Banning gas stoves will not save the planet; it results in more gas use

The gas stove “controversy” has returned to the pages of the Royal Examiner, courtesy of Ivy Main, a volunteer lawyer for the Virginia Sierra Club chapter, who has never met an electric heating or cooking device she didn’t like.

She says, “no one in the White House actually wants to ban gas stoves” and rightly points out that Virginia’s relatively mild climate makes gas heating “less lucrative” than the colder North. I would say “less necessary” since I do not view everything through the lens of whether a corporation will profit or not. Despite being warmer, we can still get some cold snaps and gas use scales with the need for heat, unlike heat exchangers flipping over to resistive heat and stressing the grid.

It is true that gas stoves were at least given the cold shoulder by the White House. Yahoo’s January 9, 2023 headline was “Biden Administration Considers Banning Gas Stoves over Health Concerns.” However, as Ms. Main reassures us, no one in the White House “actually” wants to ban gas stoves. The reason for the false scare, according to Yahoo, was that “The stoves, which are used in about 40 percent of homes in the U.S., emit pollutants including nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide and fine particulate matter at levels deemed unsafe by the EPA and World Health Organization.”

Those articles failed to point out that the same pollutants are emitted by cooking with any heat source, including electricity. In fact, real-world scientific studies comparing cooking real foods find only a little extra pollution from the gas itself. The indoor pollution aspect seems to be just another back door way to ban heat and cooking sources that some people don’t like. The irony is that the same heat source is used at the power plant to boil water to produce electricity that is used in the stove or heat pump. But when a heat pump fails and switches to resistive heat, there’s far more load on the grid and far less efficient use of the heat from the gas. But that inefficiency is always true for gas versus gas/electric stoves. It is far more efficient to burn gas to heat or cook food than to use gas to boil water to deliver electricity to use to heat or cook food.

In short, banning gas stoves will not save the planet; it results in more gas use. Some day we will have more renewable electricity sources, and that won’t be the case, but it’s certainly not the case now. Most readers of the Royal Examiner do not have and will never have access to natural gas, so the issue is mostly moot. Our weather is pretty nice except for the snow lovers. The best policy for now and the next decade or two is “all of the above” and not pretending that banning gas stoves will fix the weather or improve people’s health.

Eric Peterson
Warren County