We're going to need to draw the lines somewhere. Blaming gas stoves for climate change seems like a bit of an over reach. Where's the resistance to people buying crappy, unnecessary junk from countries with cheap labor and low environmental regulation, and the associated carbon output of mega barges burning bunker oil, the lowest grade petroleum product? Is that just too popular, compared to barbecue and natural gas stoves?
This push to be perfect is never ending, but always attacks the common folk, and rarely the multi-national megacorps. It's always with a justifiable pro-environment angle, which means any common folk who fight against it are painted as immoral, or uncaring about the planet.
This is just the next lowest hanging fruit, but I'm getting annoyed at this point.
> City carve-outs for gas cooking aren’t unreasonable, said Sara Baldwin, who works on electrifying the building sector at environmental policy firm Energy Innovation. But eventually, she believes that buildings will need to be fully electrified, including stovetops, to meet ambitious emissions-reduction goals, presenting an existential threat to the gas industry.
So it's not quite "blaming gas stoves for climate change". The claim is there's a need to transition away from gas stoves _as a consequence_ of getting rid of gas hookups (which are presumably mostly used for heat), which would have a noticeable impact on emissions.
Further driving that point home, the next sentence is:
> “The gas industry really wants to make the household stovetop a wedge issue and use that to animate people against electrification as a whole,” said Charlie Spatz, a researcher at the Climate Investigations Center, an environmental advocacy group.
So they know that a storm is brewing over gas stoves, because there's inherent resistance _and_ there's an large industry trying to use/abuse that fact in order to preserve their profits.
To me, the reason the article focuses on gas cooking instead of gas hookups in general is for that exact reason. Gas cooking has a small impact on climate change, but the claim is it's a necessary sacrifice to get rid of the bigger problem of gas hookups and distribution, and it seems like it'll be a tough sell for opinionated people who are being amplified by a large industry trying to extract as much profit as possible on the way out. It could have spent more time on that claim that it's a necessary sacrifice though.
Agree that it should've spent more time on the claim that eliminating gas hookups is a necessary sacrifice. I'm also surprised there was no discussion around the personal cost impact of switching from gas to electric heat.
The emissions from gas heating are drastically higher than electric heating, and eliminating gas heating would absolutely have an impact on emissions. However, gas heating is significantly cheaper than electric heating, and I wish the article had spoken more about how environmental groups plan to deal with lower income residents switching from gas to electric. In Massachusetts, for example, a house that spends $1,200 in a winter on natural gas would spend over $6,000 on electric resistance heat (unless you have a newer electric heat pump, which is much closer to competing with the price of natural gas)
With a standard heat pump (excluding initial installation costs), costs should be appreciably lower than any other method, except when temperatures approach -20 or so (I may be wrong on that number, but I'm reasonably confident it's in the ballpark). And air conditioners are just reverse heat pumps, the same device can and should operate both as a heater and cooler.
I live in an area where those low temperatures occur seasonally, but heat pumps absolutely can improve energy efficiency and reduce carbon emissions, even here, especially if tied to non-air-source heat pumps, or just massively increased renewable energy production (including base load sources like geothermal).
The capital/installation costs are the real problem, and it will take some toothy legislation and expenditure to get it done.
You are a bit off on that temperature. Heat pumps are efficient until around 30 degrees F [1]. Once in that range, they start requiring more energy to operate normally. But mostly anything below 30 degrees F needs a secondary heat source such as gas.
Where I live in Michigan, I could use a heat pump for some time in the fall and spring, but there's no way it would replace my gas furnace in the winter. I'd be curious to know if the cost of getting a heat pump would be worth it at that point.
Even with an air-source heat pump, as long as it's smart enough to defrost itself as appropriate, etc., you can definitely get a Coefficient of Performance greater than 1 even at below freezing outdoor temperatures. You could run it the majority of days even in winter, and while your current electricity prices may make it not competitive with current natural gas prices, it would be _efficient_. If natural gas externalities were priced in, it almost certainly would be cheaper to run a heat pump except when COP goes all the way down to 1, where yes, you would need an augmented/alternative heat source -- no denying that.
But if you have central air conditioning, which is pretty common in the Midwest, reverse operation is a heat pump. In practice, many A/C systems don't do that, but the capital cost between a central A/C only system and a central A/C + heat pump system is minimal. A/C + heat pump should really be the default, and supplemented or augmented for the few weeks when COP is too low, and for longer while the economics are the way they are.
One augmentation is that you can get non-air-source heat pumps. At least for buildings with several units, it _should_ be cost-effective to get a ground source -- just dig below the frost line. That's almost never something you can easily just hire a crew to do, so unfortunately it's not a practical suggestion right now, but if/when that market failure is dealt with, it'll be a good option for many, as you wouldn't need a secondary system.
Not trying to convince you to buy a heat pump by the way, the economics of it do matter a lot. I would like to sell people the efficiency argument though.
I left it implied, but the logic of getting rid of gas hookups altogether, instead of keeping them and using heat pumps for heating, is that the emissions purely due to the distribution network are non-trivial. That's the proximate reason the cooking transition is being proposed. It's also why it mentions that there's a reasonable argument for a carve-out for _cities_, where the distribution network would be more efficient than in rural areas.
> Humans have an impact on the planet. Deal with it.
> Some of the big ways we do are summarily ignored.
That is, ironically, the point of the article (not that it's perfect). Let's not summarily ignore the emissions from the gas distribution network, just because we're upset that cooking will change slightly. Deal with it, and don't let silly resentment towards an individual activist or cynical campaigns by massive carbon emitting industries fool you into doing otherwise.
Saying "deal with it" is not at all how I would communicate the issue to the average consumer, but you don't fit that description. Never mind that individual consumer choices like your own, summed across all individuals, have almost zero impact compared to systemic changes like those proposed in the article. I say this as someone very similar to you (vegan, bike/walk everywhere, use renewable energy, etc.).
Is there a large amount of natural gas to-home infrastructure outside of cities now? I suppose this will vary by region. The (admittedly, few) family members and friends I have who live rurally and use gas have propane tanks that are filled by truck, not buried gas pipes coming from the street.
If your point is that the primary argument _should_ be "deal with it" or that anything else is "manipulating people", I disagree with such a binary assertion.
> Literally don't care that houses in Malibu are going to fall into the sea because I love grilling up some salmon and asparagus over cold ones
Houses in Malibu fall into the sea because they are built in a coastal erosion zone, not because of your grilling - which can also be done over charcoal or propane, which don't have the huge issues of gas grid leaks and maintenance.
The problem is the global warming impact of the leaky natural gas grid, which has far more consequential impacts like damaged via sea level rise to the Gulf Coast, and the aridification of the Western US.
It's a systems problem that requires system solutions, not the problem of an individual's right to cook over a natural gas flame.
I can't see that being anything other than a very luxury item. Burning wood requires much better ventilation than most kitchens have. It's not easy to control the heat level, and the effort of using it is disproportionate for small amounts of cooking. And the fuel itself is cumbersome and takes up a lot of space.
In CA, the state wants to replace nuclear power plants with natural gas. That’s many times more carbon emission than forcing some number of new homes to be built with electric ranges.
As always, some sacrifice from regular people is the first and only option, even when it is a tiny fraction of what would be a significant improvement.
I could cut down watering my garden, until everything was dead, for a year, and it would be negated by the water one almond tree drew in our San Juaquin valley.
I get that people like to do things they feel are helping, even a little. Just know that other people are laughing all the way to the bank.
There's something going very badly wrong when a state or country that decides to decommission existing nuclear to replace it with any mix of sources that includes fossil fuels. That said, I'm still in favour of keeping gas stoves as long as the co2 output is small. I also think that incinerating plastics and generating electricity from the heat is the best way to deal with "the plastic problem".
>Nationwide, fossil fuels burned for energy in businesses and homes sit at 13% of annual carbon emissions, according to 2019 data from the EPA.
>Gas stoves’ contributions to emissions are negligible compared with the gas used to heat homes and water. Less than 3% of natural-gas use in homes comes from cooking on gas stoves, according to a 2015 residential energy survey from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
3% of 13% comes to just under 0.04% of carbon emissions. Yup, definitely making a big difference.
Edit: 0.04% of residential carbon emissions in the US only.
Cooking accounts for less than a percent of total natural gas. So, no, we don't need to start here. We need to start where it makes a difference.
60% of US electricity is generated from fossil fuels (1). 40% of that is from Natural Gas. 20% from Coal which produces almost twice the carbon as Natural Gas.
60% of that energy is lost in conversion (2). So, converting from natural gas to electricity would actually increase carbon emissions in many parts of the US.
So, where should we start? I'm not an expert, but just this quick analysis says decreasing the amount of fossil fuels used for US generation would be a much better choice.
However, unlike for a home gas boiler where the efficiency is maybe 90%, direct efficiency for gas stoves is poor. Basically you set fire to the gas, the fire is near the pans you're using for cooking, so they get hot. It's simple, but it is not at all efficient. This also produces waste CO2 (and some CO but hopefully not much), which is poisonous although not that poisonous, right where you are standing, whereas your gas boiler vents the waste gas to the outside air.
In contrast induction has much better efficiency and of course produces no poisonous gases itself (though cooking foods does release a variety of volatiles you shouldn't really breathe, especially pan frying)
So while "Burn gas in your home" to heat water is definitely a net efficiency win over "Burn gas in a power station, ship the electricity to your home, then use that" to heat water, the same does not follow for stoves where I suspect it's either a wash or a small win for electricity.
Water heating, like cooking should not be a significant part of the home power equation when done right.
Large boilers need to die. Small "instant heaters" at or very close to each faucet is the correct way. Way way way less energy usage.
Sadly the electrical water heater units usually don't have access to the 240v line and are limited to 120v, 10A or something measly. People then complain their water doesn't heat fast enough or get hot enough for a given flow and then complain/swear off small instant heaters =/
Just did the math and supporting a ~70F (50F-> 120F) rise at 1GPM (faucets are limited to about this) requires 9kW, or about 40A at 240W. Supporting a bunch of 40A circuits in a typical home would require a massively upgraded circuit panel for most homes -- 200A or even 100A service is common.
A centralized system avoids having multiple circuits with potentially high loads like this. Not to mention the likely gigantic heat exchangers required to transfer 9kW!
Cooking is a negligible amount of the gas use, but in warmer states gas networks will do rebate deals with developers to get gas appliances into new homes to keep the domestic networks expanding. There can be transmission loss in these networks and curbing demand for appliances (Via City regulation) stops them expanding.
Also, at least in my country, the network connection fee to the gas network is often higher than the gas used by appliances, (warm climate) and residential cooks don't realise they're subsidisng the cost of our business gas users.
> So, converting from natural gas to electricity would actually increase carbon emissions in many parts of the US.
Yes, but the plan is a more clean grid in the future. If you are building a new home now then this calculus (hopefully) will not hold in 20 years. If we've got a clean grid but everybody is still using gas to heat their homes, we've still got a huge problem.
In a new build, if the house isn't going to get a gas heater (to make that 97% reduction in home gas usage) then the builder isn't going to want to bother laying a gas pipe just for the cooker. That 3% reduction comes as a saving on inconvenience, not really as a saving on carbon emissions.
Is there a tank alternative? I much prefer cooking on a gas stovetop, and would be willing to refill a tank every couple of months, the same way folks do with propane grills.
Most municipalities and or HOA's will have limits and restrictions on tanks. If they are portable tanks then it will likely be covered under whatever rules for grills already exist, but larger installs will have a different set of requirements.
Politics today doesn't care about nuances like this. The stove question covered by the article is an egregious example.
A much less egregious but still valid one is buying a sports/lower mileage ICE car today, and driving it less (e.g., using public transit for commutes, and the sports car for weekend rides). This can have a lower carbon footprint than a long distance everyday commute in an electric car. The fixes that properly account for these things are trivial technically (any econ grad can tell how), but do not have any political support.
I do not expect the political landscape to ever appreciate these things. Therefore, I will alter my consumption pattern according to my own understanding, and not according to the whims of Capitol Hill.
Natural gas space heating is a good backup solution for extreme cold. When Texas's power grid went down, people were freezing to death. AFAIK, gas delivery wasn't affected.
But again, it's more of questioning the scale. How big of an issue is leaks in the natural gas grid? I'd like to see some actual numbers as to the damage that is done. Promote electric space heaters as primary option, sure. But this smells like all hype and little bite
Most natural gas space heating involves a blower fan of 500W or more.
We don’t know exactly how much leaks, but the estimates have been growing and most sources cite 2-4%. Given the 80x multiplier on methane as a GHG compared to CO2, that’s potentially a really big problem.
One of the reasons to be aggressive here is that building codes are upstream. You won’t see the impacts on the market (reduced gas consumption, strong demand for induction stoves & electric space heating) until many years after this change, and it’s precisely those shifts in demand we need to drive further advancement in electric stoves and heating to make them even better quickly.
I work for a utility with ~260km of gas pipe, ranging between 60 year old cast iron to brand new polyethelene pipe, and everything in between. We aim for <2% UAFG (unaccounted for gas) and our regulatory requirement is <2-4% depending on the network classification.
This is leakage from between our recieving gas and it being metered to the customer. On the customer side, there's another estimated 2-4% loss.
Gas worked during the power outages. I ran my gas fireplace to keep everyone from freezing to death, and used my gas range to boil water. Would have been an even more horrific nightmare otherwise. I actually started looking into stuff like wood pellet heaters because of it.
Researchers found that frozen wells caused natural gas production to fall by 85 percent in the days leading up to Feb. 16, with up to two-thirds of processing plants in the Permian Basin experiencing an outage. Researchers looked at a sample of 27 natural gas processing plants, and found that as many as 18 of them had zero output at the worst of the storm. Natural gas producers are not required to weatherize their equipment in Texas.
The desperate scramble to power up natural gas facilities again exposed a major structural flaw in Texas’ electric grid: Oncor and other utilities didn't have good lists of what they should consider critical infrastructure, including natural gas facilities — simply because natural gas companies failed to fill out a form or didn’t know the form existed, company executives, regulators and experts said.
Moreover, this very similar situation happened 10 years ago already and that had natural gas curtailments to retail customers. So, no, not a good backup solution.
I get the impression this isn't typical, but for me "gas" usually means a 150-gal propane tank, filled asynchronously, often by truck rather than gas main. A benefit of this, like most asynchronous systems, is that no amount of disfunction in the backend will have any immediate effect on local usage.
I don't know anyone who, when talking about heating, says "gas" and means "propane". "gas" is usually shorthand for "natural gas", usually from the grid. If they were talking about propane, they'd say that.
But yeah- in my neck of the woods, anywhere outside the city has a propane tank on the property somewhere.
Or, depending on local attitudes and media, any amount of dysfunction can have an immediate effect on availability, as people stockpile in response to fears of disruptions that never materialize at all :(
> an []immediate[] effect on availability, as people stockpile
Actually, that is a specific thing that this method does help with: if people stockpile in a given month, it has no immediate effect on me, because my gas tank still has gas left in it. It might cause non-immediate problems, but a lack of local buffers doesn't help with that, and I've at least bought weeks or months of time for those problems to clear up.
These are totally different distribution systems, and I've heard of several anecdotes of people using gas while the elecetricity was out during that storm. I'm not going to bother bypassing bloomberg's paywall to verify you're just speculating, sorry.
My mom has a beautiful house in Plano Texas. Her homeowners association forbids installing solar power panels. This should tell you what you need to know about Texas. But I agree gas is a great backup solution and her gas powered generator saved her butt this past winter
Texas Property Code Section 202.010: HOAs and POAs cannot prohibit or restrict a property owner from installing a solar energy device
I also live in Plano. This law was passed many many years ago, so if the HOA is really saying that they should change their tune if you point them to that relevant passage.
“ This should tell you what you need to know about Texas.”
It’s not a helpful comment. If you have something to say… say it. If you don’t like the HOA rules don’t move to the HOA neighborhood. It’s hardly a Texas specific problem.
Unreasonable homeowner associations are everywhere, sure, but homeowner associations that hate solar power do seem restricted to the states that didn't vote for the guy who won the last election in my experience.
Not my house, I wouldn't have moved to that neighborhood, but my mom didn't have a whole lot of time at the time but of course that doesn't matter we must all embrace the free marketplace of ideas because no other solution is possible here I know I know... Bored now...
The funny thing is that my conservative friends complain about exactly this sort of mindset in California. And I tell them to move to Florida or Texas instead of perpetuating their own misery but they rarely do. One of them seems to have killed himself last year over this. I conclude that I do not understand people and why they can't just do the simple obvious things because you're right that my mom shouldn't have moved there but there's a story behind how she ended up there and you've completely neglected that. Maybe my late friend has a story too.
> but homeowner associations that hate solar power do seem restricted to the states that didn't vote for the guy who won the last election in my experience.
I find this unnecessarily political, but I also find the more "conservative" minded people to be more supportive of independence, including solar. Not sure how many HOAs are in your experience, maybe it is a lot more than mine.
My friend in DC said her HOA tried to ban her from getting solar panels but she pushed back using a similar law saying they can’t prevent her from getting solar, and the HOA shut up. It’s not just red states, Karens are ubiquitous.
I think your first assertion is pretty misinformed since it's republicans are pushing texas to go over to renewables, if for no other reason than it just makes business sense. Run as much as your state renewably as possible, so long as it's cheaper than oil/gas and export oil/gas outside the state. And in texas currently renewables are cheaper than oil/gas.
If I'm not mistaken California has made it law that your HOA simply cannot stop you from having solar if you want it. Hard to imagine Texas doing that.
> If I'm not mistaken California has made it law that your HOA simply cannot stop you from having solar if you want it.
While the protections have been extended and clarified by subsequent legislation, its worth noting that this policy (the Solar Rights Act) was adopted in 1978 in California.
Using the law to force your HOA into something, though, sounds like a really good way to ensure that your HOA will fuck with you by every possible means for the rest of your natural life.
How many houses have natural gas space heaters that work without power?
I'm sure lots of people used an oven or a range as emergency heat, but a point in favor of keeping those going is not a point in favor of natural gas space heating.
Powering a ~500w blower is not a big deal if you are flexible with diy options. You can backfeed 50A 240v into your panel with about $150-200 worth of hardware (and to code if you follow a few basic rules). A ton of Houston homeowners did this after Ike. I was able to keep my furnace going continuously through a 24 hour outage with a 12kw generator. I know of some who used even smaller ~2kw units to similar effect (albeit they had to be more conservative with other household loads)
How many houses have natural gas space heaters that work without power?
Quite a few. Older through the wall gas panel type gas heaters work without power. Often found in low-end apartments and trailers.
Newer ones tend to require power, mostly for a fan, but sometimes for "cloud connectivity".
Your reaction is very common, there is probably a name for such thing, because it's a paradox. People always say "this or that is unsignificant to global warming", but all contributors to pollution are insignificant, it's the accumulation of all of them that makes it what it is, and with this kind of reaction, things just keep getting worse
Not only do I agree with this thing about electric efficient stoves, but I think we push our lifestyles much more in favor of environment, like not really "I have respect for the environment, and I drive an electric car", but more "I have respect for the environment, and I ride a bicyle" this means more to me (electric cars are still a large source of pollution, from their components: plastics, electronics, to the batterires, their maintenances..)
A lot of people seem unaware that many dishes can not be cooked with anything but a gas stove, including practically the entire Chinese cuisine. Electric stoves simply aren't a workable replacement in this case.
I work in earth science, I know how bad methane is a greenhouse gas. The comment on top is absolutely right in that the line has to be drawn somewhere for a sensible approach though. Your bike example, the factories making these bikes still pollute, steel is a major source of pollution actually. So we should all walk!
You see, there is no end to it once we get started and don't have a plan.
It's a compromise, but those compromises should be more toward environment, less toward personal comfort (like hearing they use gas stoves because it makes something taste a little better, is a bit ridiculous). My footprint is very small, not 0% (electric cars showing "100% electric, 0% pollution" is not honest, I see the good intent behind, but let's not lie), I've one bike collected from garbage, the other is second-hand, even replaced tyres from thrown-out wheels. This compromise is good because it's also give me a good health, immune system, things like covid is not really a concern for me, at least far behind road accidents
There's already a significant difference between this kind of basic bike and a full blown competition bike with all sorts of electronics devices. And the difference with a car is another level, just considering the weight of it (all kind of road kills it does, road damage, ..) and all services needed to maintain to fuel those cars, all the hidden indirect pollution, that's what people don't consider.
If people reduced all their footprint by a half, we would in short/mid term pollute twice less globally, so it's defnitely worth trading some lifestyle habbits for environment friendly ones
So the exact level of pollution you produce is good, people should all live the same way you do?
I grew up in a developing country without heating or aircon. I remember having frostbite on my feet some winters. Most of the food we ate was brought from the local farms straight to the market. No shipping stuff around the world, no cooling etc. I also biked everywhere and still do. If you're from a first world country, just by existing there and living the most basic life you're already responsible for so much CO2 it will be hard to ever catch up. So please give up everything and revert to monke before preaching to me.
But seriously: Moralizing doesn't help. People need better education so they understand energy issues, which they currently don't. Instead everyone repeats believe the science™ or such mantras, but they never actually look at the science. Once they have an understanding, as societies we need to figure out rules that work for most people, not just edge cases. It's good you ride your bike and I do to, but it's not a solution for everyone, some people will still need to drive cars. On the same note the push to make all cars electric is idiotic. The other day I saw they introduced electric highway patrol cars in New York, who on earth would think that to be a good idea?! I work in earth science and the amount of myths people believe about energy and climate related topics is insane. The lack of understanding makes them easy targets for misinformation by the energy lobby, the car industry and other actors with ulterior motives.
Totally agreed with you, about education, and sorry, nothing against you, reacting more on the article and global behaviors. I know I still have a footprint, I consume a bit of electricity (powering my low-energy laptop, a bit of light the evening, and cooking rice, that's pretty much all, I don't even have a fridge, no kidding), tap water, not much but still (like I don't wash my clothes often, few time a year probly), planning to have dry toilets, not easy in an apartment, but I'll try.
I don't preach for my way to optimize things which is a bit extreme, just for a more achievable end result: cutting by a half our footprints. People can take more pblic transports, train, avoid planes, consume more local food, consume less overall etc..
The line isn't gas stoves. It's gas connections to new houses or businesses. Once you have gas connected you have gas hot water, gas heating, and oh yes, gas stoves.
I suspect a lot of restaurants will move to bottled gas for cooking while using electricity everywhere else. That way they can still get the flame seared taste or the feeling of control they don't get with an electric or induction cooktop.
> We're going to need to draw the lines somewhere. Blaming gas stoves for climate change seems like a bit of an over reach.
I don't think ecology is the main drive here. It's more of a safety/convenience thing. No need to care about gas lines, a lot of new houses are fully electric (heating, stove). Also, no more grandma forgetting to shut down the gas and exploding half the building.
Also, afaik, gas stove are pretty bad for indoor air quality
"...the ability of the rich and the powerful to identify their ascendency with lofty moral principles, [makes] resistance a crime not only against the state but against humanity itself. Ruling classes have always sought to instill in their subordinates the capacity to experience exploitation and material deprivation as guilt, while deceiving themselves that their own material interests coincide with those if mankind as a whole" -christopher lasch
I could argue that there is a push precisely because it is the most controversial cutover from gas to electric. Few people argue over the quality of a gas vs. electric water heater, or furnace - if the air and water are hot, all is well.
Gas cooking is the last hurdle culturally to dumping citywide gas lines entirely. This is just a theory.
Room Heating consumes more energy and thus emissions, perhaps switching to blankets and warm clothes can prevent more emissions than cooking. Even Better stop cookign and live on salads instead. That should be an even better way to prevent emissions. With this kind of logic one should probably just stop living altogether.
A carbon tax would discourage this behavior only to the extent that it is harmful, and would avoid regulations on every niche market with a CO2 output...
Unfortunately, Carbon taxes have been become political poison and red meat for the republican base, so we use methods that are less effective, more costly, and more annoying.
When the government tries to control business, they fight back with lobbyists, bribes, by moving, etc
The citizens never fight back. They are pretty easy to convince that they are doing the right thing (see every Tesla owner ever [don't fight me guys, I'm joking])
I love these things. The scent and feel of wood burning to keep you warm is ingrained through nearly a million years of human history and evolution. It's more a part of the human experience than the concept of living in a group of more than a dozen people. It goes as far back in our shared experience as clothing. It predates writing by a longshot, and touches possibly the moments of language as a whole. Monogamy, marriage, every concept we have of interpersonal and romantic relationships is more modern and constructed than this simple chemical reaction that changed our species from simple hominids to Civilization Builders. A nice wood fire scratches the primal itch all humans (that I know) occasionally feel better than most things.
Do we really need to shed such a cornerstone of humanity in order to remain being human on this rock?
The main argument against fireplaces and wood burning stove isn't their CO2 emissions; it's the particulates they release into the immediate surroundings, which have much worse health impacts than previously thought.
The real issue is gas hook-ups to homes, not just gas cooking. The author of this article just tried to frame it in the most controversial way possible. Using gas to heat a home and provide cooking heat in an area where electricity is almost perfectly green is a big problem.
How do I cook with gas if not my home hookup? By driving my car to the nearest hardware store, purchasing or renting a steel propane tank, filling it from another tank that was filled by a truck that drove in, and driving home?
You put a tank outside or in your garage next to the water heater and a truck comes and refills it once or twice a year. You can use propane or natural gas.
Tens of millions of Americans living in rural and exurban areas have been cooking like this since before we were born. This is what we’d call a “solved problem.”
No, my point here is that you're saying we're "blaming gas stoves for climate change" but no one is saying that. However gas hookups are a big contributor to carbon output for a family home.
Where is electricity almost perfectly green? Burning at the house is thermodynamically much more efficient (and by extension much more green) than burning at a plant for resistive heating at the house.
Nowhere in the US is even close to having an energy mix where this is not the case. Why take steps backward and pollute more? Shouldn't we be trying to make strides to reduce emissions?
A study in the UK found that heating with electricity has lower carbon emissions than heating with natural gas:
> the average efficiency of gas heating rose slowly to 86% over the last decade, so that carbon emissions from producing 1 kWh of central heating [using natural gas] fell to 215 grams of CO2 in 2019. However, simple [resistance] electric heaters averaged only 207 grams of carbon dioxide per kWh by the end of 2019
For new buildings the effect is probably even greater, as you are probably going to choose a heat pump (2-5kW heat output for 1kW electrical input) over resistance heating.
The US averages around 400g CO2 per kWh, so yes maybe resistance heating doesn't make sense, but heat pumps for sure do.
> Burning at the house is thermodynamically much more efficient (and by extension much more green) than burning at a plant for resistive heating at the house.
Which is why almost no houses in heating-dominated climates use primarily resistance heating.
In the UK, pretty much anywhere that uses electric heating will be resistive: either night-time storage heaters or just straight-up electric radiators. Heat pumps are still exceedingly rare.
Wind turbines are manufactured using petrochemicals and currently have no way of being recycled, so they build up when they are replaced. GE hopes to turn them into some form of cement, but that may take decades https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb...
Solar panels are built in China, powered by coal and slave labor.
My point is there is no such thing as a free lunch, and a lot of "green" tech is very much not-so at this point.
I see this point often brought up to detract from green energy sources. But I fail to see how it would be possible to transition to any new green technology without relying on the existing energy infrastructure for manufacturing. This attitude reminds of of the saying "perfection is the enemy of the good" and would get us no closer to a green energy future if everyone held this opinion.
Put another way, what is the alternative you are proposing for the energy source to manufacture the first wind turbine (at cost and can scale)? You might be able to manufacture a couple of wind turbines with some horses and man power but it will never be cost competitive with fossil fuels unfortunately.
Those also produce CO2 (effectively by burning sugar, more or less), and IIRC generally more of it per unit of useful work than a good fossil-fuel-powered engine.
I’m trying to point out an uncomfortable truth that a lot of green promoters gloss over or fail to acknowledge. In some cases natural gas may be the best option for the environment given a location - that’s simply a fact. Producing solar power, even if it was perfect and constant, does not magically remove all of the petrochemicals involved in its manufacture, transport, and maintenance.
I think hydro and nuclear are the realistic clean options. Solar and wind are not going to fix our problems.
The disruption isn't that big, if you don't own a stove and don't cook in your home.
For the rest of us, it would be an enormous disruption. If we were forced to get rid of gas stoves, the individual and aggregate economic cost would be huge.
And while you might get used to an induction stove, nobody gets used to an electric one - those things really are rubbish.
>[0] Cooking on electric is a horrible experience compared with gas, and cooking on induction isn't great either (unless you're entire cooking knowledge is boiling a pan of water, in which case, yay!). And of course there are dishes (such as many Chinese dishes) which you simply could no longer cook.
> unless you're entire cooking knowledge is boiling a pan of water
If your entire cooking knowledge is boiling a pan of water, just get a damn microwave and stop ruining things for everyone else.
0: Quoted in full because it disappeared while I was writing my answer.
The idea that you can't cook Chinese food on an electric stove is nonsense. If you are a hardcore wok enthusiast you can actually get an induction wok burner, and induction stoves are far more common in China than the US, which one would expect not to be the case if they couldn't be used to make Chinese food. Of course most people trot this argument out as a talking point and not because they actually like to make Chinese food very often.
> The idea that [I] can't cook Chinese food on an electric stove is nonsense.
Good for you? The most Chinese thing I make on a regular basis is frozen orange chicken (from <checks freezer> Foster Farms, apparently), so I don't really care.
In any case, I've yet to encounter a electric stove that's fit-for-purpose for anything more sophisticated than boiling water. That's not to say they don't exist, but someone else, somewhere else having one is rather irrelevant to me.
> induction stoves are far more common in China than the US, which one would expect not to be the case if they couldn't be used to make Chinese food.
FWIW, I'm pretty sure most uses of "Chinese food" on eg HN refer to American-adaptations-of-Chinese-food, similar to how "pizza" generally bears little resemblance to the traditional Italian dish, so this doesn't mean much either way.
> Of course most people trot this argument out as a talking point
I appreciate the implication that I'm not most people, I guess?
So you're making my point, then. Most people who trot out the line about how electric stoves are not suitable for Chinese cooking don't know or care about Chinese cooking and just want to use it as a cudgel.
I have no idea what those people know, care about, or want, and I don't see how my comment has anything to do with them; it certainly doesn't make your point. My point is that electric stoves are not suitable for (almost) any kind of cooking, presumably but not specifically including Chinese.
I thought what I meant to imply was obvious enough, but maybe not. The idea that you can't cook Chinese food on an electric stove is nearly always made as bad-faith concern trolling and it is not correct.
0 > If your entire cooking knowledge is boiling a pan of water, just get a damn microwave and stop ruining things for everyone else.
1 > 0: Quoted in full because it disappeared while I was writing my answer.
2 > Good for you? The most Chinese thing I make on a regular basis is frozen orange chicken (from <checks freezer> Foster Farms, apparently), so I don't really care.
3 > In any case, I've yet to encounter a electric stove that's fit-for-purpose for anything more sophisticated than boiling water. That's not to say they don't exist, but someone else, somewhere else having one is rather irrelevant to me.
4 > FWIW, I'm pretty sure most uses of "Chinese food" on eg HN refer to American-adaptations-of-Chinese-food, similar to how "pizza" generally bears little resemblance to the traditional Italian dish, so this doesn't mean much either way.
5 > I appreciate the implication that I'm not most people, I guess?
Which of those reads like "electric stoves are even worse at cooking chinese food (in particular) than they are at cooking most types of food" to you?
Come on, man. You might not like it as much but it's completely serviceable to cook a meal. Even the shitty old coil ones do the job. I've used those too, as have most people in America who've ever rented a home. There is pretty much nothing you can ONLY make on one kind of stove.
Sorry, but this is simply not true. As someone who cooks, I'd rather grate my own face than use an electric stove. They don't get hot enough, they take forever to heat up, and they take forever to cool down. After cooking on gas, there is no way anyone would ever want to go back to electric. Induction is a lot better than electric of course, but gas is still preferable.
Aside from anything else, this whole exercise smacks of making people believe they're helping the planet so they continue to consume, consume, consume with wild abandon - all the while providing a huge cash injection for companies selling stoves. Some quick maths, just for fun: there are 122,800,00 households in the USA, and around 35% of them have gas stoves (42,980,000). I don't know about the US, but here in the UK the cheapest (and therefore not great) induction stoves are around £300/$411, and for anyone mad enough, electric stove tops are around £100/$140. Let's assume average replacement unit cost is around $300, with fitting around $100. Cost to replace all gas stoves is around $17,192,000,000 - and that's assuming everyone buys the cheapest stove tops available.
If we really wanted to do something that would actually make a difference, how about banning bunker oil?
If we were going to ban gas stoves the obvious way to do it would be to forbid sale and installation of new ones, not to mandate that everyone immediately replace their existing stoves.
Again, I have a gas stove for the first time with my home now. I don't find it that much better and I don't really like the hazards associated with it. I cook frequently. Perhaps I'd feel differently if I'd learned to cook on gas and then went to electric, rather than the other way around, because the issue people have seems mostly to be not accounting for the temperature not being easy to change on the fly.
No, it's not comparable and are you kidding me? This is utter nonsense. There are 12 ships that produce more co2 than all the gas fed home sin the world.. Quite getting off in telling other how to be.
The point isn't that a stove uses more than a container ship -- where did you get that idea? It's that "I can't figure out how to work an electric stove" is a relatively frivolous reason to burn fossil fuels.
... Thats disingenuous, its not I don't know how to use an electric stove its that its simply better, they don't even compare. The response time on a gas stove is unbeatable and makes a big difference in how you cook. Also try using a wok on an electric stove.
My point was why don't we fix the very obvious and low hanging fruit like cargo ships that run on sludge, fix that first before you tell me and millions of others that "we don't know how to use electric stoves"
Ultimately I just find these conversations frustrating. People say they're concerned about the environment but then go into fits at having to make even trivial sacrifices like putting up with electric stoves which are better than they've ever been. And in the process they point at vital industries like shipping and agriculture and say we should do away with those first. If you compare the sacrifices people made, say, to win World War II, just on the home front -- gas rationing, donating household goods for scrap metal, etc.-- it makes us look quite unable to meet the historic moment to see people have fits about using a paper straw.
One big reason I prefer gas over electric for the stove top at least, is that all modern electric hobs have these awful unresponsive touch controls, to give the overall stove that totally flat look. Tap tap tap to go from 1-9, where every 2nd or 3rd tap doesn't register. It drives me nuts. Gas always has a nice big knob for you to turn, even if the settings are not very precise, being pretty much full blast or low.
However the writing is on the wall for gas in domestic use. At least where I live it's more of a pain to install - requiring the specialist gas guy to do it rather than an electric stove that anyone can just plug in. Then the gas fixtures require regular safety review every couple of years. Between moving/renovating houses and helping family replace stoves over the last 10 years or so I've seen that stores have gradually stopped selling gas units. You have to order them specially and the selection gets smaller each time. They only sell electric by default now. Eventually I can see there being a kind of de facto ban just from you not being able to get gas anywhere, or it being so much hassle that you really, really have to want to get it. It's pretty much the situation now. And if you are renting the place is almost guaranteed to be electric because gas requires more effort to fit, and has more that can go wrong.
The unresponsiveness of controls drive me nuts as well. Greasy or wet fingers makes it hard to use the controls. This is solvable with physical knobs.
Also the power moves up and down in steps, induction alternates between on and off to deliver an average amount of power. With gas knobs you have more fine grained control. When you want to fry something, with induction you often have 2 power options: the “fry, cook, fry, cook” option and the “fry just a bit too hard” option. I have debuyer pans, made of thick metal, acting as a buffer, which helps a bit.
Stepless controll, with physical knobs would help a lot.
Induction stoves are great for cooking water though. And for cleaning.
I think that's largely a function of how much the manufacturer is willing to spend on hardware. I have a Bosch Series 8 cook top and it has enough power levels and fast enough PWM cycle that I can't detect the pulsing even with a light weight carbon steel pan.
There still are issues, like the automatic pan warm up feature control logic overshoots with a carbon steel pan and undershoots with a cast iron one. Pan detection takes a couple of seconds every time it's triggered which makes it annoying to use lifting the pan as a way of temperature control.But overall I'm pretty happy.
A separately installed control panel with physical knobs would be appreciated though. Wouldn't want knobs on the main cook top as having a flat surface makes cleanup so much nicer.
If you have the oven below the cook tops, you can place the controls there. This is basically how most home ranges look like in Germany: https://imgur.com/a/U2JK6cB
> Pan detection takes a couple of seconds every time it's triggered which makes it annoying to use lifting the pan as a way of temperature control.
This is my biggest problem with the induction burners I've used. Basting meat in butter requires tilting the pan, lifting it off the burner. Cooking eggs softly involves moving on and off the heat. Whatever auto setting on things I've used don't allow for "off for a bit, and then back on for a bit" use.
You think that’s bad? I have been upset at Rubbermaid for months, because I bought some $6 buckets that cannot pour more than a trickle without spilling their contents everywhere. That brand used to be a favorite of mine, but I now plan to avoid buying any of their products for as long as I can remember that they hire obviously incompetent industrial designers.
It sounds like I should proactively add Bosch to my list of companies that demonstrate dedicated leadership in the race to the bottom. I will still consider their brand and products, but more as a cautionary example than as a viable option.
My last dishwasher had the analog buttons go bad twice, so when it was time to get a new one I went with the capacitive touch button one, just for that reason (no moving part to break there). Been about 12 years, not a single problem, and the buttons work all the time. Granted, I know a well spec'd/designed hardware button can last a lifetime, but that one didn't even get close, so for me the capacitive's been a pretty good choice.
Definitely not all induction stoves are like that - in my previous appartament I had an induction stove from Bosch, and the frequency of alternating "on/off" was high enough that it was not noticeable at all. It also had 20 power levels and a frying temperature sensor - worked really well. But now I moved to an older house, which one of the cheaper induction stove from Samsung, and that one is terrible - it has exactly the property you describe.
The fine grain control issue is very solvable. The induction hot plate I use has 100 steps, and is perfectly adept at gently reducing balsamic to a glaze, for example.
It’s a high end unit today but the technology will trickle down.
A colleague of mine (who likes cooking with gas) recently had to set up a new kitchen and chose the Miele professional induction field, he is very happy. It features old-style mechanical controls for the power and behaves exactly as one would expect a cooking stove to behave:
Yes, Miele is always expensive and this is their professional line. On the up side, they are made to last. Their washing machines for at least 20 years, I would guess their stoves even longer, as there are no big moving parts.
Miele used to be that. I have a Miele stove and oven. The oven's humidifier killed the controller (I have the version where the stove controls are above the oven, I hate controls on the cooking surface) which was north of 400€. I used to be all-in on Miele, now it's giving me a pause. Proper engineering encases stuff in IP67 if it can't stand humidity. At Mieles price-point I'd expect everything being IP67 cased.
These are horrible indeed, and it gets only worse if liquid is spilled in the vicinity of those controls - who in their right mind would design a cooking surface that cannot handle spills?
The control knobs arranged in a linear fashion may be listed as an example of bad design in "The Design of Everyday Things", but little did Donald Norman know in which direction stove design would be heading!
One of my mum's cats worked out how to push the capacitive button that lifts the range hood out of its nook in the bench. Pretty fascinating because he'll sit there pawing in the general area of it till he raises it, sits there for a bit admiring his work and then leaves.
I've got an oven and induction cooktop freestanding unit[1] that has big chunky knobs to change the induction power levels. Would never bother with gas again.
I made the mistake of letting a 3rd party pick out my appliances. Never again. They bought me an expensive induction stove. I love the induction, but the damn touch controls make me want to take a sledgehammer to the thing.
It’s constantly turning itself off and beeping at me because it thinks someone is touching it or that something has overflowed its pot or that it’s Tuesday. Touch interfaces— outside of the phone form factor— need to die a fast and fiery death.
Electric ovens often just plug into a standard power outlet but stoves typically have a high voltage setup. However, if we're talking about your own stove in your own home, you're absolutely allowed to connect it yourself in Germany. You better know what you're doing, though.
Yup. Bosch/Siemens has them too[1], presumably so do the other major brands. I had to look for it when buying, but I didn't have to look for it very hard.
My only complaint about my induction hob [0] is the opposite - that touch panel is way too sensitive, can't cope with being wet (even just slightly having been wiped) and beeps at you if you spill something or put something down across the controls, giving you about 3s before it turns off, loses settings including timers, and must be bone dry before you can try to reset. That might be a feature, (emergency shutoff there's a spill?) but it's a really bad/unreliable/over-sensitive one.
[0] - (perhaps it's not the case in the US - but we should avoid calling them 'electric' which can work through conduction, i.e. it gets hot and ferrous pans are not required, and often do have knobs - at least in the UK if someone says 'electric' they mean the 'red ring' kind)
At least in talking to friends in the US, we generally say "gas", "electric coil", "Electric flat top", and "Induction" if it was important to draw a distinction. I haven't encountered anyone who said "Electric" and meant "induction". Granted, induction hasn't really caught on here yet. Lots of older people I talk to don't even know what I'm talking about. My friends who are in a position to buy a stove are generally buying induction, though.
And while that's an extreme example, fire departments in areas with natural gas tend, from what I've seen/heard to go out on a lot of "gas leak" calls over the course of a year. Sure, some are false alarms, or very small leaks that are quickly and easily mitigated, but any one of them could turn into a catastrophe. And it's not exactly rare for that to happen. Not common-place, but it happens more often than anybody would really like. And when gas explosions happen, they tend to injure/kill multiple people and destroy lots of property.
This is not, of course, to suggest that electricity is without danger as well.
That was an unusual setup (at least I hope it's unusual) where the gas piping under the street runs at working pressure (for the furnaces) with no local regulators at the houses. So a central fault (accidental cross connection to high pressure) caused a catastrophe.
Where I live, and hopefully most places, the distribution network runs at high pressure - causing a nice loud hiss when someone backhoes into it, which surprisingly never seems to cause a fire - but with each house individually regulated.
One hopes that the house regulators have a "fail closed" mode on input overpressure, but I don't actually know.
That's exactly why I sought out an induction model which has a "scale" control where all intensity levels (1-12) are available with a single touch. This issue in foreseeable, and we should vote with our money for usable devices.
YES!!! I had the displeasure of having to use one with those exact shit touch controls for a bit less than a year and it made me so furious I swore to never use an induction stove again. The thing was absolutely impossible to control and even when you managed to dial it in, it was unresponsive as hell so I found myself moving the pot between two coils to avoid spewing pasta all over the kitchen.
The writing is on the wall, period, it's just a matter of time. As renewable usage increases, industrial and power grid use of natural gas is going to decrease. Period. That's the whole point. The reason natural gas is so cheap is that we use so much of it; when that starts to change, it'll be prohibitively expensive for restaurants to cook with it. It might get replaced with something other than electric, but fossil-derived natural gas is going away, and cooking is no exception.
Almost every day, I use three different types of range: gas, induction, and radiant electric. Of the three, gas would be the hardest to give up. My most-used pieces of cookware are small aluminum pots that are not magnetic (and thus not induction capable), and even if they were, too small to work on my induction cooktop, which doesn't recognize any magnetic base of less than about six inches in diameter.
I use the induction cooktop for slow cooking, boiling, and pressure cooking. Everything else gets put on gas if I have room. Nothing beats gas for output and control.
I could certainly do just fine on radiant or, god forbid, coils. But the gas and induction together are a huge luxury that I feel grateful for every time I use them.
One under-appreciated advantage of a gas range is how evenly it heats pans of lesser quality. Because so much of the heating on gas is accomplished by the flow of hot "exhaust" gas across the entire bottom of the pan, a thinner and less thermally conductive pan will still heat much more evenly than it would on an electric coil or induction hob.
EDIT:
I'm definitely on board the energy efficiency bandwagon. I have a four kilowatt solar array on my house, and I drive a twenty five year old Honda minivan because of the mileage and low upkeep.
If I thought gas cooking was a low hanging fruit on the efficiency tree, I might be more willing to give up the luxury of it. But from what I've seen it's not. It's rather like the highest gas-powered fruit on the tree.
I couldn't give up induction now and I have used gas plenty. FWIW, my induction handles 4-11" and I had no pans that were not induction-compatible, but that might depend on where you live I guess.
> Nothing beats gas for output
Yeah, maybe if you have a huge wok burner? my induction boils water substantially quicker than any gas stove I have used.
Yeah, that statement was confusing I guess. Same as you, my induction hob boils water in a suitable pot faster than my largest gas hob.
The largest gas hob I've ever used is 20,000 BTU/hr. It will heat up a saucier faster and more evenly than any electric or induction hob could hope to, but that's partly due to the pan's narrow base, and to the way I use it. It doesn't often sit on a hob for very long.
Have you tried using steel adapter plates to use the aluminium cookware on induction? The only thing I miss is not being able to use a Moka pot (there are induction versions, but they are usually 4+ servings - I find the single serving versions produce better coffee).
Here in Europe induction is everywhere, so maybe finding good cookware is easier than the US. Last year I got a 8cm (3") pot for boiling milk and beans from the supermarket for €15 that works perfectly on induction.
I use a plate adapter from Bialetti to do Moka pot on my induction range, it was a bit pricey at 20€ but it looks good and does the job.
I also ended up buying the Bialetti induction Moka but for a place that turned out to actually have the evil Ceran electric top… still worked obviously. It’s expensive but AFAICT the only one that’s induction friendly and also has the standard Bialetti interior shape, which I find much easier to clean. Also it’s gorgeous.
However, I do get a pretty serious caffeine high off the larger dose.
And yet, a copper pan will not heat on an induction cooktop.
For almost all induction cooktops, cookware must be made of a magnetic ferrous material in order to be compatible. This is why induction-compatible aluminum pans have a disc of magnetic steel impact-bonded to the base.
Do you really like radiant better than electric coils? To me it takes too long to heat up, has poor temperature control, and hurts you if a pan isn't fully covering the burner. It seems like it's made for people optimizing for their stove to be "easy to clean". What am I missing?
But for new houses it doesn’t make sense to spend thousands to install something that will needs to start being phased out. A heat pump water heater and home heating but still installing gas lines for cooking is probably not super economic.
The efficiency of gas is more than the btu of gas to equivalent electric. Gas produces pollutants that must be removed from the house. The higher exhaust rate will remove more conditioned air than an equivalent electric would.
Well, its seems unexplainable, but did you found the gas food tastes much better than other medium? In china and many asian countries, they do believe this thing.
LOL, I wouldn't say I need anything. I can make hollandaise in a tin can. I'm just giving my perspective as a long-time user of these very different tools.
We're talking about something that accounts for less than half a percent of total natural gas use right now. This will have no measurable effect on CO2 emissions.
Right? All the can't "give up heating my beans" sarcasm makes you wonder if we've all become so bought in to our candidates that we just accept our politicians BS blindly. Does anyone fact check anything?
As ylermenezes mentioned cooking accounts for less than half a percent of total natural gas. So, no, we don't need to start somewhere. We need to start where it makes a difference.
60% of US electricity is generated from fossil fuels (1). 40% of that is from Natural Gas. 20% from Coal which produces almost twice the carbon as Natural Gas.
And (2) says 60% of that energy is lost in conversion. So, converting from natural gas to electricity would actually increase carbon emissions in many parts of the US.
So, where should we start? I'm not an expert, but just this quick analysis says decreasing the amount of fossil fuels used for US generation would be a much better choice.
Sure we're about to go bankrupt, but it would really be inconvenient to give up my Starbuck's latte every morning. Don't you know how bland regular coffee is? And my Starbuck's only accounts for less than half a percent of my wasteful spending.
I don't think that's a very good analogy. A consistent latte habit can easily cost a few thousand dollars per year, which is likely to be a significant portion of discretionary spending for anyone under threat of personal bankruptcy.
In contrast, less than 3% of residential gas usage goes to cooking, according to TFA.
Now, if you were to assert that poor people shouldn't even buy Starbucks once a week, that might be a more apt analogy, although I would question the effectiveness of that advice.
Like I said earlier, I drive a 1995 Honda minivan, because the mileage and low upkeep probably constitute the greatest environmental impact I can make at my income level.
What, if I may ask, are you do doing to minimize your impact?
It's not just cooking, it's residential and business natural gas use period, as stated in TFA ("phasing out natural-gas hookups to homes and businesses to reduce carbon emissions.")
It sucks, but it is something that has to be done if we are going to avoid catastrophe, unless someone invents really effective carbon capture.
My personal habits are irrelevant, but I'm in a deregulated energy state and pay extra for 100% renewable/carbon-offset power, and I don't have a natural gas hookup.
Right, the article is just playing up the most inflammatory aspect of gas bans.
But IMO, a better way forward would be to raise taxes on residential gas delivery such that home heating with gas becomes cost prohibitive. The extremely low cost of gas incentivizes profligate, wasteful consumption, sort of like the unmetered delivery of water in places like Sacramento, where the marginal cost of water delivery is very low, and the externalized cost of eventual resource depletion is not accounted for.
>but it is something that has to be done if we are going to avoid catastrophe
What sources of pollution are we allowed to keep? What is your criteria for an acceptable amount of human impact on the environment? If you also have information for acceptable levels of cobalt, nickel, and copper mining, and landfill usage (per capita per year, in cubic meters, I guess), that would be useful. Because every time I see any climate change story, I'm told that I absolutely have to give something up to save humanity, and I'm beginning to feel like no level of existence will be acceptable.
I'm very eco conscious in my day to day life, more than most of the people in my social group. But I also realize we can't just eliminate every trace of our lives.
I'm not talking about pollution, I'm talking about CO2 emissions.
The answer is that, long term, we have to balance out and only keep the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that the planet + carbon capture can absorb. It's going to be a very small number per capita.
As I said, it sucks. But it is the only way to prevent serious climate change long-term.
I don't think you're making the point you think you're making. Using a Starbucks coffee to represent CO2 from gas ranges, your total monthly expenditures are $100M, $80M+ of which is going to a few big categories like cars.
The reason you're going bankrupt is because you've convinced yourself the $5 coffee is the solution.
If you want a small change that makes a real difference take the bus one day a week.
You can't successfully ban X and replace it with Y if Y does not have feature parity with X. Gas stoves are almost always better for cooking; they give you a more even heat distribution and it is easier to control the amount of heat the pan is getting at any time. Chefs love them.
Tangentially, I had the same complaint about paper straws when they started banning plastic straws. You are forced to drink fast, or you end up having a flimsy straw that can't suck, so you're forced to get another one. Bad alternative solution to plastic straws. Electric stoves are a less viable alternative to gas stoves, but they are definitely better than paper straws...
Electric coil ranges are awful, yes - but have you tried a good induction range?
And electric ovens completely beat gas ovens.
My house came with some fancy-pants 48-inch gas oven+range unit from an Italian company whose name I can't pronounce - the cool (er... hot!) and unusual range-top features are nice and it is a good gas range, no-doubt, but the gas oven just lacks all the neat mod-cons and features you can only get with an electric oven, like better temperature regulation, self-cleaning, etc... While my friends and associates with induction ranges (especially the ones you don't see sold in Best Buy) won't stop talking about how great they are while I'm dealing with another stovetop flame-out, aieee.
I bought an induction stove 5 years ago. I cook 3-5 times a week and I love it. I will never go back to gas stoves. At this point, I see them as a fire hazard.
Those are generally meant for single devices, hence aren't going to be on the kitchen counter. Instead you'd have to have a dedicated plug, circuit, and associated costs with that.
One and two burner models seem to use ordinary 120V @15 amp power. I've tested two single burner models, they both top out at 1440 watts. I think the two burner models divide the 1440 watts total between the two burners.
I appreciate the information, but referring to an induction set-up as a “burner” makes me die inside, and I don’t even know why. It just feels wrong. Isn’t there a better term we can use?
Looks like the Scanpans I have (and love) now might not work, but the same manufacturer does offer an induction-compatible line. Replacing them all wouldn't be cheap, but certainly justifiable if I'm already buying a house and/or new stove.
A relative is a professional-ish cook; not a chef, but she writes Italian cook books and runs cooking classes from her home kitchen. She utterly loves her induction stove and finds it perfect for cooking Italian dishes.
I have a fairly high-end gas cooktop, dual electric ovens and a frickin' amazing Breville/PolyScience Control Freak induction burner. The Control Freak is considerably more precise than the gas cooktop. I have increasingly been using it in place of my sous vide setup, and the results have been excellent. I am a fan.
Right now, I wouldn't willingly give up any of them but, if I had to, I would cede the gas cooktop for the Breville induction burner, or, rather, several of them, or, better yet, a multi-burner induction cooktop of Breville quality.
The two biggest issues would be:
• Certain favorite pans of mine are not induction friendly, and…
• The extra electrical circuits that would need to be added as the Breville is power hungry
Good for her, but there's more to cuisine than Italian. Cantonese cooking in particular often requires wok hei, which in turn requires extreme temperatures/open flame, and rounded bottom woks don't work with flat induction cookers.
Induction cooktops are wildly popular in China, perhaps more so than anywhere else in the world. This isn't to say that cooking with gas/open flame isn't also wildly popular, but the difficulty of using a wok with induction hasn't been an obstacle to adoption there. It helps that by no means do you need to take an all-or-nothing stance here: standalone countertop induction plates are effective and cheap (and far safer than the traditional hot plates that they resemble).
A typical home gas stove isn't even that good for wok cooking in the first place. I mean yeah it will work, of course, but it's nowhere near ideal. It's a little ridiculous that this thing it's not even that good at is the go-to defense of the gas stove. It's almost like if people who didn't like EVs always brought up cooking food on your engine.
1. typical home gas stoves in china are far more powerful than normally found in western home kitchens. they're closer to what you'd find in a restaurant kitchen in the west
2. little portable induction cookers are common in china but most people aren't doing stir fries on them. people use them for hot pot at home, and maybe to boil or steam things. they're not the primary cooktop of choice. also something that ties into all this is that eating out is vastly cheaper and more affordable in chinese cities, and even low wage earners in cities might do it for literally every normal meal. those restaurants aren't cooking on induction.
This feels like saying no because of one very specific use case. I use a flat bottom wok on my electric stove almost every day. Adapt and you'll be fine.
Induction wok burners are a thing, here is a comparison between a 5000W induction wok burner and a gas wok burner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQVDSdW-dPU (look at the description for english description)
If you trust their results, induction burners produces much less waste heat compared to gas burners, which makes home indoor Chinese food cooking more feasible
There are quite a few induction stoves made specifically for dome bottom woks. They heat up incredibly fast, and can be lifted up out of the field and used pretty much exactly like a gas stove.
How do you char the outside of things without a flame? Burrito shells for instance. I use the flame directly on my food all the time. It really seems like you’re missing out.
I've always meant to read up on acrylamide studies and check whether they're 'in mice' or 'in humans' as I suspect that our evolutionary path might have made us a bit less susceptible to the carcinogenic effect of acrylamides from meats and such, from our out-sourcing some of our digestive tract to campfires for a few hundred thousand years.
Much like how a significant amount of humans are able to consume and digest alcohol, having mitigated some of the worst effects over thousands of years.
US appliance prices are ridiculous. I paid 689€, taxes inclusive for a top of the range 24" Bosch induction top. You could add an integrated oven and still end up below ~1k€.
> You can't successfully ban X and replace it with Y if Y does not have feature parity with X
You certainly can. For example early cars couldn't go every place where horses could. And only recently cars started to become autonomous which horses could do since forever (my great-grandpa supposedly had a horse that drove itself back to home while grandpa was sleeping on the cart).
And of course horse produces manure which is useful in farming. Cars still lack that feature :)
Horse drawn carriages are banned in some cities. I think many places don't need to ban them since owning a horse has become something of an elite activity due to cost/care/etc.
In Tucson Arizona, I saw a guy riding a horse down a busy street. It's pretty amazing how out of place it seemed, even there. The street he was riding on was historically used to race horses (much like people race cars on public roads today.)
There are old ordinances still in place which don't allow parking of horses in front of public buildings like court-houses.
> And of course horse produces manure which is useful in farming. Cars still lack that feature :)
Cars shit exhaust. I think there are products/research where yo can capture the exhaust with some filter you apply, and then can send the gathered matter back to the facility. Not sure if it's useful for anything though.
Induction is completely fine. I had a gas stove for the first time with the house I have now and I just don't see what the fuss is about. Also, my wife set her clothes on fire cooking, something that literally could not happen with an induction stove.
>You are forced to drink fast, or you end up having a flimsy straw that can't suck
At which point you just stop using the straw and drink normally.
The straw controversy was bizarre to me. I can't remember when I last used a straw and it's not often that I see them, aside from chain restaurants selling overpriced novelty drinks (e.g. starbucks).
Hm, there are drinks that make "more sense" through straws.
I am somewhat entangled in Tiki culture, and (mostly-)rum-based mixology. Drinking through straws changes drinking speeds and makes the whole experience slower and arguably better.
I switched to stainless steel straws. Those are way better than paper straws which start to disintegrate after 10 minutes, and probably last for a lifetime.
As the other user said, it’s hardly a rational process. The banners probably went for straws because they can be presented as relatively useless, or perhaps that their proponents are just gluttons.
Strongly disagree with this. Straws have a benefit over picking up a cup and sipping. A sip takes extra time and effort. If you have a lot of ice in the cup, it could get in the way of a sip. More importantly, straws can reduce spills, and make it more convenient to drink when your hands are busy or when you need to focus attention elsewhere.
TLDR: There's no way people are giving up straws in movie theaters.
Not to mention the millions of people with temporary or permanent disabilities that make fine motor control difficult or impossible. Or the millions (billions?) of people who need an unobstructed view while operating dangerous machinery like… maybe… driving.
A straw is one of the most basic accessibility and safety devices in the world.
Straws were always paper when I was a kid in school (1970's). But they may have been wax coated or something because they easily lasted long enough to finish your chocolate milk. ;-)
Better than electric, but we switched from gas to induction (magnets) when we redid our kitchen and I couldn't be happier with the change. It heats faster and more evenly than gas and is safer and easier to clean.
The only downside is that you can't heat aluminum with it. I had to replace my moka pot with a stainless steel alternative.
Agreed that paper straws are garbage - but the equivalency you are making doesn't work for gas stoves which have health impacts on their users - especially in smaller spaces/older buildings. Even my parents house, built in 2008, has no external venting for their gas stove/oven.
I agree gas stoves are so much better. I had always had electric until I moved into my current home that has a gas stove. It heats the pan so much faster. I love cooking on it.
as for paper straws I have purchased a number of steel straws but they are pain to clean
Not quite. It doesn’t work on every pan. You can’t easily walk into someone else’s kitchen and guess the setting needed for some medium heat dish by visually examining the burner on induction like you can on gas. (I mention this as someone who’d prefer to cutover to induction and getting resistance* from the main user of the gas cooktop.)
It appears to me that the studies in the article compared homes with gas stoves with homes without gas stoves. Do you think that people without gas stoves cook significantly less to explain away the difference to other cooking methods?
I was under an incorrect impression that gas stoves were more common in more wealthy homes. Every crap place I rented had an electric stove. Every nice place I've lived came with a gas range. I was incorrectly extrapolating from there that poor people cook less (I still think this is true - see food deserts, fast food induced health issues, and the like).
Basically a chain of incorrect assumptions, and ones I didn't even properly express
Is it possible to do something about the pollutants inherent to cooking? Clearly you can do something about the pollutants from gas. Maybe the pollutants from one dwarf the other?
I have no idea, but I'd be interested to learn the answer.
I have a different perspective. Having gas during freeze in Houston allowed us to boil water while the power is out. It not only allowed us to have warm water for taking a bath it also allowed us to boil the water to make it potable as the water was unsafe to drink during that time. Had we not had gas it would have been much worse for us.
This is a really good point, in that the cities that are banning natural gas in new construction, have not as far as I know invested in more reliable electric infrastructure to compensate for the lost redundancy. Are they considering the consequences of eliminating a second redundant energy supply leaving a “single point of failure”? More people will inevitably freeze to death, and that human cost should be accounted for along with the climate crisis, in finding the best path forward.
BTW in my experience, natural gas infrastructure is no more reliable than electricity. In winter 2011, our gas was shut off across Northern New Mexico for a week, due to high demand with record cold temperatures, and the need to retain pressure in the pipeline so it could function at all. Wood saved the day then, and seems to me a more distributed and robust emergency solution. Wood is super dirty of course, so it seems plausible that retaining gas residential hook ups as a backup to the electric supply, could be better for the environment by reducing wood use. Have the cities that are banning natural gas done this analysis?
For safety gas needs to be shut off during many emergencies. Solar panels and battery backups are probably better as they are less dangerous and less prone to common-mode failures than gas. As you mention, a woodpile is also a nice low-tech and low-risk backup.
Unless you have a modicum of electrical knowledge, a willingness to break some small safety regulations/laws, or lacking the former, a thirst for danger
Growing up in an area that commonly has power outages a gas range is a must for me for all of those reasons. But, they are secondary to how much nicer gas is to cook on than any electric range I have tried.
Makes sense. It seems like it would be best to create a fault tolerant society and have multiple forms of energy production instead of going all in on a single one. This can be done in an eco-friendly way, too. I don't think there will be one energy "winner" unless there's a huge breakthrough. We're one big solar flare away from needing paper and pencil for a few weeks.
On the other hand, on the west coast the likely cause of water contamination issues is a major earthquake. In which case gas would most likely be out longer than power.
The only reliable solution is to have a backup that’s not reliant on infrastructure. I.e everyone should have a camp stove and a couple of bottles of propane for it or an alternative self reliant solution that’s good for 3 or so days.
Personally I strongly prefer an induction stove to gas, partly because it’s faster to heat up, partly because it’s easier to clean.
But I can’t imagine professional chefs being told they have to switch to electric or induction. You can’t effectively cook in a wok with induction, since the sides of the wok don’t heat up nearly enough.
Speaking on behalf of a family that's run Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, and Thai restaurants - It's just not a wok if there are no flames shooting around the sides of it that can sear the food as it get tossed about.
On the one hand, you do really need to be dumping a bunch of heat into the pan, and on a gas stove "flames shooting around the edge" is probably a good thing to look for.
But I don't expect the flames themselves actually interact with the food in a meaning way compared with the hot metal.
>But I don't expect the flames themselves actually interact with the food in a meaning way compared with the hot metal.
Maybe not as much as the hot metal, but they absolutely can (and should, under the right circumstances). See how these noodles are tossed over the flame? https://youtu.be/oX62hKkcb6s
You can't directly compare power output from induction vs. gas. On an induction stove that 1500 W is nearly all useful heat with little or no variance. With gas a highly variable amount of that is lost to the air, dependent on cooking vessel size/shape.
That's true, all of that wattage is being turned into heat in the metal of the wok itself. But, like the other commenter to my post alluded to, a common wok cooking method in restaurants involves tossing the food up into the air, where presumably the food is being heated directly by the heat of the flames. In a home-cooking environment that would likely not be the case, and heat conduction even on a gas stove is primarily through contact with the wok.
> But, like the other commenter to my post alluded to, a common wok cooking method in restaurants involves tossing the food up into the air, where presumably the food is being heated directly by the heat of the flames.
Tossing is to interrupt cooking to prevent burning not to cook with direct heat from flames. To the extent it might do some slower cooking from the heated air when tossed, that’ll still happen from radiated/convected heat from the pan heating the air when the pan instead of flames are the heating element.
That's cool, and better pricing than I expected ($159). If it works well, it could help convince some of my relatives that have been on the fence about switching to induction, partly because they cook a lot of Chinese food.
The issue isn't that woks aren't compatible with induction stoves. I have a flat-bottomed wok that works with induction, but only the bottom heats up. I don't know how you would create an adaptor that would sit on the stove and somehow pull the heat up to the sides of the wok for even cooking.
That would satisfy Chinese restaurants, though I wonder if other restaurants would also ask for exceptions, if for no other reason because they don't want to put in expensive new equipment. Are there other types of cuisine that strongly benefit from gas?
Are you asking for a precise number? Sorry but what kind of question is that? I couldn't even give you an order of magnitude but it's a lot. Basically every person who is cooking an Asian cuisine.
because I'd guess that induction is less hazardous than gas in these respects, and some otherwise would-have-been gas ranges will be replaced by induction.
I've recently been trying to find an apartment in NYC. Every apartment has a gas stove. And all of the post-war apartments (and most of the older ones, too) don't have ventilation in the kitchen — at most they'll have a tiny passive vent opening in a corner somewhere, and even that's not guaranteed. The fans over the cooktops, if present, don't connect to outside air but just recirculate the stove exhaust throughout the kitchen. I don't understand how such designs aren't banned by building codes.
I have to begrudgingly agree. It's almost insulting that most apartment stove sets blow the ventilation exhaust right back in your face. It reminds me of the Victorian practice of burning gaslight fixtures all day long in sealed rooms.
With that being said... I hate electric fixtures so much! I know instant feedback is impossible, but do the electric alternatives really have to be this slow? It's as if everyone gave up on improving the concept 10 years ago and it drives me a little crazy...
How does removing natural gas stoves reduce carbon emissions? Unless the cities are using a lot of renewables I'd expect going from natural-gas to heat would be a lot more efficient than going from some-fuel to electricity to heat?
The goal is to decarbonize our economy. We need to convert pretty much everything that uses fossil fuels in house to use electricity. At the same time we are replacing in house fossil fuel usage (gas stoves, gas water heaters, etc) we also need to be increasing the energy share of renewables on the grid. Its not an "either/or" its a "both/and" situation. Decarbonizing the household can and should be done in tandem with decarbonizing the grid. Induction stoves, which are the modern alternative to gas, are much more efficient, get to temperature instantly, and are generally considered a very high quality.
Point taken wrt greenhouse, but I don't think we're gonna be that desperate even considering how bad the situation already is, and is likely to get.
Gas cooking is a really tiny fraction of residential greenhouse emissions. Natural gas accounts for most of of the greenhouse emissions from commercial and residential[0] sources, but commercial & residential represent less than 15% of the total domestic US contribution. If you consider how often somebody is using the gas range vs their water heater or household heating, this is a really really small number.
Globally, the numbers look similar[1]. I'm not sure about how much gas is leaking from the grid, or what the cost of the hazards associated with the gas supply is, however the second source cites fugitive emissions as %3.9 and pipeline transport as %0.3. Its a little unclear to me exactly what the proportion of cooking is, but it is undoubtedly very small.
Greenhouse minimalist is certainly a valid position to stake out, but personally I see the buy in easier to achieve in the other, larger, more centralized sources. There is also the possibility of delivering non-fossil fuel gas, while a bit jokey, there are diverse sources and the technology is mature[2]
However you or I feel about energy diversity should probably be disregarded currently as its not an issue at this time, but I feel confident that we likely can keep cooking with gas if we handle the other stuff and even if we don't. Also, consider the unneeded political difficulty introduced while garnering consumer action instead of tackling the largest and most easily managed contributors.
Why not produce zero carbon natural gas at the sewage plant and municipal dump instead of banning the best method of cooking? Seems like the easy route of passing restrictive laws instead of a real solution.
1) "fragility and cost of repairs" are not an inherent quality of a manufactured product. When gas appliances were new, they were also fragile and expensive to repair. The process by which they became sturdy and cheap to repair was that they became widely used, which lead to an incentive structure where the companies that manufacture them were rewarded for making them sturdier and easier to repair. If we can make induction stoves a widely used appliance, their fragility and cost of repairs will improve due to the natural improvements during a products lifecycle.
I can have a guy at my house same-day to fix a gas oven, or maybe just grease the valve myself. A computer-controlled induction coil will never be so simple to fix, in some cases it's probably cheaper to junk the broken one and replace the whole thing.
And I was obviously being a little facetious, but copper is becoming more expensive and mines are having to expand to meet demand.
My moms gas oven is 50 years old. It did't fail a single time. Doesn't have electric ignition though. Still running on the fist set of flame outlets. It will probably outlive her.
My understanding of how they work is that they are dam simple and reliable.
It's not just taking what little gas is used for cooking out of the equation because of the shift to renewable sources of energy. When heating is done with electricity or district heating it makes sense to get rid of the gas infrastructure completely. The maintenance and infrastructure costs for having a gas pipe to every home in every street just for cooking are too high to make economic sense once you take out heating of rooms and water (i.e., the bulk of a house's gas usage).
I've heard electric burners are more energy efficient than gas because you have a more direct energy transfer through physical contact, and induction are even more efficient because the cookware is the heating element. Of course to reduce greenhouse emissions that increase in efficiency needs to be greater than the generation and transmission transmission losses.
I'd be fascinated to see emissions figures related to restaurants and home cooking from gas. It'd be shocking if it were more than a rounding error.
Electric does not have a more direct energy transfer through physical contact. Consider your GPU or CPU: with the cooling fan disconnected, imagine or even very carefully experiment with the tempuratures that the heat sink will reach.
Now uninstall the heat sink, clean the thermal paste off of both surfaces, and repeat the experiment.
Induction is more efficient in the way you describe.
Cooking has gotta be less than %0.5 of total domestic ghg. We would do so much better and avoid needless political hassles by increasing solar wind geothermal and hydroeclectric, electrifying fleets, and controlling centralized industrial and agricultural sources.
The answer is that natural gas hookups to homes leak some amount of natural gas, and the leakage in the distribution system is somewhere around 2-3%, some of that is residential. The GWP of natural gas is fairly high--somewhere around 84.
Interesting, as there was an article linked either from HN or Pocket about how a lot of "gas is better for cooking" was deliberate advertising campaigns:
Side question: do induction stoves have proper power levels yet? I used an induction stove a few years ago at a short-term vacation rental, and it could only toggle between on/off. If I set it at 50% power, it would cycle between being on and off, rather than staying on 100% of the time but at 50% power. My non-induction electric stove does the same thing. Is this an issue that is solved with higher end models?
While there certainly has been advertising by the gas industry, the only people I've met that said they preferred electric over gas were home cooks using inductions stoves, and pretty nice ones at that.
Heating homes with natural gas (which the article clarifies is the source of the majority of the emissions) is currently far more efficient than with electricity.
If everyone in NYC switched to electric heat, the grid would certainly fail.
Additionally the grid uses a lot of natural gas for energy production.
Once all the electric production is green, and we have lots of extra capacity, it might make sense to look at reducing natural gas service to homes.
Until then, doing this will actually just make more emissions.
> If everyone in NYC switched to electric heat, the grid would certainly fail.
Not to mention cost of heating in the winter would balloon to comical heights. Housing costs would also increase, but to a less degree, since utilities are a part of housing costs. Resistive heating is absurdly electricity intensive.
Gas feels really natural to cook on. It FEELS good to cook on. Induction stoves really are amazing with how quickly they heat up but they don't feel as good. Electric is obviously horrible.
I’m always curious about this sentiment. I find gas really bad feeling to cook on. Gas stoves are very difficult to keep clean. The surfaces can’t easily double as counter space. All the waste heat makes my kitchen hot and pot handles hot (I regularly burn myself when using gas stoves now because I am just not used to having to use mittens to handle pots on the stove). Finally, literally allowing the byproducts of combustion to float around my non-existantly ventilated American apartment kitchen feels barbaric.
What is it that feels good? Is it nostalgia? Is it literally just visible fire feels dangerous and powerful?
My most often-used pans are small, not very flat, and aluminum. Any one of these traits disqualifies them for induction use. I use these pans-- a small garlic pot and a saucier-- literally every day. I could use other pots, but I'd be slower and less efficient.
The jumpers I use to saute things are induction-capable, and large enough to be responsive and efficient on an induction cooker, however they're still useless on either induction or electric, because an electric or induction hob only heats a pan when it's making contact with the surface. The moment I lift it to jump a meatball the cooker stops cooking. This is especially true for induction cooktops, which will typically de-energize if you take the pan off the surface.
You can mitigate this somewhat by using a heavy saute pan or skillet, which will maintain its temperature longer when it's not in contact with the cooking surface. But sauteing this way is a lot slower and more painful that using a light steel or aluminum pan. And at some point, I'm not strong enough to handle a heavy pan safely anyway.
My gas range is controlled by simple knobs. I use it by feel, and I always know how much power I'm using because I can see the flame and feel the heat on my face and hands. My induction cooker has a touchscreen and gives no feedback. I adjust it by guessing what number to enter, and then waiting for the food to make sounds. I am much less connected to the induction hob, and I'm therefore slower, less efficient, and I fuck things up far more often than I do on gas. Same problems with radiant electric.
The vast majority of the indoor pollution from cooking comes from the food, not the gas combustion.
Getting burned by handles sucks, and is probably unavoidable if you cook long enough on any surface. As Marco Pierre White says, "handles are for burning". If the pots and pans don't get you, the oven door eventually will.
I don't ever, ever, fucking ever use any cooktop as counter space. That's just asking for a catastrophe when a hob is accidentally turned on.
I feed a family with these tools, so I don't feel that the difference is merely one of convenience.
I always feel pans are going to be knocked over on gas stoves, resulting in a few litres of boiling water over me and the floor. I don't understand why the burners and parts the pan sits on don't screw together, rather than just being placed together.
My only gripe with induction is most of them have terrible touch sensitive unless it's even remotely damp buttons. The next one I buy, I will try to have knobs instead.
I'm running an outdoor pizza oven, outdoor grill, and indoor gas range on NG. If I had to move to an area like new san jose developments that don't have natural gas hookups that'd be pretty sad. Blaming my food cooking for global warming would be a joke especially since 2/3 of those can run on wood.
We need to decarbonize the economy, including food prep. 2 weeks ago, British Columbia Canada recorded temps in the F 120s. Just this past week a huge series of flash floods destroyed a lot of towns and killed 130+ people in Germany and the Netherlands. If we don't attempt to decarbonize the economy, its going to get much much worse.
Banning gas stoves would reduce total emissions by how much? Focusing on something like this seems silly to me when 20% of all electricity in the US is still produced in coal power plants (and another 40% in natural gas ones).
It's not just natural gas stoves, it's natural gas heating and infrastructure, including extraction. All of it needs to go and we need to use low-carbon energy sources in its place.
It sucks, and it's a huge change. But it's unavoidable, and the longer we wait the worse it will be for everyone.
I'll never give up gas utilities in my home: cooker, heating system, boiler. These are negligible when it comes to the environment. Maybe go after the actual culprits that cause global warming than wasting time/money/effort on this nonsense.
I’d ask you to at least consider replacing your gas hot water heater with a heat pump hot water heater. Good for the environment and will save you significant money at the same time.
You don't. You simply need to add additional venting area if it's in a smaller space. Check the manuals for them, not the poorly written articles. ;)
Many places (and just about everywhere without a basement or attached garage) have water heaters closed up in tight spaces. A heat pump heater won't work there, but if you add some vents to the door so it can exchange air with the rest of the house, they're just fine. Or, depending on where you live, you might consider venting it to the attic - if you have an attic that runs hot, "extracting heat directly from it into the hot water and then cooling the attic" is a good use of time.
I'm currently in the process of replacing a gas cooktop with induction.
My justifications are primarily ease of cleaning, followed by speed & power.
I am putting in a jennair unit that can pipe 5kw through the air into a single pan. If you do the math, you will find that to be far more than a single gas burner puts out in a residential setting. Calrod and other radiant doesn't come close either.
If I was big into wok cooking or other edge cases I'd probably keep the gas range, but 99% of the time I'm just trying to boil water or heat a piece of iron as fast as possible.
>99% of the time I'm just trying to boil water or heat a piece of iron as fast as possible.
Works for you then, but asking professional cooks to switch to electric is ridiculous. If this gets pushed through next everyone will wonder why the restaurant food tastes so bad all of a sudden. And then 30 years later NPR Hidden Brain will do a piece about how back in the day people used to cook with gas and that it enabled cooking methods that made the food taste amazing.
> asking professional cooks to switch to electric is ridiculous.
I agree with this specific point, but I do not agree with the justifications presented. The notion that gas somehow enables food to magically taste better does not sit well with me.
I do agree that there are certain cuisines that are more ideally prepared with an indirect heat source, but any skilled chef should be able to produce excellent outcomes regardless of pedantic concerns around their tools. The cooktop is just a source of heat energy at the end of the day. The way you manage that energy is part of the artform. Blaming tools for bad food would be like blaming visual studio because production went down.
In San Francisco, gas lines are a major risk of fire in case of earthquake, as in 1906, and that is probably a more important consideration than CO2 emissions, at least for cooking.
The solution is simple. Produce green gas from electricity. Probably first make hydrogen and then add CO2 to create methane.
This will cost a fortune compared to current gas prices, but will allow everybody who is really set on using gas to keep doing so.
Same thing of course for petrol for classic cars, etc.
Technically we can do it, it is just a matter of blocking the sale of fossil gas (or taxing the hell out of it to make it more expensive than the green equivalent).
As someone who has just installed a new kitchen, I can attest this. My wife insisted on a couple gas hobs as the taste is "better" / "different" whereas I just wanted electric.
The compromise was a mixed solution. You can get pretty good looking mixed cooking surfaces with 4 electric hobs for things like boiling, and 2 gas hobs for where we think it makes a difference (mainly wok style, some teas, and frying).
This has the added benefit of giving us a back up should anything happen with the power supply. Also feel like at least we're moving in the right direction enviromentally.
Having read the article though - I wish the end result had been different. The gas industry usingt his as a "wedge issue" sounds about right.
p.s. Am using Siemens and touch controls are fine.
I have a gas stove, furnace, and water heater. I can tell you that the furnace is about 90 percent plus of my total gas usage annually.
If you want to ban anything, ban the installation of new gas / oil furnaces, but that is going to only increase demand on the grid and delay the removal of coal power plants.
I don’t really think banning residential or even commercial gas makes a whole lot of sense. Focus on removing coal/oil/gas power plants first. Natural gas will still make a great backup to renewable sources of energy production, but ideally it is emergency use only.
This is the problem with how the whole climate movement is being handled. The vast majority of the problem is corporations, but the media focuses on individual action.
I get why people are skeptical and think it is simply the government is reaching for more control.
Here is the line of reasoning:
Why am I not allowed to have a gas stove, but I can see huge amounts of pollution from factories and power plants being dumped into the environment? If it were an actual problem wouldn't politicians focus on the bigger portions of pollution? Wouldn't they focus on the things that wouldn't affect average people?
It is easier to demonize these people as "anti-science", but they have a valid point. Look at this past year with COVID, virtually all traffic and personal emissions stoped and we only saw about a 10% drop in emissions.
Cooking on gas uses relatively little gas compared to space and water heating. Does anyone know if natural gas stoves can run on propane? Perhaps people could run their gas stove “off grid” as a compromise…
Yes, almost all natural gas appliances can be converted to propane, and come with the instructions to do so. In NH natural gas is only in the cities, all rural houses (that want it) use 100-500 gallon propane tanks instead. It's very common here.
When I built my house new in 2018 I installed a 500 gallon tank for the heating system + cooking. (Though the house is primarily heated with a wood stove)
It's a violation of federal regulations to store more than 2lbs of propane inside living spaces/kitchens. Those big 20lbs are supposed to be stored in garages/outside.
Obviously, people break that all the time, but a compromise that requires people to do so seems bad.
I could, but my current solution of having a pipe connected to a bigger pipe, to a pipe in the street, etc. keeps me from having to change cylinders and is far more efficient.
Everyone here is right that you can sub for propane with little modification. Propane actually has higher energy density than methane, too, so it creates higher heat with less fuel. Seems like the best solution — allow restaurants to install propane tanks and even subsidize conversion. Could be challenging in dense cities though.
Isn’t natural gas one of the easiest biofuels to produce? I even think it’s straightforward to reform from the air. There should be a sustainable solution that allows people to keep cooking on gas.
In my country of 200 million, it's pretty much gas everywhere. I have three gas cylinders and when they empty I have to either wait for the gas truck to come by with its song (like ice cream trucks), or I just take the cylinder to the deposit and exchange for a full one. I the biggest cities here you get gas coming from the ground to your home, but mostly it's still like that, you get your gas by the cylinder. I bet many, many countries still deliver gas to homes this way.
People are not moving from natural gas to the old style resistance coil electric stoves that everyone is accustomed to, they are moving to induction stoves that get to temp nearly instantly, have a high power output ceiling.
Mine certainly is... as long as the pan is flat and large enough for the induction top to recognize it. My induction cooktop will warp a cast iron pan if I'm not careful. I've never had to be careful like that with gas hobs.
Does your induction stove also work if water/muck gets on it?
I have only used one at a holiday house, and I swear it was the most temperamental thing in the world. A few drops of water or oil and it refuses to work.
Could just be that I am using an early model (this one was bought 10+ years ago, it has a touchpad for controls instead of knobs which also blows)
Yeah, the surface is sealed and the controls are tactile buttons and a knob. It’s technically a commercial unit, I agree that there are some rotten consumer units out there. It doesn’t care if there’s a mess on it.
Another plus, when a mess happens, I can actually wipe up with a wet rag literally as I’m cooking, even under the pot.
Did you try cooking with an induction stove? It’s now getting quite popular and combines the benefits of both worlds. Though it’s obviously not replacing an open flame which is usefull for cooking with a wok for example.
I second this. I was totally against electric, and evidently only due to ignorance. I recently had a chance to use induction for 3 months and my oh my it is magic! Haven’t tried an induction wok though.
They're not. Nor does the article assert that they are. You're attacking a straw man.
Natural gas heating is the largest greenhouse gas source in my province and many other jurisdictions. Not providing natural gas hookups to new construction is one way to reduce that. The loss of natural gas cooking is a side effect.
But if you really need a gas stove you don't need a hook up, you can use a bottle and nobody will stop you. Carbon taxes might make it expensive, but nobody will stop you.
I am not sure we have the luxury of only going after primary emitters. I think at this point we have to do literally everything we can.
Also, I read on HN a month or so ago about gas stoves making indoor air quality worse. So there is some upside there too. And if we remove gas stoves then people will probably not care to have gas brought in just for water heaters, and maybe we can avoid an entire type of infrastructure.
"Cooking with nat gas is ~ 3% of gas use which is about 0.001% of US fossil fuel use which is about 0.001% of global fossil fuel emissions. Banning gas cooking is farcical virtue signaling if you truly want to decrease CO2 emissions."
What about the last four decades of studies that have indicated people who grow up around gas cooking have a far greater likelihood of severe respiratory ailments?
I am disgusted by the answer here, people are inconvenienced by minor gripes about electric heating, claim that banning gas stoves miss the big picture, but gas stove is the enabler to heat your whole house with it, it is really the sign we are in deep shit about climate change. Also electric reliability is sure a major point, if we want people to abandon gas we need ultra reliable electric grid, with enough firm 0 carbon electric generation. The point is to tear down the leaky gas distribution to put the money into an ultra reliable electric grid.
It seems that the city is trying to phase out gas stoves entirely, and removing natural gas connections is only the first step of this. It's a less lethal version of "First they came for the communists...".
Look, we can either make sacrifices for the environment, or we can come up with special reasons why this particular sacrifice is too inconvenient. Given that the Pacific Northwest has had 115 degree days this summer and an entire town in Canada just spontaneously combusted, there are some bigger stakes at play that getting a perfect omelette.
I couldn’t agree more. I am so frustrated by the tone of many of these HN posts along the lines of “it doesn’t solve a big enough portion so don’t inconvenience me at all.” And then magically nothing changes and everything keeps getting worse. shocked face
Yes, a big hurdle to 'solving' climate change is that people are unwilling to make even the smallest sacrifices to solve a problem that they don't perceive as affecting them directly. People refusing to wear masks during the pandemic was/is an excellent example of this.
But those sacrifices are literally a rounding error compared to what large industries do.
You can buy precut pineapple in a plastic jar, on a plasic plate, packed in a cardboard box covered in plastic, on a pallet, wrapped in plastic,... and on the other hand we ban plastic straws.
Now we're literally burning coal in some places, heating water, running the turbines, creating electricity, losing a lot of that power in the wires, to heat a metal disk/spiral, so we can cook, and cook worse than using eg. gas directly.
99% of mask usage was wasteful and pointless safety theater, like wearing them outdoors.
similarly, most natural gas is used for power generation and industrial processes. in the US, only ~15% is used residentially, and most of that is for home heating, water heating, and clothes drying. about 1/3 of our national energy use is derived from natural gas, so you're on the order of 1% (or less) of national energy being consumed by natural gas cooking. it's a tiny problem in the energy pollution mix.
we'd be much better served in this regard by focusing all our efforts on reducing carbon pollution from electricity production and transportation, which accounts for well over half of the problem, not a tiny slice like gas cooking because it's a "small sacrifice".
I'm reminded of fluorine chemistry. Back in the days before the Montreal Protocol you could get all sorts of halofluorocarbon starting materials for pennies because they were byproducts of CFC manufacture. But nowadays cost is prohibitive, a 100 g can of CF2Br2 will set you back hundreds because it's a specialty chemical and the paperwork is outrageous. It's a genuinely small sacrifice for most, but for a select few there's great cost.
SF6, CFCs, etc. The increased costs fixed the problem: labs now use closed loops instead of purging to atmosphere daily. Same story with helium, though not for environmental reasons. That's the system working.
> 99% of mask usage was wasteful and pointless safety theater, like wearing them outdoors.
You'll have to do better than that. Yes, outdoor use was probably a waste of time. I would also say it was worth doing until we had data. But then, what else? Outdoor use is just a fraction. How do you get from that to 99%?
pretty much all public mask wearing was performative rather than effective. even indoors, besides care settings (hospitals, nursing homes) and social-focused venues (bars, clubs), most of the work was being implicitly done by distancing. almost no public venue was dense enough that casual proximity was more than an exceedingly remote risk (lightning strike level). most risk was with friends & family in private spaces, and those are overwhelmingly the least likely around whom you’d mask, but where it would have had real mitigative effect. instead, we masked outdoors and at the grocery store because of a wrongheaded focus on strangers in public spaces rather than familiars in private spaces, resulting in 99% useless safety theater.
you don't need to keep perfect distance everywhere. transmission risk, at an individual level, is a function of both time and (the inverse of) distance[0]. if distance is short and time is short, as at the grocery store, risk is still miniscule. if distance is short and time is long, which is the likely case for social interactions in private spaces, then risk rises, which is why that's the place where masking can have some mitigative effect, but because social norms act against masking, that's where most transmission happens, not between strangers (outside of care settings and social-focused venues). airflow is at best a second-order (and probably weaker) effect, but volume (e.g., outdoors) dominates it because volume multiplies the effects of both time and distance.
in a similar vein, at the office, only large meetings are really a potential problem (for which you can mask or teleconference), but not appropriately-spaced meetings or sitting at a desk with appropriate distance to the next person. for retail workers in potentially close contact with a large number of the public daily (time elongated through multiple people), then a mask can have mitigative effect, but patrons can just distance from each other.
[0]: note also that the virus decays as a function of time, on the order of minutes outside the body.
Also, where I live it is permitted to wear fabric face masks that do not protect against the virus. They do stop drops of sneeze granted.
I think those type of masks are useful for reminding others to keep their distance more than they are for actually protecting against the virus.
I honestly can not even wrap my head around why they included the word "outdoor" in their original comment since outside use is such a miniscule portion of mask usage that I have no idea how it could meaningfully contribute to the 99% figure. I didn't really take it to be sincere, maybe more of an accidental strawman. So I guess I just ignored it.
false, distancing is even simpler and more effective in a wider variety of situations, and suffers from none of the inane identitarian signalling to boot. stop spreading misinformation.
You can do both. The only identitarian signaling I see in this thread is your post with it's view on people who simply think it's reasonable to wear a mask, even outside.
Many people, including myself, would be willing to make other concessions in order to keep my gas stove. Some people may not care about the difference but would prefer to keep eating a bit more red meat or something.
Maybe we shouldn't approach this with blanket bans because people have different preferences and lifestyles. A ban that is easy for one person to swallow might not be so easy for another. Perhaps we could just price stuff in, so that people can decide? Although, I suppose that would just disproportionately affect poor people..?
For any given thing that someone will be asked to give up, someone will ask if they could give up something else they care less about instead. Eventually I'm sure they'll come after something I care about as well. I think we need to be willing to embrace a carbonless future to the greatest extent that we reasonably can. The idea of pricing things in would be good in theory, as long as the money could be reliably used for capture of carbon and other pollutants.
You need to get the general populace on board. It requires a cultural revolution to culminate in political upheaval, or nothing will stop companies from externalizing costs by buying corrupt politicians.
I agree. This thread has me quite depressed. Numerous people who can't give up a minor convenience like being able to sear a capsicum over a flame in order to help save our planet.
How old is your phone? Your computer? Your car? Have you updated them in the last 5 years? Do you play video games? On anything newer than a PS3/Xbox One? Or are you a true environmentalist still gaming on a SNES? Watch films? Ever take a drive to clear your mind? Ever drive somewhere you could have theoretically walked, or taken public transit? Do you buy all your books pre-owned? Ever purchase the "collectors edition" of something with some included trinkets/posters/box set?
Who are you to say that my mild inconveniences are more mild than yours?
I’m not poor. I make 120-150k a year depending on the year and my wife works, too. Just living below my means for a variety of reasons; anyone can do it.
That is the point of my post. It’s really not that hard to consume less if it is important to you.
Neither am I. I'm in the same approximate income. My car and motorcycle are both 2002s. My computers I upgraded this year and last year, but previously were 2011 and 2013. Phone is an iPhone 7 with broken screen and camera. I put an effort into conserving. But you're not who I was making a point to, and coming in, with no other posts in this discussion, and pointing out that you conserve everything I tried to allegorically illustrate as common wastes comes across as... weird? rude? I don't know how to describe it, maybe just tone deaf?
I dunno, to be honest. I thought the original post I replied to was setting a low bar- that’s why I replied.
There is a ton of free, nearly free, and cheap shit out there that works just fine. It’s not that difficult to use it. I’m not behind economically, my friends think I’m a little weird but whatever- almost everyone I know gets it.
To be fair, I'm addressing a tech nerd website. I think the bar here tends to be more wasteful than you or I. My last job, there were multiple people with their cubicle walls covered to the top in funko pops, latest and greatest gaming was common cafeteria talk, and new engineers always had a fresh off the line car
Updating your phone is a bit of a cheap shot when most manufacturers don't support them for longer than 2 years. A 5 year old Android phone, shit, you can probably get a root shell by just sneezing in its general direction.
I think you're missing the point. Gas cooking is a vanishingly small fraction of energy consumption.
Every time you commute to work, you produce more CO2 than my gas stove does in months.
Every time you fly on a plane (which I do only if I absolutely have to), you produce more CO2 than my stove will in its entire lifetime.
Transportation is an area where changes in behavior can make a significant difference in energy consumption and CO2 production. Gas cooking is probably not.
Rather than making a million stupid, tiny rules, you can make a few big rules. For example, a carbon tax. IMO Biden and other world leaders should be getting shit on every single day until they implement this.
this also is true on gas grill, wood smoking or barbacuing, blackening in cajun, others. some food are not transfering easily to electricity stove. building heating technology change make sense, just not so much with cooking.
This point is sort of all over the place. Some thoughts (from a former chef)
Blackening: You could do this on anything. I used to work in a cajun/creole place and we had one burner reserved for a cast iron skillet that was on at all times in case someone ordered a blackened whatever. This could be done just as easily on induction
Grilling/Broiling: IDK how you do this without a gas line or charcoal while maintaining timing and flavor. The direct flame required for the cooking also allows for smoke/char that you're going to have a hard time recreating with a heating coil "grill".
Smoking: You can get an electric smoker...but you still need to burn some sort of wood for the smoke. When you get into larger BBQ joints that are doing 50+ shoulders/briskets/whatever a day, IDK how you possibly convert from wood-fire to a fully electric system.
Wood/coal fired pizza ovens: Same as BBQ smokers, there's a difference between this and an electric coil in flavor imparted that changes the end result.Obviously you can make a giant electric pizza oven and have great pizza come out of it, but you literally can't make a Neopolitan pizza without a woodfired oven.
Based on the comments in this thread, I’m guessing the majority of HN doesn’t cook. The switch from an induction stove to a proper gas stove changes the way you cook. No more waiting for the coils to warm up, being able to dynamically adjust the heat, being able to sear bell peppers against an open flame, etc. I’m almost certain I will never go back to an induction stove for cooking.
Induction stoves don't do that, that's older resistance stoves.
> being able to dynamically adjust the heat
You can do that on induction, again you seem to be thinking of resistance.
> being able to sear bell peppers against an open flame,
That's a real but perhaps not so meaningful difference. Heat is heat; yes, the low and slow to adjust heat output of resistance stoves compared to gas makes this a big advantage over resistance stoves, but other than induction needing a suitable pan instead of a bare burner, there isn't as much of an advantage here with gas over induction. (OTOH, for any significant recipe I’d do searing in an oven, and I’m not sure the broilers in the electric ovens pared with insuction stoves are uo to snuff compared to gas broilers.)
> I’m almost certain I will never go back to an induction stove for cooking.
From your complaints, I’m almost certain you’ve never used an induction stove in the first place, only an electric resistance stove.
I think you may be confusing electric (which has coils) and induction (which I've never heard referred to as having coils). Induction is actually faster to heat up and more efficient than gas, [1] although of course you can't use an open flame for searing peppers.
It's also possible that we live in different parts of the world, and the word "coils" is used to refer to induction stoves where you are.
As noted in the other comments here, you are likely thinking of coil based resistive electric stoves and not induction. Induction stoves have no warm up period, change heating amounts instantly like gas stoves and have a ton of other benefits that as some who cooks most meals at home I can’t live without. I put a $100 induction hot plate on top of the “fancy” gas stove in my apartment because it is that much better for actually cooking things.
I definitely agree that cooking on a resistive electric coil is awful and will grudgingly use gas over that.
This sucks a lot. Induction stoves are better than gas stoves but chefs don't like them because it's a new tool the need to learn how to use. They have a many years of experience with their old tool, of course they will say the new thing is worse. We see this in software engineering and technology all of the time. We need to decarbonize the economy and these cities shouldn't be allowing new gas stoves.
> of course they will say the new thing is worse. We see this in software engineering and technology all of the time.
It usually is worse, and still keeps getting worse with every subsequent iteration. But there will always be some pious Gnome or Firefox UI developer to tell the user they are wrong.
I'm sure if the government made a law that all acoustic pianos must be replaced with digital ones, there'd be a ready supply of people crawling out of the woodwork, who could not tell a piano from a typewriter, to tell professional pianists that "digital pianos are better, you just need to get used to it!"
TBF, "bullseye" gas stoves, basically induction tops with a constant flame under them and heat radiating out from a central "bullseye" (hotest) outwards (getting colder), have been around for a long time. They're just not common.
Point is it's an unknown tool, not a new one. It would be like asking a French chef how to use a wok and cleaver instead of saute pans and a chef's knife.
You’ve posted some variation of “we need to decarbonize our economy” something like four times in this thread, which is a great example of how slogans are thought terminators. This seems an awful lot like cutting out your daily coffee when you’re millions in debt. I don’t cook with gas and have no particular attachment to it, but at least at a glance this looks performative - and you’re swallowing it hook, line, and sinker. The amount of carbon produced by cooking with gas is surely negligible in the grand scheme of things. What are the carbon costs in decommissioning and replacing thousands of working appliances? Could the money spent on this more effectively decarbonize other aspects of our economy? Could the political capital spent on this more effectively decarbonize other aspects of our economy?
The subject of the article has nothing to do with decomissioning working appliances, it is about not allowing new gas links or gas stoves, entirely different subject here. Every new gas stove we add today has a working life of 15-30 years. Measured over the course of a products lifetime, yes, disallowing gas heating, stoves, water heaters etc in new construction makes a large difference.
I don't like my induction stovetop because the heating is very uneven. I use it for boiling water, but it doesn't work e.g.for searing steak because I end up with a small rectangle that is hotter than the rest.
thats likely an issues with your pans, or with your coil size. Both of those are solvable problems, and if we had mandates to enforce electric only heating these problems would be solved much faster due to demand.
Induction and electric stove tops requires much higher quality pans than gas. Gas will heat a warped pan relatively evenly. Gas doesn't care much about the quality of your pan either, whereas a positive induction experience really depends on having a quality set of induction pans that are not warped from use.
Considering that many individuals are cooking with poor quality, old, and warped pans - gas will be a better cooktop for them.
Please replace "cast iron" with "good" pans. Uncoated cast iron is a fucking pain to take care of if you cook anything acidic regularly. Coated cast iron is better, but SO heavy (and it takes forever to get up to temp because it's such a heat sink)>
Nobody should be buying thin, cheap aluminum pans. They heat unevenly and both get too hot too quickly on the flame and lose heat almost immediately if they're of a burner. Solid bottom steel pans will always be the standard because they're lighter than cast iron but hold temp and work well.
Not being a chef, I'll have to defer to you, but I despise stainless steel pans. My favorite pans are these[1] thin, expensive-ish aluminum ones. They not only heat evenly, but are really non-stick (even with little or no oil) and are light and amazingly easy to clean.
I specifically avoided brand names because it seemed like it might have cheapened my point, but my pan of choice is All-Clad. If I had more money I'd convert everything I have to their Copper-Core pans for even better heating. The big appeal for me with these is that they're durable as hell and can take a wide range of temps while being easy to clean/care for.
Quick question: Other than for omelettes/pancakes, what's the appeal of non-stick for you? Is this a health issue (cutting down butter/oil) or an ease of use thing? I only ask because I'm (PERSONAL OPINOIN, YMMV) not a fan. I find them much harder to clean/care for and am all too familiar with the fact that often the NS coatings degrade into really bad things which then get pulled into the food. Just looking for your opinion, not trying to start a flame war or say you're wrong.
Well, eggs are kind of a big deal :) I don't think I'm extreme in my butter/oil preferences, for example 1tbsp butter for 2 eggs in an 8 inch pan. There's also pan-grilling -- I usually don't want a fried steak, or salmon fillet, or whatever.
Mostly it's just ease of use, especially cleaning. These particular pans, if still hot, can be cleaned by simply running cold water over the hot pan, then wiping it off. Nope, this doesn't warp the pan, I've been doing it for years. On the occasions when the pan isn't hot enough for that, one or two quick passes with a soapy sponge, and it looks brand new. They can also go in the dishwasher, although I personally don't do that.
The nonstick coating they use is some proprietary one, not Teflon. It's PFOA-free and durable enough to be used with metal utensils. I don't think any of it gets into the food.
I probably sound like a shill at this point, but seriously, I just love these things. I would certainly prefer to not spend ~$100/pan, but after trying one, I ended up with four of them.
I agree that eggs are a big deal, and I have a non-stick pan that is pretty much only used for eggs, hand washed, and then put away in a cupboard (vs the hanging rack that we use for literally every other pot or pan)
I don't believe I've ever measured the amount of oil/butter in which I fry in my life, but I am aware of the opposite end of the spectrum lol. I assumed this was probably the difference in our pan preferences: my solution to sticking is "add more fat".
I also tend to make a lot of pan sauces, and non-stick kills that a lot of the time (no fond = sad sauce).
While the coating is PFOA free, if you're using metal utensils, SOME of that plastic is coming off. Technically fried/burned food is a carcinogen, so IDK what your tolerance for this risk is but for me non-stick has always felt unneeded and knowing that some of this plastic is winding up in some of my food sometimes.(I'm weird though and find washing dishes meditative, probably due to my years in restaurants)
Interesting to get others opinions on this stuff. I could talk knives/pans/kitchen tools for days.
The steel pans that @moate is talking about are heavier commercial pans-- thicker than what you're probably used to. My steel crepe pans are nearly 3 mm thick.
You're right about cheap stainless pans. They're the very worst. Stainless has even lower thermal conductivity than cast iron or carbon steel.
Pretty regularly. Lots of places would go with cheaper pans. One thing to consider, I would assume that most professional cooks are cooking in a very different way than most regular home cooks. The way food is prepared, the familiarity with both the equipment/techniques.
It was always nice when I'd get a job somewhere that had good stoves/pans.
my experience is exactly the opposite. I've got the GE Cafe induction stove and it sears like a champ. maybe try a cast iron skillet so the heat comes more from the pan vs the stovetop?
