mph
In most of the country, driving at 55mph is going to get you rear ended.
I suspect they removed the back seat to make room for a bigger battery.
Their odometer must have been a little off. Michigan is not anywhere near 752 miles across. And you probably would have a hard time driving 55 mph without getting shot or run off the road.
Jeff Kart, Contributor Sustainability Section. His bio at Forbes:
Translation: no experience actually making anything work, even as a hobby. His professional writing reflects his declared fondness for “horror and thrillers”.
People like him who are in charge are adept at making horror a reality.
As a lover of camping, does he set a fire,grill a fish? With wood or a camping burner?
Fires keep the cloud of flies off…
So he’s a big fan of escapism and fantasy, but not so much of reality? Says it all really, doesn’t it?
Reminds of of the graduate marketing manager survivor from the B Ark. “Alright, if you’re so smart, what color would you paint the hexagon?”
Its always something…no win for the little people living a comfortable life.
Morons everywhere and they’re all liberals or commie b*stards, same thing actually.
It always amazes me that it is blithely assumed that electricity delivered to your home or business is free of green house gas emissions or produces less GHGs than burning gas directly. Even assuming that the GHG emissions due to delivering the gas to its point of use are greater than for delivering the gas to a power plant, losses in the electricity system (40% efficiency for the generation of electricity and line losses etc} would surely push up the GHG emissions above those of burning the gas directly.
Much like ‘electric’ ( coal fired ) cars. What’s wrong with LPG?
Who cares what the green blob thinks or says?!
just ignore them, in that, ignorance truly is bliss
Restaurants with legacy gas cooking will be like taxi medallions.
Compare these two:
Transport gas lossless to homes, heat eggs.
Transport gas to generator, make steam with losses, turn turbines with losses, transport electricity with losses to substations with losses, convert to AC with losses, accept anything not used is lost, heat electric elements, burn eggs, heat hot water to scrub burned pan. Smile at successfully virtue signaling.
Transporting gas is not lossless, even in pipes.
I dismissed the two head to burn paths as a rounding to zero.
Ok have over 50 houseplants in my calgary house and all are noticeably happier when I installed the gas range/oven
Gas roolz
We’ve all heard of those people who claim that talking to their plants makes them healthier.
I’ve always suspected that it was actually all the CO2 that they were exhaling onto their plants that was making them healthier.
That too but i do most of my talking with the keyboard on here, no co2
We need a smart PR person to create an international movement FOGS (Friends of Gas Stoves) flying a flag SOS Save Our Stoves to warn everyone on the planet who uses gas for cooking what the RE loonies are up to.
I’ve got Hobgoblins in my kitchen – brewed by Wychwood Brewery. And very good they are, too! Hard luck on those who live in less enlightened parts of the world.
Talked me into it.
Isn’t it true that if all of the Greens ceased to exist, there would be no climate problem?
As well as a reduction in stress levels and government’s worth their pay (well I can dream!).
I can only imagine how much the economies of the world would improve.
>>a climate friendly electric cooker.
That might hugely depending on the situation and the dish you are cooking!
Gas and electric stoves have intrinsic losses, I am not at all convinces which one wins over the other overal!
It isn’t about efficiency, its about personal choice. You should be free to make the choice rather than be forced to accept what the government tells you that you have to use.
When we moved to this house, it was all electric. Neither my wife nor myself really liked cooking on an electric range (having grown up cooking on gas). One of the neighbors had regular heart attacks when his electricity bills arrived, so he persuaded a couple of other to join him in trying to get natural gas laid in. They succeeded, and we had a quote for runing it up to our house. The killer was that they insisted that they would replace a perfectly good heat-pump based HVAC system with a gas one. What about AC? Does gas do that??? Of course not, we would have to see to that ourselves. Ok, how about just running a gas pipe? $25k.
Of course, we didn’t bite. Those that did, and have no AC sometimes seem to regret it…
Anyway. We still wanted a gas range. A local gas fitter ran a gas pipe for us from the kitchen to an outside wall. A 30lbs propane tank, and a propane gas range works just fine. The 30lbs tank lasts about a year.
No methane from my gas range!
That’s why my husband and I are planning on doing one day – we have no city gas available at all and don’t anticipate it ever being available. For now we deal with the glass cooktop , which takes forever and a day to heat up and cool down, plus it’s a bear to keep clean. My husband said if he has to stay with electric he’d much rather have a cook top with the old-style coil burners. At least then we’d be able to use cast iron pans without the risk of cracking the glass top.
As for heat, we would like to convert our oil boiler to propane, but that is a less pressing concern. When the boiler has to be replaced, we may look into it then. For my local climate (central Maryland – Baltimore area), heat pumps stink on ice. Winter nights are regularly below freezing and all they do is blow cold air. No thanks….I’m either going to continue to burn the byproducts of 300 million year old dead trees, or, if I have to, I’ll burn very recently dead trees in my woodstove.
Here in the Oregon Willamette Valley, it’s rare for the temperature to fall below freezing. The heat pump works fine most of the time. When it gets near and below freezing there are resistive heat strips that kick in – electricity meter starts to spin fast though. So it works pretty well.
Just before Christmas the fan motor in the air handler died. As you might expect, the local distributor didn’t have one ins stock, and the manufacturer was closed until the New Year. We had a very cold Christmas and New Year. Three electric heaters just couldn’t keep up – mainly because the (two story) house is semi-open plan. The occasional wood fire helped to cheer things up a bit, and even added a bit to the warmth.
But I don’t think I would use a heat pump much above 45° latitude.
You are going to need more than a 30lbs propane tank for heating though 🙂
The thing that ‘kills’ most small electric motors is the ‘Motor Run Capacitor’ while there is perfectly nothing wrong with the motor itself. ##
That small-ish cylindrical thing attached to the motor.
With a modicum of care you can fix it yourself using just a small screwdriver.
Random Image found by Google
## Replacing the entire motor because of it is akin to changing your car when you get a flat tyre
This past year the washer in our apartment stopped working. I was kind of hoping that we would get a new washer. The repairman just put in a new capacitor and it started running again.
Here in the UK you can buy single or double induction ‘hobs’ that simply plug into any wall socket. Prices start at 30GBP
Get a couple and simply sit them atop your existing glass/ceramic hob
Here’s a lovely single-ring hob, made by top quality, made by Tefal at 55 GBP (You’re paying for the name here.
https://www.argos.co.uk/product/9147782?clickSR=slp:term:induction%20cooker:1:482:1
The UK discounters like Aldi and Lidl sell the equivalent for half that money
BUT, they don’t have the grunt for a deep fat frying ** – you’d need a stand-alone fryer for that
** That is, a fryer with real fat in it, such as beef dripping. if you use vegetable oil, start munching down extra Vitamin C like your life depends on it. Because it does.
Inductions have all the advantages of gas but you ain’t gonna set fire to anything, blow the house up, wreck your house/furniture/clothes with water vapour condensation & mould.
Or repeatedly be semi poisoning yourself with Carbon Monoxide. That shit is cumulative and even small amounts make you stupid, dizzy, almost ‘drunk’.
Some of us suspect that is why so many folks like cooking on gas 😀
Before it drives up your blood pressure and hastens the arrival of your own personal heart attack
A great party-trick with an induction cooker is to put a sheet of kitchen tissue on the hob, under your frying pan and then cook up some bacon, eggs, black pudding, tomato, sausage and fried bread.
The tissue won’t be marked, apart from showing up how grubby the underside of your pan was/is – maybe not when in ‘Polite Comany’
Once you get the hang of the timer, the instant response (faster than gas, seriously) and that it will turn any old pan into a slow-cooker for melt-in-the-mouth beef, belly pork & casserole ‘things’
And ‘things’ where you can set it it, leave it and forget it while it does the cooking business.
Just think of all the extra time you can get with the kids, going shopping or for UK folks, slobbed out in front of the TV drinking
(UK is now such a dump that’s all there is left to do)
Once you learn induction, There Is No Going Back.
Unless you’re on a date with Fred Flintstone
I know that they make propane powered refrigerators, so I suppose a natural gas powered AC should be possible.
I also know that the only place where propane powered fridges are used is in places where electricity isn’t available. So I assume that the operating costs for the propane version would be higher.
Guilty as charged. Did it many years ago on safety grounds
In New Zealand we had the delightful publicity around the leader of our Green Party participating in a sausage sizzle around a gas barbecue at their conference.
Let me get this straight. They were browning their sausages around a gas bbq.
Sounds like something Emmanuel Macron and Justin Trudeau might do.
Surely Justin (they/them/Xi) but unsure of macaroon?
C’ést marrant, mais
https://migusto.migros.ch/fr/recettes/marrons-grilles-au-four
grilled chesnuts…
Yum! I remember buying those from street vendors in Paris around Christmas time. Standing next to their mobile ovens for warmth while eating them…
So if burning natural gas for cooking is bad for the climate (I doubt it) then burning natural gas or any fossil fuels to mine and transport resources, produce steel, concrete, glass, plastic and electrical components and to assemble and install wind turbines and solar panels must be one of the most evil plots yet launched by right, pardon me left-wing zealots ever.
Why do you expect “left-wing zealots” to be rational?