Cities try to phase out gas stoves but cooks are pushing back

TFA states:

> 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.

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.

No kidding.

>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.

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.

Gas stoves aren’t “the problem”; natural gas space heating and leaks from the gas grid are.

Gas stoves are more collateral damage than culprit, in my opinion, although the indoor air quality issues are a compelling health concern.

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..)

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])

Let's draw the line at fireplaces and wood stoves. That's the lowest hanging fruit we should go for.

Unfortunately it's the bourgeois that loves those things and they vote.

Whence cometh carbon taxes?

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.

One reason to start with stuff like gas stoves is that, frankly, the disruption isn't that big. You'd get used to a new stove pretty quickly.

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.

Not all of them...

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:

https://www.miele.de/haushalt/proline-1548.htm

> awful unresponsive touch controls

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!

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.

[1] https://www.fisherpaykel.com/au/cooking/freestanding-cookers...

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.

There are induction cooking plates with knobs, e.g. Gorenje IC634CLB.

At least in Germany you are not allowed to connect your stove to the Herdanschlussdose[0] as a layman.

[0]https://herdanschliessen.de/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Herda...

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)

One nice thing about electric though, is you don't get stuff like this:

https://www.npr.org/2018/09/13/647621382/multiple-explosions...

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.

Yes those touch pad control on the 'modern' electric stove are horrible. And some electric stoves when have liquid on the surface it just turn off.

Fire cooking is just much better for certain dishes. Stop with this electrifying and digitising everything.

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.

Oh my god my place now has touch buttons for the oven and it is so bad. Who thought this was a good idea??

You move a wet pan, and it activates the buttons as well. Absolute garbage.

I can't believe how it's impossible to buy an induction hob with knobs. I'm almost at the point of building a control panel myself.

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.

That, and if I put anything else on the cooker temporarily it beeps in a really annoying way.

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.

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.

> small aluminum pots that are not magnetic (and thus not induction capable)

That's not the reason why, here see a magnet being inductively slowed in a copper tube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BeFoz3Ypo4

> radiant or, god forbid, coils

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.

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.

> 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 :)

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).

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.

I was pretty against the idea, then I heard the sporkful on why we like gas ranges, and a review of induction. Maybe it’s worth a test drive.

https://www.sporkful.com/tag/induction-cooking/

Then you’ll be cooking with gas. :)

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

Induction has feature parity

Gas without exhaust is horrible, of course.

Misunderstood, deleting, I am wrong, feel free to downvote

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?

https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/natural-ga...

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.

Commercial induction wok burners are a solved problem, just slope the edges of the burner to fit a wok: https://www.webstaurantstore.com/15055/countertop-induction-...

There are induction woks now:

https://nuwavenow.com/NuWaveWok

No idea how well the concept would work in a commercial asian kitchen though.

Seems like some adapter or induction-specific wok would be trivial to create, no?

Not to dismiss the concern, but how many chefs are cooking in woks on a regular basis?

Perhaps I should've added

  - fire hazard
  - burn hazard

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 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...

Induction really excels at some things. My 1500 W induction cooktop will boil a pot of water far faster than a 12,000 BTU/hr gas hob.

I agree, it feels somehow very modern. Until I burn something because I entered the wrong number on the touchscreen. Or maybe that's modern too?

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.

Induction stoves are very efficient and it’s possible to run them with solar or wind power.

Reducing natural gas infrastructure will also reduce methane leaks, which is also a potent greenhouse gas.

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.

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.

I think the idea is just to better position household energy usage in order to take advantage of rapidly expanding renewable electrical generation.

But if it's actually better for cooking (eg. response time), why should we care?

> a lot of "gas is better for cooking" was deliberate advertising campaigns

No matter how stupid they may be, just because advertising campaigns say something, doesn't make it false.[0]

0: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qNZM3EGoE5ZeMdCRt/reversed-s...

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 a home with a heatpump is a net win compared to gas in many parts of the world even when the electricity required is made with gas.

The reason is that the heatpump moves heat (from outside to inside) which is more efficient than generating heat directly.

Obviously there needs to be a plan to upgrade the grid to deal with electric heating, cooking, cars, etc.

> 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.

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?

I actually quite like electric because it stays hot for a period of time which can be useful for drying veg after draining.

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.

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.

https://www.bobvila.com/articles/heat-pump-water-heaters/

>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.

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.

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.

Yes. You can get a tank and have it filled every so often.

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.

If you had natural gas before the nozzles will have to be changed, but yes, you can run a stove off a propane/butane tank.

Quality gas stoves can be easily converted to propane. Doing as you propose would be in violation of urban building codes.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Four decades of research…

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...".

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

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".

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..?

Isn't that putting the burden on people again rather than businesses a la plastic straws and plastic recycling.

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.

I can't imagine that's enough production to actually power up everyone's stove, though.

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.

> more waiting for the coils to warm up,

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.

Induction stoves don't have visible coils and heat up instantly. You're talking about a resistance stove, not an induction stove.

induction: https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ikea.c...

resistence: https://www.centurylife.org/is-induction-more-efficient-than...

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.

1: https://www.us.schott.com/innovation/boiling-point-putting-i...

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.

Even my cheap 1500 watt induction cooktop heats up my larger pans shockingly fast. So fast in fact that I have to be really careful not to warp them.

Induction cooktops heat up instantly, you may be thinking of electric.

> 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?

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.