Banning Gas Stoves Is a Terrible Idea
Banning Gas Stoves Is a Terrible Idea
Note from Josh: When I heard the US Consumer Product Safety Commission was considering a ban on gas stoves, I was furious. So was my friend Ari Allyn-Feuer, who has a Ph.D. in Bioinformatics from the University of Michigan and works at GlaxoSmithKline. In other words, he’s a legit scientist. I could have ranted and raved about this myself, but I’ll let a professional scientist explain why this ban is total bollocks.The Biden Administration, facing backlash, was quick to distance itself from the idea, but a ban of new gas stoves is still on the table. Plus, they are effectively being banned in many cities, and the idea is still being pushed by legislators and social media influencers.Right now, the idea of banning gas stoves is having a moment. For many years, academics have chattered about the impact of burning gas in the home in terms of global warming and indoor air quality.In recent years, a couple of major magazine articles stoked the idea, leading a collection of liberal cities to actually pass laws banning gas hookups in new buildings. Conservative state governments retaliated by passing laws preempting such municipal laws.Now the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) has said it is evaluating the health impact of gas stoves to decide whether to impose stricter standards on nitrogen oxide emissions or ban the stoves altogether. While this is unlikely to happen any time soon, it’s worth taking the time to explain why this is a terrible idea.Before we get into the weeds, we should be clear about just what’s being proposed. No one’s coming to your house to take away your gas stove.  There are two proposals here:Local governments proposing to ban gas stove hookups (or all gas hookups) for new construction. This would mean that if you wanted gas cooking, you would have to live in older buildings that already have it.The CPSC proposal to impose new federal standards on newly-manufactured gas stoves, or ban them altogether. A ban would mean that if you wanted a gas stove, you’d have to buy a used one.Both of these policies would take effect slowly, over decades, and feel gentle to most people, especially at first. But they are still terrible policies.Before discussing the economics, I should mention upfront that I am a gas-cooking enthusiast.  I cook a lot, and I cook with gas, and I like cooking with gas. When I am forced to cook on a resistive electric stove, like the one at my grandmother’s house, the quality of my cooking suffers notably. And I don’t enjoy it as much; I get stressed out by the inability to turn the heat up and down quickly.  In theory, cooking on an induction range might help, but to do that I’d have to pay thousands of dollars for an induction range, then buy a whole set of expensive new cookware, and learn a new style of cooking, just to find out if I actually liked it. Seriously, the average induction range at Home Depot is over $2500, and America’s Test Kitchen is recommending pots and pans that cost about $200 each.  Maybe someday I will try that, especially if the costs come down, but in the meantime, I want to make the choice of cooking fuel for myself.Photos of other gas-cooking enthusiasts.That said, I am quite convinced that the merits of the proposed ban are nonsense, regardless of your personal choice of fuel.The CPSC evaluation is being driven by the recent release of a study in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, which estimated that about 13% of childhood asthma cases in the United States are caused by gas stoves in the home.The study stands on fairly firm ground; its methodology was simply to multiply the incremental odds ratio for asthma as a function of gas cooking (about 34% higher) by the percentage of houses that have gas stoves (about 40%). The study gives some state-by-state results, but the broad brushstrokes are that yes, gas stoves probably cause a small-but-not-tiny fraction of asthma cases.  But this in no way justifies a ban on gas stoves! It cannot be taken as a general principle that any lifestyle choice which imposes a quantifiable health burden should be outlawed.  Just talking about asthma, this rationale would also lead us to ban candles, fireplaces, campfires, laser printers, carpets, and wood shops, all of which have substantial links to asthma.Notably, this would include the wood fires which President Biden likes to keep burning in the Oval Office, as well as, potentially, any of the 27 other fireplaces in the White House.But beyond this, the array of lifestyle choices that have a link to some disease is almost infinite, and we neither can nor should take this draconian approach in general nor does anyone want to. So why this one? Just special pleading?Certainly, it doesn’t justify itself in a cost-benefit analysis. Taking the 13% attributable case fraction number at face value, and using the percentage of people with asthma in the USA (about 7.6%) and academic estimates of the Quality Adjusted Life Year (QALY) burden of asthma (between .09 and .13 per year, among the roughly half of those who have asthma attacks), we can estimate that actually eliminating all gas stoves from the USA, once it had taken full effect, i.e. after about 80 years, would save about 165,000 QALYs per year.At widely used thresholds around $100,000 per QALY, this would imply that the ban on gas stoves would be cost-effective if it cost less than about $16 billion per year.  Reckoning in death terms, with the social cost of human life around $10 million, saving 13% of the approximately 4,150 asthma deaths per year might be worth about $5.4 billion per year.But the cost is vastly more than this. Just buying 50 million induction ranges and 50 million new sets of cookware already brings us into the hundreds of billions of dollars, before we get into the cost of retrofitting, the ongoing higher cost of electricity vs. gas fuel, and the fact that gas stoves last about twice as long as induction ranges.In addition, though, the asthma effect of gas stoves can be ameliorated with more ventilation, which is a much better and more cost-effective way to solve the problem!  And as we have discussed here before, ventilation has other important health benefits.And the economic costs of banning gas stoves are small, conceptually, compared to the human costs. The approximately 100 million American adults who cook with gas spend about 400 hours a year cooking, for about 40 billion hours a year. If the pleasure they take in cooking with gas instead of electricity is worth even $.80 per hour, that by itself outweighs the QALYs which could be saved by the reduction in asthma burden. And if my experience is any guide, it’s worth far more than $.80 per hour.And while this proposal isn’t worth it in utilitarian or economic terms, we also can’t forget about freedom. People deserve the right to make choices about their own lives, and cooking food over fire is a legitimate, defensible choice for them to make, even if it does impose some costs. Not everyone has the same idea of what it means to live a good life, and people’s right to pursue happiness in different ways is a central part of our national character and our highest laws.The other proposals to ban gas stoves at the municipal level have been discussed mainly as a global warming issue. Like the impact on asthma, this is a real issue, but one that doesn’t justify the proposed policy at all.Residential gas stoves generate about one-eighth of one percent of the US carbon footprint. Natural gas makes up about a third of US primary energy consumption, but it makes up about 20% of US carbon dioxide emissions because natural gas has half the carbon intensity of coal and oil. Of that 20%, residential consumption only makes up 16%, because 84% of it is used in industrial, electrical, commercial, and transportation applications. So we're down to about 3.2% of the US carbon footprint coming from residential gas. But of that 3.2%, only a small portion of it is used for cooking. The EIA estimates that the average household with gas cooking spends only $34 per year on the gas used at the stove, but the average natural gas bill is $72 per month. This means that of the 3.2% of US carbon footprint that is composed of residential gas, only 4.1% of that—about .13% of the total US carbon footprint—is made up of residential gas cooking.Responsible estimates of the social cost of carbon, and the cost of Direct Air Capture to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, come in at about $250 per ton. With the average gas stove emitting about 130kg of carbon per year, the cost of carbon removal for this application would be about $32 per year. Or about $1.5 billion per year for all the residential gas stoves in the country. This is even smaller than the economic estimates of the health effects.It would be hard to find, if you looked, another one-eighth of one percent of the US carbon footprint with more impact on the lifestyle of the public.  In exchange for this .13%, you have to force most of the nation’s cooking enthusiasts to use a new cooking fuel that they justifiably hate. You have to go right into everyone's house and tell them to get different and worse kitchen appliances.Meanwhile, no one cares which fuel is used to produce their home heat, hot water, or electricity. In fact, they hardly care what fuel is used to move their car; people seem to like electric just fine. And these areas offer opportunities for amelioration that are not merely tens, but actually hundreds of times larger. But what is New York doing? The same year they passed a ban on new gas hookups, and in the midst of an effort to transition the grid to carbon-free sources, they prematurely shut down a carbon-free nuclear power plant and replaced it with 2 gigawatts of new fossil fuel plants.When people try to figure out what people should be doing to ameliorate global warming, they often do the world's worst job, zooming in on things that would make a massive negative impact on people's lives while offering tiny benefits. They tend to do this consistently, for some reason, I think possibly because on some level they're using disruption to people's lives as some kind of figure of merit in their heads. They feel like they need to legislate on something visible and meaningful and personal, when in fact it's invisibility and meaninglessness, and lack of personal impact, that are the hallmarks of the best carbon reductions.As global warming policy, a gas stove ban is not only not worth it but is counterproductive. It absorbs lots of energy and cost in a tiny mitigation with a tiny effect, while falsely convincing people that reducing carbon emissions will require large personal sacrifices.As we’ve discussed above, the proposed bans on gas stoves are terrible policies. But it’s worth noting that they are a terrible policy from which rich people, like the politicians passing them and the owners of the media companies pushing them, would be largely exempt.If keeping gas means buying or renting and then renovating the older housing units that still have gas hookups, the rich will win those bidding wars every time. Since most rich people are already homeowners, they don’t have to do anything. If keeping gas means buying used stoves after the ban, or setting up propane, rich people can afford that. And the rich already eat more of their meals in restaurants, which are exempt from the proposed bans.And if push comes to shove, and they do wind up switching to electric, rich people can afford fancy new induction ranges and expensive new cookware.The outsized human and economic costs of this policy are going to be largely invisible to a guy like Joe Biden, who, when he’s not president, lives in two country houses with a combined square footage of about 12,000 square feet, and doesn’t and can’t cook anyway.  Or someone like CPSC commissioner Richard Trumka, the architect of the CPSC’s proposed ban, whose father left a $6 million estate.This proposal is harmful nonsense that will hurt ordinary people for little real benefit, and there are numerous less-harmful ways to achieve the same goals.