Technically, the Congressionally enstupiated already acted based upon flawed data when they created our modern administrative state. So any decisions about gas stoves—along with almost every aspect of our economy—will actually be made by unelected bureaucrats claiming the right to rule based upon self-declared disinterested expertise. In the specific case of gas stoves, these deciders will be employees of the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
For all practical purposes, we’re governed today by an oligarchic academic priesthood that wields combined legislative, executive and judicial power. And most Americans like it that way. For some reason, the average voter places far more trust in these life-tenured civil servants than in free markets or in democratically-elected officials.
Oh, and the obvious unspoken part: the study was pushed by green energy electric stove advocates.
"A recent study that linked gas-burning stoves to childhood asthma cases was backed by two nonprofits that are pushing for Americans to adopt electric stoves.
The study, which states that the stoves account for about 12.7% of childhood asthma cases in the U.S., was partly funded by RMI, a group that seeks to “accelerate the clean energy transition,” and co-authored by Brady Seals, the manager of RMI’s Carbon-Free Buildings arm that aims to retrofit buildings with electric appliances. The study was also co-authored by Rewiring America (RA) Research Associate Talor Gruenwald, who previously worked on RMI’s Carbon-Free Buildings team; RA is a nonprofit that is “focused on electrifying everything” in communities across America, accordingto its website.
The authors of the study declared that there were no conflicts of interest associated with their research.
RMI, which used the study to promote stove electrification, has received millions in donations from Breakthrough Energy, a green energy investment firm founded by Bill Gates, as well as the Bezos Earth Fund and Bloomberg Philanthropies, according to the RMI 2022 donors report."
Though I haven't been following this issue, so I'm not even sure what the debate is about. Democrats want me to get rid of my gas stove and buy an electric stove, which will probably run on electricity made by natural gas, except that much of the heat that could have just been used directly for cooking will be lost in conversion to electricity?
I'd like to write that article as well. Generate an efficiency grid that compares the amount of CO2 released to fry and egg by different cooktops with different power generation sources.
And now, the mainstream media view courtesy of the Boston Globe:
"Happy new year, Into the Red readers,
"I can't believe we live in a world where a tweet that reads "God. Guns. Gas stoves" can go viral.
"Last week, I uncovered a new study on the children's asthma risk posed by gas stove exposure, and I hoped readers would take note of the worrying data. I mean, the authors concluded the risk of exposure to gas stoves is comparable to that of exposure to secondhand smoke. But I didn't expect my story — some of the very first reporting done on the new report — would fuel the culture war of the week. Go beyond the political skirmishes and read about the report from me here."
"Uncovered," mind you, because the authors were trying hard to keep the study secret one must guess.
A lot of Matt Taibbi’s work focuses on where the media went wrong too. His book “Hate Inc.” dives into that. One of his arguments is that journalism has gone from a bottom-up apprenticeship type profession to one that requires a college degree from an elite university. In Hate Inc he also covers the rise of the 24 hour news network and the unique things Roger Ailes did with Fox, which have now been adopted by the other large cable networks.
The Corporate Press (as I like to call them, this term is from Michael Malice) minus the obvious right-leaning ones like Fox, are almost lockstep in portraying those outside this elite world view in a negative way.
This furor was started by a statement by one member of a four member committee, and the chair of the committee qualified that it had no intention of recommending a ban on gas stoves as a result of the study. I did note though that gas stoves have been brought up in several older studies as a point of concern. So it’s something to watch, yes, maybe but no need to get excited at this point. We’ll see.
I don’t claim to understand the statistics of this analysis, but I did read through the entire study. It was a meta analysis and so based on data and/or results from different studies. In the method section I see they did not use at least three studies because of the impact of outdoor pollution. So it was at least taken into consideration. Also the study focused on NO2.
“The concentrations of indoor NO2 in some studies were clearly dominated by traffic outdoors, because the percentage of study homes with household gas stoves was small; we excluded those studies as well.”
I like to read the comment sections of these papers, where other statisticians/epidemiologists pick apart the studies. Haven’t had time to find comments on this one.
I notice I am confused. I've looked around a bit on the website for the "county health rankings" mentioned as the source for the main graphic here, and their data collection for air pollution doesn't appear to do any kind of discrimination between, as it were, natural and artificial sources. I am wondering if the entire thing is heavily confounded by pollen counts or something of the like, which is the only reason coming to mind for why the Illinois-Indiana-Ohio area is apparently the most heavily polluted part of the country.
I live in Indiana. Have for most of my life. It is heavily rural/agricultural outside of the few large cities we have, with little heavy industry, and yet the whole state somehow ends up having more air pollution than some of the largest cities in the nation? It doesn't follow.
Even if everything you say about this particular study is true, there are other reasons to think that gas stoves fundamentally change the indoor climate — and not for the better. We don't have great data on it, because indoor air quality is almost entirely unregulated and wildly under-studied in the U.S. But what few controlled experiments have been done suggest exactly what an ordinary person might expect: open-air gas combustion in the main living space of an enclosed home, often without sufficient ventilation, generates asthma-linked pollution. It's not really that controversial a proposition. (See: https://www.consumerreports.org/appliances/indoor-air-quality/is-your-gas-range-a-health-risk-a6971504915/)
Sure, you can argue that the world is full of bigger problems — and I would agree! And the dearth of solid, evidence-based, real-world data is shameful. But if a lucrative wager hinged on whether gas stoves have the potential to worsen childhood asthma, I know where I'd put my money.
I don't disagree with any of that. But until they do a proper multivariate analysis that takes overall pollution into account (which afaik doesn't exist) then the whole thing is pissing in the wind.
The article you linked to says that gas stoves produce nitrous oxides, but not particulate matter. Which is more harmful(in terms of worsening asthma)? I wish people would make clear distinctions between different types of pollution, because otherwise it's too easy to muddy the issues. It seems like there's a disagreement between HWFO and CR, but maybe not, if particulate matter and NOx are equally bad for asthmatics.
Imagine if you will a scenario where gas stoves are disproportionately owned by indoor smokers. In some cities, the air pollution is equivalent to smoking 3 packs of cigarettes per day.
If it was known that gas stoves were disproportionately owned by indoor smokers, then the very first thing people would look for in terms of asthma connections is the connection to smokers, not to gas stove effluent.
If we know that gas stoves are disproportionately owned by people in cities, we MUST correct for that confounder.
They may be and they may not be, and the way to differentiate between the effects of either or both is with a multivariate analysis of fine enough grain to determine whether proximity to particulate sources is polluting the data.
It is unassailably true that a higher ratio of gas stoves are in metro areas with higher pollution. If you don't disaggregate this effect then you can draw no conclusions, and the study is just a study about zip codes.
That one is pretty much already known. Super tight homes have higher CO2 levels, higher mold levels, etc. And now building codes specify "make up air" for kitchen ventilation systems over a moderate CFM level. Make up air is a controlled vent that brings in outside air, because the IRC doesn't believe people know how to open a window. But running the range hood in these super tight homes can suck out the pilot light on your hot water heater (assuming your gas HWH is so old that it actually has a pilot light) unless the HWH was built with it's own personal fresh air supply.
Something else missing, especially with stovetop cooking, is that cooking the food itself releases all sort of stuff. If oils are used - same thing. Some oils smoke at lower temperatures than others, yada yada. So all this is *still* present with electric cooking.
Also I’ve traveled all over Latin America. Electric stoves are extremely rare. At least in Mexico this was due to the high costs of electricity. So most households, which previously used wood for cooking (often indoors- and this is still common in other parts of LATAM) use gas stoves. There too dedicated gas lines are fairly rare so gas is delivered via tanker trucks to tanks on the roofs of homes. One would think given all the research there would be something about high childhood asthma rates in these areas.
So, their claim is that the combustion of the gas itself (CH4 + O2 -> CO2 + H2O) results in some NOX emissions as well. What’s the chemical process producing that? I want these clowns to break this down in an easy enough format for someone whose only taken high a high chemistry can understand.
Also worth noting, San Diego on your list last summer as part of their second edition Climate Action Plan will not only require all new construction to be all electric but that the majority of existing buildings be retrofit (regardless of left over service life on these nat gas appliances) to all electric by 2035.
The “science” they cited for part of their justification for this ban goes to websites and links that don’t back their claims.
In fairness, this is the same crap they have done for 2 decades with "climate science". One could probably sub in any of the nonsense studies they have pooped out the last decade built on "models" from garbage data.
Oh, and this is my favorite comment of the whole article.
"The entire study could just be a geography proxy."
At this point, we should just ask, who prefers to live in overregulated hell, and who prefers to be left alone. Let the counties in NY/CA/IL overregulate the ---- out of their citizens and let those areas rapidly decline into Detroit 2.0.
Anyway, the better conclusion should have just been an indictment on urbanization and we should be ask why that is being jammed down our throats. (yes, we know the answer, but how do we explain it to the Tribe Fanatics where they can understand?)
"Most rural houses have electric stoves, and most rural houses have less particulate pollution, leading to less asthma. " Seriously? Provide data please, or I guess it depends how you define "rural". Because real rural often means nearly fully off the grid, which implies a wood or coal burning stove. And oil, coal, or wood heat. All of which throw off a lot more particulates than a gas stove. And the whole situation can be almost fully resolved if you put in a fan or a range hood in your kitchen that vents to the outside.
Even folks in the country who heat their houses with diesel or wood are *cooking* on electric. The only way to get a gas stove in the country is to be on propane, which requires a tank and regular propane delivery.
Reference: I'm in the country and I have a propane tank for my gas stove.
Reference: my father heated his country house with wood and was on an electric stove.
Reference: I grew up in rural NC and we had a wood stove to heat the house and an electric range
Reference: so did literally everyone else I knew
TBH I'm quite surprised I'm getting challenged on this.
Not really a challenge, just that it might not be as accurate as you assume. Or I could have a different perspective, or be a bit uninformed. Where does rural begin, and what is out beyond rural? "town gas, water, and sewer" is definitely a urban/suburban thing. I live on the outer edge of suburbia; a fair number of homes here have oil and propane tanks, many of them are well and septic. All of them have electricity, so they could have electric stoves. Or propane. So while there are farms and forests all around me, I don't personally consider it all that rural here. Go back up into the hills, deep in the mountains, and at some point the number of homes with supplied electricity will dwindle. How rare are those these days? Perhaps very very rare; a quick online search says 100% of USA have electric. But if you had to run a generator to have electricity, would you be using that to run the major electric eating appliance in the home? Or would you use propane, wood, or coal? I used to get catalogs that leaned towards the Amish and similar lower tech communities; oil lamps, propane powered washers and fridges, etc. Plenty of wood burning cooking stoves too.
"Until someone does that, all this freakoutery about gas stoves can and should be completely ignored."
...Except it can't be ignored, because the enstupidiated in Congress are going to make law based upon flawed data. For the children, of course.
Technically, the Congressionally enstupiated already acted based upon flawed data when they created our modern administrative state. So any decisions about gas stoves—along with almost every aspect of our economy—will actually be made by unelected bureaucrats claiming the right to rule based upon self-declared disinterested expertise. In the specific case of gas stoves, these deciders will be employees of the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
For all practical purposes, we’re governed today by an oligarchic academic priesthood that wields combined legislative, executive and judicial power. And most Americans like it that way. For some reason, the average voter places far more trust in these life-tenured civil servants than in free markets or in democratically-elected officials.
Or so The Science™ says.
I only wish you were wrong. The deep state is the government we have, the Constitution is the one we're supposed to have. It's outrageous.
Oh, and the obvious unspoken part: the study was pushed by green energy electric stove advocates.
"A recent study that linked gas-burning stoves to childhood asthma cases was backed by two nonprofits that are pushing for Americans to adopt electric stoves.
The study, which states that the stoves account for about 12.7% of childhood asthma cases in the U.S., was partly funded by RMI, a group that seeks to “accelerate the clean energy transition,” and co-authored by Brady Seals, the manager of RMI’s Carbon-Free Buildings arm that aims to retrofit buildings with electric appliances. The study was also co-authored by Rewiring America (RA) Research Associate Talor Gruenwald, who previously worked on RMI’s Carbon-Free Buildings team; RA is a nonprofit that is “focused on electrifying everything” in communities across America, accordingto its website.
The authors of the study declared that there were no conflicts of interest associated with their research.
RMI, which used the study to promote stove electrification, has received millions in donations from Breakthrough Energy, a green energy investment firm founded by Bill Gates, as well as the Bezos Earth Fund and Bloomberg Philanthropies, according to the RMI 2022 donors report."
https://www.shorenewsnetwork.com/2023/01/13/electric-appliance-advocates-backed-study-driving-push-to-ban-gas-stoves/
SSDD, same old One World elitist socialists, still trying to destroy our world to build their own micro-utopia on your suffering.
Great article.
Though I haven't been following this issue, so I'm not even sure what the debate is about. Democrats want me to get rid of my gas stove and buy an electric stove, which will probably run on electricity made by natural gas, except that much of the heat that could have just been used directly for cooking will be lost in conversion to electricity?
I'd like to write that article as well. Generate an efficiency grid that compares the amount of CO2 released to fry and egg by different cooktops with different power generation sources.
I Fucking Love Science Except When It Contradicts My Preferred Narrative!
There's a model for that.
And now, the mainstream media view courtesy of the Boston Globe:
"Happy new year, Into the Red readers,
"I can't believe we live in a world where a tweet that reads "God. Guns. Gas stoves" can go viral.
"Last week, I uncovered a new study on the children's asthma risk posed by gas stove exposure, and I hoped readers would take note of the worrying data. I mean, the authors concluded the risk of exposure to gas stoves is comparable to that of exposure to secondhand smoke. But I didn't expect my story — some of the very first reporting done on the new report — would fuel the culture war of the week. Go beyond the political skirmishes and read about the report from me here."
"Uncovered," mind you, because the authors were trying hard to keep the study secret one must guess.
WTF has journalism become?
To directly answer your question about journalism, please consider the book Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy, by Batya Ungar-Sargon.
(Review here: https://www.city-journal.org/how-the-news-got-woke-and-why-it-matters)
A lot of Matt Taibbi’s work focuses on where the media went wrong too. His book “Hate Inc.” dives into that. One of his arguments is that journalism has gone from a bottom-up apprenticeship type profession to one that requires a college degree from an elite university. In Hate Inc he also covers the rise of the 24 hour news network and the unique things Roger Ailes did with Fox, which have now been adopted by the other large cable networks.
The Corporate Press (as I like to call them, this term is from Michael Malice) minus the obvious right-leaning ones like Fox, are almost lockstep in portraying those outside this elite world view in a negative way.
LA Times does it on the West Coast
https://greenleapforward.substack.com/p/the-anti-rural-divisive-la-times
NPR and NY Times do it on the East Coast.
https://www.npr.org/2022/02/15/1080773495/in-the-misinformation-wars-renewable-energy-is-the-latest-to-be-attacked
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/30/climate/wind-farm-renewable-energy-fight.html
This furor was started by a statement by one member of a four member committee, and the chair of the committee qualified that it had no intention of recommending a ban on gas stoves as a result of the study. I did note though that gas stoves have been brought up in several older studies as a point of concern. So it’s something to watch, yes, maybe but no need to get excited at this point. We’ll see.
I don’t claim to understand the statistics of this analysis, but I did read through the entire study. It was a meta analysis and so based on data and/or results from different studies. In the method section I see they did not use at least three studies because of the impact of outdoor pollution. So it was at least taken into consideration. Also the study focused on NO2.
“The concentrations of indoor NO2 in some studies were clearly dominated by traffic outdoors, because the percentage of study homes with household gas stoves was small; we excluded those studies as well.”
I like to read the comment sections of these papers, where other statisticians/epidemiologists pick apart the studies. Haven’t had time to find comments on this one.
I notice I am confused. I've looked around a bit on the website for the "county health rankings" mentioned as the source for the main graphic here, and their data collection for air pollution doesn't appear to do any kind of discrimination between, as it were, natural and artificial sources. I am wondering if the entire thing is heavily confounded by pollen counts or something of the like, which is the only reason coming to mind for why the Illinois-Indiana-Ohio area is apparently the most heavily polluted part of the country.
I live in Indiana. Have for most of my life. It is heavily rural/agricultural outside of the few large cities we have, with little heavy industry, and yet the whole state somehow ends up having more air pollution than some of the largest cities in the nation? It doesn't follow.
It could be confounded by pollen counts, but those pollen counts would also confound asthma, so the data still works perfectly well for our purposes.
Even if everything you say about this particular study is true, there are other reasons to think that gas stoves fundamentally change the indoor climate — and not for the better. We don't have great data on it, because indoor air quality is almost entirely unregulated and wildly under-studied in the U.S. But what few controlled experiments have been done suggest exactly what an ordinary person might expect: open-air gas combustion in the main living space of an enclosed home, often without sufficient ventilation, generates asthma-linked pollution. It's not really that controversial a proposition. (See: https://www.consumerreports.org/appliances/indoor-air-quality/is-your-gas-range-a-health-risk-a6971504915/)
Sure, you can argue that the world is full of bigger problems — and I would agree! And the dearth of solid, evidence-based, real-world data is shameful. But if a lucrative wager hinged on whether gas stoves have the potential to worsen childhood asthma, I know where I'd put my money.
I don't disagree with any of that. But until they do a proper multivariate analysis that takes overall pollution into account (which afaik doesn't exist) then the whole thing is pissing in the wind.
The article you linked to says that gas stoves produce nitrous oxides, but not particulate matter. Which is more harmful(in terms of worsening asthma)? I wish people would make clear distinctions between different types of pollution, because otherwise it's too easy to muddy the issues. It seems like there's a disagreement between HWFO and CR, but maybe not, if particulate matter and NOx are equally bad for asthmatics.
Imagine if you will a scenario where gas stoves are disproportionately owned by indoor smokers. In some cities, the air pollution is equivalent to smoking 3 packs of cigarettes per day.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/05/if-you-live-in-a-big-city-you-already-smoke-every-day/
If it was known that gas stoves were disproportionately owned by indoor smokers, then the very first thing people would look for in terms of asthma connections is the connection to smokers, not to gas stove effluent.
If we know that gas stoves are disproportionately owned by people in cities, we MUST correct for that confounder.
They may be and they may not be, and the way to differentiate between the effects of either or both is with a multivariate analysis of fine enough grain to determine whether proximity to particulate sources is polluting the data.
It is unassailably true that a higher ratio of gas stoves are in metro areas with higher pollution. If you don't disaggregate this effect then you can draw no conclusions, and the study is just a study about zip codes.
Not sure which is worse in terms of exacerbating asthma, but NOX are certainly not healthy, and they have a known association with asthma. https://www.atsjournals.org/doi/full/10.1164/rccm.200903-0485ED
Are you a chatbot? Because I think you're a chatbot.
What I heard from that comment was that this recent trend towards hypersealed "green" housing causes childhood asthma.
A drafty house is a ventilated house.
Drafty houses are also safer from covid spread. So there's that.
That one is pretty much already known. Super tight homes have higher CO2 levels, higher mold levels, etc. And now building codes specify "make up air" for kitchen ventilation systems over a moderate CFM level. Make up air is a controlled vent that brings in outside air, because the IRC doesn't believe people know how to open a window. But running the range hood in these super tight homes can suck out the pilot light on your hot water heater (assuming your gas HWH is so old that it actually has a pilot light) unless the HWH was built with it's own personal fresh air supply.
I’d put my money on poorly designed and/or just flat out unused vent hoods.
Something else missing, especially with stovetop cooking, is that cooking the food itself releases all sort of stuff. If oils are used - same thing. Some oils smoke at lower temperatures than others, yada yada. So all this is *still* present with electric cooking.
Also I’ve traveled all over Latin America. Electric stoves are extremely rare. At least in Mexico this was due to the high costs of electricity. So most households, which previously used wood for cooking (often indoors- and this is still common in other parts of LATAM) use gas stoves. There too dedicated gas lines are fairly rare so gas is delivered via tanker trucks to tanks on the roofs of homes. One would think given all the research there would be something about high childhood asthma rates in these areas.
So, their claim is that the combustion of the gas itself (CH4 + O2 -> CO2 + H2O) results in some NOX emissions as well. What’s the chemical process producing that? I want these clowns to break this down in an easy enough format for someone whose only taken high a high chemistry can understand.
Also worth noting, San Diego on your list last summer as part of their second edition Climate Action Plan will not only require all new construction to be all electric but that the majority of existing buildings be retrofit (regardless of left over service life on these nat gas appliances) to all electric by 2035.
The “science” they cited for part of their justification for this ban goes to websites and links that don’t back their claims.
https://greenleapforward.substack.com/p/lets-go-ban-it
Thank you for bringing sanity to this latest Marxist Deep State issue....
In fairness, this is the same crap they have done for 2 decades with "climate science". One could probably sub in any of the nonsense studies they have pooped out the last decade built on "models" from garbage data.
Oh, and this is my favorite comment of the whole article.
"The entire study could just be a geography proxy."
At this point, we should just ask, who prefers to live in overregulated hell, and who prefers to be left alone. Let the counties in NY/CA/IL overregulate the ---- out of their citizens and let those areas rapidly decline into Detroit 2.0.
Anyway, the better conclusion should have just been an indictment on urbanization and we should be ask why that is being jammed down our throats. (yes, we know the answer, but how do we explain it to the Tribe Fanatics where they can understand?)
Upcoming commentary to be published in June:
"Population attributable fraction of gas cooking and childhood asthma: What was missed?"
by Wenchao Li, Julie E. Goodman, and Christopher Long
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590113324000075?via%3Dihub#bb0035
"Most rural houses have electric stoves, and most rural houses have less particulate pollution, leading to less asthma. " Seriously? Provide data please, or I guess it depends how you define "rural". Because real rural often means nearly fully off the grid, which implies a wood or coal burning stove. And oil, coal, or wood heat. All of which throw off a lot more particulates than a gas stove. And the whole situation can be almost fully resolved if you put in a fan or a range hood in your kitchen that vents to the outside.
Even folks in the country who heat their houses with diesel or wood are *cooking* on electric. The only way to get a gas stove in the country is to be on propane, which requires a tank and regular propane delivery.
Reference: I'm in the country and I have a propane tank for my gas stove.
Reference: my father heated his country house with wood and was on an electric stove.
Reference: I grew up in rural NC and we had a wood stove to heat the house and an electric range
Reference: so did literally everyone else I knew
TBH I'm quite surprised I'm getting challenged on this.
Not really a challenge, just that it might not be as accurate as you assume. Or I could have a different perspective, or be a bit uninformed. Where does rural begin, and what is out beyond rural? "town gas, water, and sewer" is definitely a urban/suburban thing. I live on the outer edge of suburbia; a fair number of homes here have oil and propane tanks, many of them are well and septic. All of them have electricity, so they could have electric stoves. Or propane. So while there are farms and forests all around me, I don't personally consider it all that rural here. Go back up into the hills, deep in the mountains, and at some point the number of homes with supplied electricity will dwindle. How rare are those these days? Perhaps very very rare; a quick online search says 100% of USA have electric. But if you had to run a generator to have electricity, would you be using that to run the major electric eating appliance in the home? Or would you use propane, wood, or coal? I used to get catalogs that leaned towards the Amish and similar lower tech communities; oil lamps, propane powered washers and fridges, etc. Plenty of wood burning cooking stoves too.
Please give it a rest. Rural does not equate to frontier living. Most folks out in the country even wear shoes nowadays.😁
How about the term “unincorporated area with low population density” instead of the word “rural?”
You state Indiana is second, but highlighted Illinois.
It hasn’t gotten that far. The study only pointed to gas stoves as a factor in 13% of cases.