The Health Risks of Natural Gas Stoves Flashcards
I believe in science. I believe in climate change, but gas stoves are already in more than 40 million American homes. How bad can they really be for our health?
Many of us, myself included, may have a stove with no range hood that vents outside. And so what happens is every time we turn on the gas burner to cook a meal, we’re also having a lot of combustion, which essentially is just burning. And some of those problematic pollutants that are coming into our home that really have nowhere to go because of poor ventilation are things like carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, formaldehyde. A lot of the same pollutants that come out of our car tailpipes. And we spend a lot of time inside at home. And so we are breathing in these pollutants that come from the gas stove.
We took our samples directly from gas stoves that participants offered to us. Having spoken with so many participants, very often people have not thought about their kitchen stove or their home as being at the end of a pipeline.
03/01/24
19/02/24
The United States Environmental Protection Agency has deemed about 187 different volatile organic compounds that we know are hazardous to the human body in some degree – causes some kind of serious health effect or cancer. We did find 21 different hazardous air pollutants in end-use natural gas – this is consumer grade, natural gas. Again, this is unburned natural gas. Benzene for sure is probably the one most concerning probably the most toxic that we found.
Some of the chemicals found are known to have carcinogenic or other detrimental health effects. What we don’t know yet is whether the concentration of those chemicals in the home, or the frequency of exposure to those chemicals, is having an impact on the health of people who have gas stoves. But Drew says emerging evidence suggests that these pipeline endpoints in our kitchens are leaking. We have been learning a lot about leakage of the natural gas supply chain, and leakage of natural gas-fired appliances in the home. And it seems that everywhere we look, these systems are leaking more than we think. A recent study that was done by Stanford University, they actually sampled how often are stoves and ovens leaking in homes. They sampled 53 different stoves and ovens. They basically found that 52 of the 53 had a detectable leak.
But these leaks are small enough that you might not be able to smell them. And when you add up all the small leaks in all the homes across the U.S., it’s on par with the carbon dioxide emissions of half a million cars per year. But unlike car emissions, emissions from our natural gas stoves are not really regulated. As it stands right now, indoor heating and cooking appliances do not meet the kind of source type that the EPA would regulate in terms of how much of these pollutants are being emitted.
Stoves are the one appliance in our home that we are standing in front of all the time. And yet, the gas stove is often the one appliance that gets exempted from these policies, but it’s the one appliance that may have the outsized impact on our health. The air inside of our homes is the great black hole. Nobody regulates it.
Last year the World Health Organization revised their global air quality guidelines that relate to indoor or outdoor environments. From what I’ve seen from reading this about gas stoves, I don’t know if a home with a gas stove could meet some of these levels, say for nitrogen dioxide. Getting the EPA to set us indoor air quality standards is one of the policy interventions that Brady and Drew agree would be helpful in creating change. We have outdoor standards since the dawn of the Clean Air Act. But we’ve seen in Canada and other places that they have set indoor air quality guidelines.
In the absence of federal action, some cities like New York, Seattle, and San Francisco have taken it upon themselves to ban natural gas hookups in new buildings, prompting a good deal of pushback. But one clear limitation to these bans is that most people don’t live in brand new buildings. Buying a new stove is expensive, and renters don’t usually get a say in what kinds of appliances are in their homes.
The issue of gas stove pollution is a health equity and an environmental justice issue. There are a couple of factors that make lower-income people and communities of color more susceptible. One of these is the smaller the unit size, the higher the concentration of pollutants. Also, some of the people who are most susceptible to stove pollution are those who already have asthma or underlying conditions. The air we breathe is so unequal. And if you already live in a place that has really bad outdoor air quality because you live close to a polluting site or close to a highway, and then your indoor air is also polluted from an unvented gas stove, you could really be seeing more exposure to some of these harmful air pollutants.
There are immediate and free things that we can do to reduce our exposure. So, the first thing is if you do have a gas stove and you have a range hood, is to use it. And they’re a lot more effective if you cook on the back burners. Another thing I learned is that there are these little vents in these range hoods that you can clean with soapy water, and that can also help. If you don’t have a range hood, which many people don’t, you can open windows and try to try to increase ventilation and circulation.
The biggest change you could make if it’s available to you, would be to get rid of the gas stove entirely and replace it with an electric or an induction stove.
Our worry is that it’s sometimes 15, 20 years before people are changing out the appliances in their homes. And so, if we don’t start changing the way that we heat or cool our homes or the way we cook, there will basically be this lag time where our electricity is getting greener, but we’re putting in new gas appliances, which could be around for 20, 30, 50 years.
My name is Jon Kung. I go by chef Jon Kung on Instagram and YouTube and all that. I actually started off as a pop-up cook and by doing pop-ups all over the place, you don’t have the luxury of ventilation all the time. And that’s the reason why I started, and fell in love with that technology fell in love with the accuracy, fell in love with how easy it was to clean, especially when I had to haul things around in my car all the time.
John actually started using induction in his own apartment too. Beyond the health and climate benefits, we’ve talked about, he thinks it’s just a good way to cook.
Because of the efficiencies of induction, 99% of the energy that you go into the cooking is actually gone into the pot and it’s not displaced as offset heat. Whereas gas, you’re at the mercy of this flame and hopefully you’re just punching enough power into the pot, through the fire, that, hopefully, you’re actually going to get something going. That creates a lot of waste heat and a lot of wasted energy that’s just spewed into your kitchens. If you’ve ever worked in any kind of professional kitchen setting, it’s literally hellish in how uncomfortable that can be.
Jon admits that using an induction stove has a learning curve for those of us who are used to gas. First of all, you have to make sure you’re using the right cookware. You have to make sure that you’re using ferrous metal, which is anything that reacts to a magnet. So if you can stick a magnet to the bottom of your pot or pan or whatever you’re using on the induction, then it should be compatible.
To get a good feel of how powerful your induction is, make a lot of eggs. Because egg reacts to heat so visually, when you’re scrambling it, you can see when it’s sticking, you can see when it’s burning. That’s a really good way to tell how high and how precise the throughput of your induction is.
If induction is healthier, more efficient, faster, not to mention safer and easier to clean, why isn’t it in more American homes? We are literally like the last people to get on this. Every other country has been doing this already. It’s funny, I’ll be talking about induction stoves and how great these things are, and then, I’ll get like some Norwegian or UK commenter like, why is he talking about stoves? They all already had this.
But change is hard. And our stoves that sit in the heart of our homes, they have an emotional and a cultural component too. Let’s just talk about the primal connection that we have to an open flame as a human species, ’cause we have to, and ’cause there’s definitely something innate about it. Fire is light, it’s heat; some of the oldest stories we have told are light versus darkness as a species. I think there is an appeal to fire that kind of tickles the primal need to, you know, cook with a base element – in our minds, what a base element is. Maybe for some, there might be a toxic masculinity component to it as well. And some people are just resistant to change.
One of my vices is scrolling through pictures of luxury and celebrity homes, and I cannot count the number of houses I’ve seen that have a Tesla or a Prius in the driveway, and an enormous gas range in the kitchen – sometimes without a ventilation hood.
A healthy kitchen considers the people using it in its design in all aspects. People spend a huge amount of their lives in the kitchen, whether or not they cook in them. It is also a place of gathering in many homes. And so, incorporating as few of these toxic elements into these parts of our homes, that’s what a healthy kitchen is.
What is the most hazardous thing in your kitchen? Is it the chemicals underneath your sink? It might be, but you know, we have put warning labels and everything on those, so we know not to consume them. We have created a barrier for that exposure route. We haven’t quite created the barrier for the exposure route for the stove and oven. So clearly a cleaner, healthier kitchen is one that is not burning natural gas.
Millions of Americans are still cooking with gas, me included. But tucked into the Inflation Reduction Act is a provision for rebates on electric and induction stoves that kicks in in 2023.
