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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The leaking methane when off claim simply is not true. The utilities add mercaptan to the natural gas, so that if there is a malfunction/leak you can smell it immediately and shut off the mains. Same is true for gas furnaces and hot water heaters.
Yes, we’d be seeing house explosions all over if true
Just more Bs
I love my gas stove, they’ll have to pry it from my cold dead hands
Yes, natural gas is odorless and colorless and is lighter than air. As such it displaces oxygenated air in a room from the top down and accumulates until it finds an ignition source. That’s why mercaptan is added so any leak can be detected immediately. The human nose can detect mercaptan in microgram amounts per liter of air, well under any explosive natural gas concentration. That’s why natural gas explosions generally occur only in unoccupied buildings.
I thought they were talking about leaks in the parts per million level.
Natural gas in the atmosphere is in the parts per billion level, and amounts leaked from homes would be only a small fraction of that.
Since nobody has been able to demonstrate that global warming is a problem, the extremely small portion of that warming that is due to CH4, much less then even tinier portion of that, that is coming from homes, is even less of a problem.
My new natural gas oven arrives in a few weeks. It’ll join my gas furnace, gas water heater and gas fireplace to make one big happy gas family. 🙂
That’s pretty standard where I live. It’s too cold for heat pumps, electric water heaters are ridiculously expensive to install and a gas fireplace with electronic controls is so easy to keep going.
i think this whole global warming business will end by 2030. When we see that the observations don’t match up the models at all, they’re gonna have to explain themselves. The only problem is we’re all going to be using “clean energy” instead of our fossil fuels.
It should have ended in November 2009 when all those emails were leaked. It didn’t. It will only end when a cooling trend that can’t be fudged away appears. Probably decades from now, and by then the nouveau bolsheviks will have achieved their goal and it won’t matter.
At some point the Holocene will end and Chicago will be under a mile of ice again for 90,000 years. Nobody will be campaining about global warming then. If you “follow the science™”, it’s getting late in the game and the optimum is already over.
The trouble is that they will claim that the move from fossil fuel to renewables was ” wot did it “.
This is all the result of the “Covering Climate Now” conspiracy (see Kip Hansen’s 22 May 2021 WUWT piece: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/05/22/following-the-money-covering-climate-now/ )
https://coveringclimatenow.org/sharing-library/
All the soi-disant “journalists” regurgitated the same story. It was all over NPR and the Associated Press (Seth “The Moron” Borenstein, again).
It’s just copy and paste crap that the “journalists” use instead of actually doing any work.
That Kip Hansen post needs to be pinned to the top periodically.
One of the biggest problems with a household Propane tank company here, is that the one guy they have delivering at a nearby town is down sick.
“… 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. “
________________________________________
An actual statistic repeated adnausium but the climate crusaders never tell us how much the increase in methane will run up global temperature. Probably because they don’t want to say that it’s essentially zero.
They also fail to tell us how much a half-million cars would run-up global temperature. Also essentially zero.
Just like the battery-electric vehicle, electric cookers run on coal, oil, and natural gas, you just don’t get the smoke and purty flame at the point of use.
Well, boys and girls, I did wonder how long it would be until the Greenbeaners would condemn cooking and warming a home with gas, and it wasn’t as long as i’d expected.
This is when that “not just NO, but HELL NO” part comes up and the crackpots need a severe lesson in reality. It is winter in my kingdom, and that means cold, snow, ice, possibly bitter winds from those Polar Bears up North of us.
My response to these geniuses is both “YOU FIRST, birdbrain!” and “I wanna see you start a fire by rubbing two sticks together.”
Really, I do want them to have a reality check in the form of a dose of the medicine they wish to inflict on us.
If that doesn’t shut them up, what will?
I do know how to cook on a wood-fired stove, just in case anyone is wondering. Baking bread might require some practice, but there is also the pure ignorance in their notion that generating electricity does not result in CARBON (CO2) PRODUCTION!!!!
What a bunch of loons. Oh, wait – calling them “loons” is an insult to the real loons. “Bunch of dimwitted iggernunt mopes” might be more appropriate.
Methane is now 86 times as potent as CO2, first it was 4 times, then they told me it was 17 times next it was 45 times, good Lord now its 86 times as potent. One way or another some one has a meth problem but I’m not convinced it’s methane.
The IPCC assessment reports have mostly increased the Global warming Potential (GWP) numbers over the years:
AR1 it was around 50
AR2 – 60
AR3 – back to 50
AR4 – 70 or so
AR5 – 86
The GWP numbers use the CO2 concentration as a standard. Who has ever heard of a metric that uses a standard that constantly changes?
They determine the answer they want to see, then fiddle with the numbers until they get it.
Biden inflation!
Can anyone tell me what they mean by methane is 85 times more powerful than CO2 as a greenhouse gas. This sounds like complete bullshit . Wijngaarden and Happer establish methane’s effect on absorption, like that of CO2 as being essentially saturated and their work looks pretty solid to me.
Also I understand that
W&H METHANE AND CLIMATE
by W. A. van Wijngaarden and W. Happer
was rejected on mickey mouse peer review on one journal and so the climatariat denounce it as denialist maunderings .
Surely to God they can get it published somewhere with a proper peer review system
An article on why this has not been done this would be instructive. Andy May perhaps?
The GWP bullshit compares equal masses of CO2 and methane. Methane is on track to increase by about 0.5 parts per million by 2100. An equal mass of CO2 is about 0.2 parts per million. So, if CO2 increases from 415 ppm to 415.2 ppm the increase in global temperature will be essentially nothing, and 86 times nearly nothing is still nearly nothing.
The GWP statistic is real, but total meaningless bullshit.
Thanks for that Steve . According to Wikipedia methane concentration is about 2 PPM as opposed to 415 for CO2 so a doubling of Methane would be equivalent to about 1 ppm of CO2 . To do that would require a lot of cows belching . Of course when buffalo in US and Wildebeast in Africa and reindeer in the arctic roamed the plains their methane footprint added to that of the termites must have dwarfed our domestic livestock Methane footprint Bullshit squared
C’mon, climatistas. Lead by example. Reprocess your own, er, “organic waste” into fuel and cook with it. Be carbon neutral.
“ Home methane leaks ”
Houses are blowing up all the time /sarc
I don’t think it affects climate change, but my gas range made some fine Cuban Chicken today.
An interesting letter to the editor I read this morning suggested that gas from Australia should not be exported to nations that advocated for Australia to stop coal mining and use and other penalties for our Australian economy during the Glasgow Conference COP or FLOP26.
The solution to the ‘problem’ is to seal the stoves better. Perhaps have the gas utility do maintenance every 5 years to make sure the fitting are working properly. Retro-fit older stoves with electronic ignition.
No more ‘snuff porn,’ please!
They’re Green, invariably green, but assuredly not green.
As the EU Standards penalises ICEV in favour of EV with enormous costs involved developing EV and providing infrastructure, subsidies, and so on, I think about the transition from leaded to unleaded petrol and sulphur in diesel/distillate to no sulphur and associated costs, and then CNG/LPG conversions for internal combustion engines and the technology that evolved into injection systems for gas only fuel in petrol engines (and dual fuel provision) or LPG injected with diesel fuel.
Gas produces far lower emissions than petrol and with injection systems the amount of fuel is only slightly more litres per one hundred kilometres. Injected diesel-gas greatly reduces exhaust particulates and exhaust gas reticulation valves are not necessary. From personal use experience including a small fleet of business vehicles petrol and diesel powered using LPG the operating cost savings are significant. A diesel-gas system depending on ratio of fuels injected, but say 20% LPG exhaust emissions are greatly reduced with a similar percentage gain in power and torque because the diesel fuel burns more efficiently with LPG mixed.
Heating up a can of beans apparently causes methane emissions long after the cooker is turned off and cold! A vegan diet accomplishes the same thing even without the cooker.
Quick primer for indoor gas ranges. In Florida, gas ranges must be vented to the outside. To calculate the blower strength needed you take the total BTUs of the cook top and divide by 100. That tells you the minimum CFMs needed for the blower. If you have a long vent run to the outside, especially if you have elbow turns, you may also need a second blower inside the system. If the blower above the range is over 600 CFM you need to install make up air.
So, if installing gas, make sure the total BTUs of the cook top are under 60,000 and make the vent run as short and straight as possible.
A few years ago near where I live an elderly man apparently lit an installed gas heater in his home that was connected to LPG cylinders outside, as he had been doing for years.
There was an explosion that completely demolished his house, damaged adjoining houses and the force of the blast sent his car over a perimeter fence.
I understand that questions were asked about regular or annual maintenance having been done, obviously the house owner could not be interviewed.
One of my favorite WUWT articles: Methane: The Irrevelant Greenhouse Gas
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/04/11/methane-the-irrelevant-greenhouse-gas/
Every time I find information on how greenhouse gasses actually cause warming I find in all cases severely flawed physics. What a black eye for science.
Just think, get rid of CO2 and very little on this earth will remain green. How ironic
I have an induction hob and frankly it is as responsive as any gas hob I’ve ever owned, plus it has a flat easy to clean surface.
I’d say leaving all other issues aside, induction is better than gas…
You won’t during a blackout.
And climate change influenced storms aside, I’m not expecting any blackouts here in the UK.
Beware the unexpected griff. Especially wind droughts.
Storms are just weather. You have no 30+ year trend under your arm.
Do you remember the hurricane? Were you even born? That was 35 years ago. It was a one in 300 year event, not a trend. But if it happened tomorrow you would have verbal diarrhoea proclaiming it to be climate change driven.
This is why nobody takes anything you say seriously.
It’s a joke.
Unless you have any kind of medical device that the magnetism would interfere with, such as a pacemaker.
“You know what? I think I’ll keep my gas cooker, and keep enjoying life.”
But only if Big Brother allows you to, & if they did, you’d probably have to pay a heavy compensation tax to somebody somewhere!!! It’s all about the money after all!!!
Since when is informing the public the same as “demonizing”? Should this kind of information not be reported simply because it’s not nice to hear?
You need to learn the difference between “information” and disinformation.
So hyping non-existent threats counts as “informing”?
I have recently discovered sous vide low temperature immersion cooking and am enjoying it, especially the searing to Maillard Reaction at high temperature with gas.