99% of mobile living/travel i.e. RVs have propane stoves! Talk about small enclosed spaces...
When I started a discussion thread on a widely read RV forum the outcry was so much that the moderator took down the post and canceled comments! The same tired arguments..."People have been cooking with gas for generations...we see no problem..." type of replies. As an RV owner and live in one 6-7 months every year to escape the Michigan Seasonal Ice Age...I realize most only come with propane cook stoves as electric requires "Shore power" and 50 AMP service. Even the onboard generators are usually not sufficient to power an electric stove top. We simply do not use ours and rely on an Instant Pot and the convection - microwave combo. Reminds me of the DDT days when it was assume safe for people as they did not drop over instantly when they came in contact with it.
As Ken Firestone points out below, an induction cooktop works very well and does not need a lot of amps to operate. A friend with a camper is doing this and is very satisfied. She is now searching for ways to get hot water without using a propane heater.
Thanks for this. Far too few people know about this. Sometime in the near future, we'll look back on this era with amazement that we brought such a volatile, dangerous gas right into our very homes. I'm glad municipalities are enacting bans on methane in new buildings. I wrote a humor piece about this a while back: https://open.substack.com/pub/juliegabrielli/p/cooking-with-gas?r=4cg2x&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
>>"The estimated cost of premature deaths related to gas cooking in the EU and UK combined is 160 billion (EU is 143 billion) euros, with Italy incurring the highest cost (54 billion euros) as a single country."
I call bullshit. Italy has the highest life expectancy of any country in the EU and its temperate Mediterranean climate avows itself to cooking with open windows for ventilation purposes for the better part of the year.
The decline in life expectancy in the U.S. is driven almost exclusively by the opioid epidemic and self-destructive habits like binge drinking and antisocial behaviors. No one can seriously claim that tens of thousands of people die every year because they're cooking on a gas stove instead of electric or induction hob—especially when fewer and fewer of us are using them than in past decades, as evidenced by outside the home dining trends.
" its temperate Mediterranean climate avows itself to cooking with open windows for ventilation purposes for the better part of the year."
Thats a myth. It's probably true for rural areas but most Italians are city/town dwellers. They dont cook like that. Thats clear from the data tables which measure actual NO2 from studies that Italian concentrations are amoungst the highest levels in the EU. Taking into account that 74% of Italian households have gas hobs then the result above is probably correct.
I have more issues with the statements about cost and death.
It's simply not true to say xxx people are killed. The study is clear that what you are getting is a reduction in life duration. By their own numbers the reduction in life expectancy is about 18 months. So people are already in the last parts of their lives.
When you work out the costs you need to take that into account, which I can't see they are doing. They seem to be deviding a persons productive effort evenly across their life years. This means that the calculations assume that a person produces as much in a year at 5 as they do at 25 and at 65.
The incidences of peadeatric asthma however do stand as a case for removing gas stoves from service on their own.
You also use the number for the US while the study is the EU. The situations are completly differfent between the situations present. Don't use USA numbers as a surrogate for the rest of the world.
>>"The study is clear that what you are getting is a reduction in life duration. By their own numbers the reduction in life expectancy is about 18 months. So people are already in the last parts of their lives."
Sorry Bob, but if a major aspect of the study depends on a *cumulative* effect of NO2 aspiration as opposed to acute, and your study population has been using gas hobs for more or less their *ENTIRE* lifetime, how can you say that the reduction in life expectancy is ONLY at the end of their lifespan? Italian life expectancy has stagnated since 2012, around 82.5 years—this is not due to NO2 or gas hobs or even Covid-19 but some other factor(s). It's like saying we can cut U.S. healthcare costs by 3/4ths if we stopped providing care to the terminally ill, since 80% of all healthcare expenses are incurred during the last 6 months of life—or like saying that we can *presume* any mortality occurring within 6 months of a positive Covid-19 test is the result of the virus and not something else (which we saw people who died in car accidents being labeled as having died from Covid.)
Paediatric asthma is no different than the adult form except for (a) it sometimes resolves itself spontaneously as a child ages and (b) adult onset has a worse prognosis.
Don’t confuse diagnosis with mortality risk. You also haven’t addressed explaining why Sweden has such a high asthma rate in BOTH paediatric *and* adult populations as both are very similar to each other but yet has one of the lowest gas hob utilization rates in the EU.
Weasel words. You attempted to compare two data points that appear to be the same but are actually quite different. You are now attempting to cover up your mistake.
"You also haven’t addressed .. the EU."
Distraction. Irrelevant to the subject under discussion. Any report covering this sort of subject area and scope will inevitably have individual data errors/anomalys in it. It does not mean the report is faulty - it simply shows the real life is both complex and messy.
You have failed to provide anything that suggest that there are fundamental problems with the report. One is left to assume that you are unable to come up with anything.
Your frequent approach of "this does not say what I want so it must be wrong" does you no credit.
I am not prepared to waste more O2 on this, this thread is now closed.
My rant goes beyond promoting induction, to advocating everybody ditch their stupid range, an outdated concept based on the stove and oven sharing one fire:
...four years now, I think, we've never looked back, never had to compromise on how we cooked a meal, oven or stove. And it's just saved a lot of money.
We tried to install an induction cook-top 12 years ago when we renovated our apartment in a 1979 vintage apartment building. The electrician said the electrical supply couldn't handle the 40 Amp demand so we settled for replacing the 12-year-old halogen cook-top which was OK with 30 Amps.
Please - could someone comment on induction cook-tops with batteries that might work on our 'meagre' electrical supply?
Thanks Lloyd. I'm most interested in what we could in Calgary, AB. I also sent your post to my family in the UK, where Asthma is an issue in one family. I found a couple of useful articles in a D-D-G search: (Please delete if you worry about commercialism):
Two responses (lightly edited) from my siblings in England (check the map in Figure 2, above):
(1) "I'm glad I've never had to cook on gas! We haven't got gas in the house here".
(2) "Well, despite the dire warnings Mark and thank you for your concern, I/we have had a gas hob, [stovetop] and retain 2 gas fires in lounge and 1 bedroom, for years. Deliberately. However we have an electric oven, also now electric microwave and crockpot. We opted to have both power systems *because of power outages* [emphasis added].
"We later experienced a Christmas with a household of 5 residents, when the power lines and poles got uprooted and downed across [the] Lane, by high winds - yes, just outside our house, but the whole of North West Cheshire was without electricity for days, from 22 Dec, 3 to 9 days I think. Heating, though gas, was controlled by electrics - shucks - no heat ... We were the only household with a hot Christmas dinner, - turkey cooked by gas [bottled propane] in the caravan oven by J and I the veg, etc. in the kitchen.
"A neighbouring family of four were supposed to go to [a relative] in [a distant town] for a week, so no supplies [at home] so they joined us.
"Thus a week in the midwinter dark and cold ... On other occasions in elec power outages I would drive next door and bring the elderly neighbour, to spend at least a half day with us. All her heating, light and water were elec.
"SO
"It is expedient and sensible in this environment to have split power here, and I'm sure I'd have had many more problems due to a week of midwinter cold. (Burst pipes?) As it was, we survived, the gas fumes didn’t get us, and I'm still here today. So is the house - just!
"I will heed your info but stay as I am !!!!"
(1) lives in a newer house served by underground utilities in an Eastern England village. (2) lives just outside a village, in an older house served by overhead wooden pole-mounted electricity, phone and TV cables, and underground gas, water and municipal sewage (but not storm drains).
I am an advocate of underground utilities (remember the Quebec ice storm a few years ago?) but wonder what is going to happen to our underground utilities now we are experiencing extreme storms such as SE Spain a few days ago. Should we be installing weather-protected ducts or 'utilidors'? Under- or above-ground? How? Please discuss (no prizes).
The strange hysteria around moving away from gas stoves reminds me of the strange hysteria around heat pumps in the UK. It makes me wonder if "vested interests" are in there muddying the waters and clouding the discussion. Or maybe we're just really wedded to our poisonous cookers and expensively heated houses.
When I purchased a CO2 monitor (for classroom use) I was shocked how quickly C02 shot up when I turned on the gas stove. Obviously lots more wasn't being vented either. Love our not expensive, easy to clean, fast, safe (fire/burns), and easy to use induction range.
99% of mobile living/travel i.e. RVs have propane stoves! Talk about small enclosed spaces...
When I started a discussion thread on a widely read RV forum the outcry was so much that the moderator took down the post and canceled comments! The same tired arguments..."People have been cooking with gas for generations...we see no problem..." type of replies. As an RV owner and live in one 6-7 months every year to escape the Michigan Seasonal Ice Age...I realize most only come with propane cook stoves as electric requires "Shore power" and 50 AMP service. Even the onboard generators are usually not sufficient to power an electric stove top. We simply do not use ours and rely on an Instant Pot and the convection - microwave combo. Reminds me of the DDT days when it was assume safe for people as they did not drop over instantly when they came in contact with it.
My tiny home had an alcohol stove. Slow but it worked!
As Ken Firestone points out below, an induction cooktop works very well and does not need a lot of amps to operate. A friend with a camper is doing this and is very satisfied. She is now searching for ways to get hot water without using a propane heater.
I’ve had an induction stove for nearly 5 years. I should have gotten it sooner.
Thanks for this. Far too few people know about this. Sometime in the near future, we'll look back on this era with amazement that we brought such a volatile, dangerous gas right into our very homes. I'm glad municipalities are enacting bans on methane in new buildings. I wrote a humor piece about this a while back: https://open.substack.com/pub/juliegabrielli/p/cooking-with-gas?r=4cg2x&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
that's very good.
Thanks, Lloyd! An experiment in delivering bad news with a smile . . .
>>"The estimated cost of premature deaths related to gas cooking in the EU and UK combined is 160 billion (EU is 143 billion) euros, with Italy incurring the highest cost (54 billion euros) as a single country."
I call bullshit. Italy has the highest life expectancy of any country in the EU and its temperate Mediterranean climate avows itself to cooking with open windows for ventilation purposes for the better part of the year.
For the record, "The growing trend of building electrification in the US is largely driven by climate change targets AS OPPOSED TO HEATH EQUITY BENEFITS (emphasis added)." https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2214629624002536
The decline in life expectancy in the U.S. is driven almost exclusively by the opioid epidemic and self-destructive habits like binge drinking and antisocial behaviors. No one can seriously claim that tens of thousands of people die every year because they're cooking on a gas stove instead of electric or induction hob—especially when fewer and fewer of us are using them than in past decades, as evidenced by outside the home dining trends.
So yeah, I call bullshit.
" its temperate Mediterranean climate avows itself to cooking with open windows for ventilation purposes for the better part of the year."
Thats a myth. It's probably true for rural areas but most Italians are city/town dwellers. They dont cook like that. Thats clear from the data tables which measure actual NO2 from studies that Italian concentrations are amoungst the highest levels in the EU. Taking into account that 74% of Italian households have gas hobs then the result above is probably correct.
I have more issues with the statements about cost and death.
It's simply not true to say xxx people are killed. The study is clear that what you are getting is a reduction in life duration. By their own numbers the reduction in life expectancy is about 18 months. So people are already in the last parts of their lives.
When you work out the costs you need to take that into account, which I can't see they are doing. They seem to be deviding a persons productive effort evenly across their life years. This means that the calculations assume that a person produces as much in a year at 5 as they do at 25 and at 65.
The incidences of peadeatric asthma however do stand as a case for removing gas stoves from service on their own.
You also use the number for the US while the study is the EU. The situations are completly differfent between the situations present. Don't use USA numbers as a surrogate for the rest of the world.
>>"The study is clear that what you are getting is a reduction in life duration. By their own numbers the reduction in life expectancy is about 18 months. So people are already in the last parts of their lives."
Sorry Bob, but if a major aspect of the study depends on a *cumulative* effect of NO2 aspiration as opposed to acute, and your study population has been using gas hobs for more or less their *ENTIRE* lifetime, how can you say that the reduction in life expectancy is ONLY at the end of their lifespan? Italian life expectancy has stagnated since 2012, around 82.5 years—this is not due to NO2 or gas hobs or even Covid-19 but some other factor(s). It's like saying we can cut U.S. healthcare costs by 3/4ths if we stopped providing care to the terminally ill, since 80% of all healthcare expenses are incurred during the last 6 months of life—or like saying that we can *presume* any mortality occurring within 6 months of a positive Covid-19 test is the result of the virus and not something else (which we saw people who died in car accidents being labeled as having died from Covid.)
There are studies out there that show Nordic countries have the highest rates of asthma (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/edn-20210924-1) while others show Italy actually has a **lower** asthma incidence rate than the EU average and less than half that of Sweden's, despite just 1,5% of their hobs running on gas (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1296610/asthma-prevalence-in-the-eu/ and https://i.ytimg.com/vi/LYQNMlgzqNg/maxresdefault.jpg). How are we to square various datasets that show diametrically opposing results without questioning the veracity of the NEW study that purports gas hobs are evil?
It's why I continually am disappointed in modern "science" and will stand by my original claim: this study is nothing but bullshit.
“how can you say that the reduction in life expectancy is ONLY at the end of their lifespan? I”
Because that’s what the data says.
You are also confusing paediatric asthma with the total population asthma rate.
Paediatric asthma is no different than the adult form except for (a) it sometimes resolves itself spontaneously as a child ages and (b) adult onset has a worse prognosis.
Don’t confuse diagnosis with mortality risk. You also haven’t addressed explaining why Sweden has such a high asthma rate in BOTH paediatric *and* adult populations as both are very similar to each other but yet has one of the lowest gas hob utilization rates in the EU.
"Paediatric asthma i...prognosis."
Weasel words. You attempted to compare two data points that appear to be the same but are actually quite different. You are now attempting to cover up your mistake.
"You also haven’t addressed .. the EU."
Distraction. Irrelevant to the subject under discussion. Any report covering this sort of subject area and scope will inevitably have individual data errors/anomalys in it. It does not mean the report is faulty - it simply shows the real life is both complex and messy.
You have failed to provide anything that suggest that there are fundamental problems with the report. One is left to assume that you are unable to come up with anything.
Your frequent approach of "this does not say what I want so it must be wrong" does you no credit.
I am not prepared to waste more O2 on this, this thread is now closed.
How accurate is this new study? Is the methodology solid? Is it peer-reviewed? Are there thoughtful critiques?
no thoughtful critiques yet.
Unfortunately, like almost everything, this issue is a political one. "Woke liberals are coming for my gas stove."
The quote from Ronnie Jackson is typical Republican nonsense.
My rant goes beyond promoting induction, to advocating everybody ditch their stupid range, an outdated concept based on the stove and oven sharing one fire:
http://brander.ca/range
...four years now, I think, we've never looked back, never had to compromise on how we cooked a meal, oven or stove. And it's just saved a lot of money.
We tried to install an induction cook-top 12 years ago when we renovated our apartment in a 1979 vintage apartment building. The electrician said the electrical supply couldn't handle the 40 Amp demand so we settled for replacing the 12-year-old halogen cook-top which was OK with 30 Amps.
Please - could someone comment on induction cook-tops with batteries that might work on our 'meagre' electrical supply?
https://heatmap.news/sparks/nycha-induction-stoves-copper
Thanks Lloyd. I'm most interested in what we could in Calgary, AB. I also sent your post to my family in the UK, where Asthma is an issue in one family. I found a couple of useful articles in a D-D-G search: (Please delete if you worry about commercialism):
https://www.batterytechonline.com/trends/why-a-battery-assisted-induction-stove-makes-sense
and
https://electrek.co/2024/02/29/induction-ovens-with-big-batteries-solve-lots-of-problems/
Two responses (lightly edited) from my siblings in England (check the map in Figure 2, above):
(1) "I'm glad I've never had to cook on gas! We haven't got gas in the house here".
(2) "Well, despite the dire warnings Mark and thank you for your concern, I/we have had a gas hob, [stovetop] and retain 2 gas fires in lounge and 1 bedroom, for years. Deliberately. However we have an electric oven, also now electric microwave and crockpot. We opted to have both power systems *because of power outages* [emphasis added].
"We later experienced a Christmas with a household of 5 residents, when the power lines and poles got uprooted and downed across [the] Lane, by high winds - yes, just outside our house, but the whole of North West Cheshire was without electricity for days, from 22 Dec, 3 to 9 days I think. Heating, though gas, was controlled by electrics - shucks - no heat ... We were the only household with a hot Christmas dinner, - turkey cooked by gas [bottled propane] in the caravan oven by J and I the veg, etc. in the kitchen.
"A neighbouring family of four were supposed to go to [a relative] in [a distant town] for a week, so no supplies [at home] so they joined us.
"Thus a week in the midwinter dark and cold ... On other occasions in elec power outages I would drive next door and bring the elderly neighbour, to spend at least a half day with us. All her heating, light and water were elec.
"SO
"It is expedient and sensible in this environment to have split power here, and I'm sure I'd have had many more problems due to a week of midwinter cold. (Burst pipes?) As it was, we survived, the gas fumes didn’t get us, and I'm still here today. So is the house - just!
"I will heed your info but stay as I am !!!!"
(1) lives in a newer house served by underground utilities in an Eastern England village. (2) lives just outside a village, in an older house served by overhead wooden pole-mounted electricity, phone and TV cables, and underground gas, water and municipal sewage (but not storm drains).
I am an advocate of underground utilities (remember the Quebec ice storm a few years ago?) but wonder what is going to happen to our underground utilities now we are experiencing extreme storms such as SE Spain a few days ago. Should we be installing weather-protected ducts or 'utilidors'? Under- or above-ground? How? Please discuss (no prizes).
The strange hysteria around moving away from gas stoves reminds me of the strange hysteria around heat pumps in the UK. It makes me wonder if "vested interests" are in there muddying the waters and clouding the discussion. Or maybe we're just really wedded to our poisonous cookers and expensively heated houses.
When I purchased a CO2 monitor (for classroom use) I was shocked how quickly C02 shot up when I turned on the gas stove. Obviously lots more wasn't being vented either. Love our not expensive, easy to clean, fast, safe (fire/burns), and easy to use induction range.