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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That’s old news, but evidence of a concerted effort to limit the use of natural gas in all applications. Do that and we will freeze, overheat and starve and/or increase CO2. The solution is the .problem
The sneaky liars are using a 20-year time period to get their 86 times more powerful than CO2 figure. The standard period used even by the Alarmist EPA Liars is 100 years, which gives a figure of 25 times more powerful.
A while ago, we needed a new stove, and considered dual fuel ones, which have an electric top and gas oven. These are actually ideal. Electric ovens work better than gas, and gas cooktops work better than electric. The units themselves are very expensive though, perhaps 3-4 times more than just gas, or just electric. But on top of that, most situations are only set up with one, not both gas and electric. In our case, we would have needed to have a 220v receptacle installed. That would probably be $300 right there. I think installation costs are higher as well. So instead of maybe $700 or so, you’re talking more like 3 grand. Pass.
I think an electric induction hob, with gas like response, performs as good as or better than gas…
They look interesting, but you need to have the right cookware (magnetic) for them to work. Aluminum or glass won’t work. Pass.
Your ability to think has never been demonstrated.
griff: reply to fretslider replying to griff, January 31, 2022 8:35 am:
“And climate change influenced storms aside, I’m not expecting any blackouts here in the UK.”
These words are now officially recorded for the historical record for later reference when power shortages and blackouts caused by the intermittency of the wind and solar renewables begin hitting the UK.
So leaking methane from over 40m households in the US that use gas cookers has the same climate impact as half a million ICE cars.
Considering there are over 1.4 billion ICE vehicles in the world surely the problem of gas cookers pales into insignificance even if you are fully signed up to the climate change thingy?
I think some Stanford researchers have too much time on their hands.
My final comment on this is that like everything else, nothing is perfect. I love cooking with gas in the home because instant on and instant off is most of the battle,
But i use propane bottles for the gas grill instead of using the natgas hookup because propane is hotter.
For the really good steaks, or making bacon i have a big green egg, hardwood charcoal cannot be beat.
But electric gets hotter still, my stove top expresso maker finishes faster with the least amount of water left in the reservoir.
Because it gets hotter, but that is the only advantage.
If the power goes out i can use a match and light the burners to cook.
Electric, not cooking
’86 times as potent’? What? The graphs I’ve seen show methane as much less potent than CO2 at scattering light (and C02 is nothing to H2O, which is next on their greenhouse gas hit list, I suppose). But do these people not know that methane oxidizes? Easily? I’m not sure what drives this insanity, but apparently now it’s just okay to make up anything you want in the name of saving the planet from something which isn’t happening.
OMG!! Researchers found that this leaking has a climate impact comparable to the carbon dioxide emissions from a half-million cars. With 1.4 billion cars in the world, this means that natural gas stoves contribute 36/1000 of one percent of what cars do to global warming!! do these researchers ever consider the total insignificance of their findings? Never mind the wild-ass extrapolations they had to make to come up with their comparability statement.
I, too, think “I’ll keep my gas cooker and keep enjoying life.” If it’s good enough for commercial cooking for profit, it’s good enough for me!