Gas Stoves Are Hazardous To Your Health – CleanTechnica

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Remember when cigarettes had warning labels that said “Caution: Smoking may be hazardous to your health.”? A new study by researchers at Jaume I University in Castelló de la Plana, Spain, found that residents of the European Union and Britain are twice as likely to die prematurely from exposure to the pollutants emitted by gas stoves than they are from a car crash. Take a moment to digest that claim. Cooking  breakfast or baking a cake using a gas stove (which burns methane, known around CleanTechnica headquarters as “unnatural gas”) is more dangerous that driving a car. Yikes! Maybe we should pay attention to what the researchers discovered?

The New York Times reports that the results of the study show gas stoves lead to about 40,000 premature deaths a year in the European Union and Britain and decrease the lifespan of people who live in homes where gas stoves are used by two years. In the EU and UK, gas stoves have led to more than a million annual asthma cases. The costs of treating asthma in children account for $4.3 billion a year in additional health care spending.

Gas Stoves Kill People

The researchers attributed 36,031 early deaths each year to gas stoves in the EU and a further 3,928 in the UK. They say their estimates are conservative because they only considered the health effects of nitrogen dioxide and not other gases such as carbon monoxide and benzene, which is a known carcinogen that can reach levels above health guidelines from using gas stoves indoors. “The extent of the problem is far worse than we thought,” lead author Juana María Delgado-Saborit, told The Guardian. “Way back in 1978, we first learned that NO2 pollution is many times greater in kitchens using gas than electric stoves, but only now are we able to put a number on the amount of lives being cut short,” she said.

One in three households in the EU cooks with methane.  More than half do in the UK, and more than 60% do in Italy, the Netherlands, Romania, and Hungary. The report, which was supported by the European Climate Foundation, builds on research in 2023 that measured air quality in homes to find out how much cooking with gas increased indoor air pollution. That study allowed the scientists from Jaume I University and the University of Valencia to work out ratios between indoor and outdoor air pollution when cooking with gas, and map indoor exposure to NO2. They then applied risk rates of disease, sourced from studies on outdoor NO2 pollution, to work out the number of lives lost. The results are in line with a study in the US in May of this year which found methane and propane stoves contribute to as many as 19,000 adult deaths each year.

The EU tightened its rules on outdoor air quality this month, but it has not set standards for indoor air quality. The European Public Health Alliance urged policymakers to phase out methane-burning stoves by setting limits on emissions, offering money to help switch to cleaner stoves, and requiring manufacturers to put labels on those stoves to warn people about the pollution risks. Studies have also shown that gas stoves pollute indoor air even when they are not in use. “For too long it has been easy to dismiss the dangers of gas stoves,” said Sara Bertucci from the EPHA. “Like cigarettes, people didn’t think much of the health impacts — and, like cigarettes, gas stoves are a little fire that fills our home with pollution.”

Defenders of gas often suggest that an exhaust hood solves the problem, but this latest study says no. It quotes other research which found “households with cooker hoods (both recirculating and vented to the exterior) saw no substantial reduction in cooking-related indoor air pollution.”

Not everyone can just rip out their stove and replace it with an electric unit. Renters don’t have that luxury, and installing a new electrical circuit for an electric stove can be costly, although induction cooktops use far less electricity than conventional electric stoves. “It’s an issue of environmental justice,” said Delgado-Saborit. Transitioning from gas to electric stoves, she said, means “governments have to help communities make those changes and it’s important that governments take steps to ensure that gas stoves put into the market are safe.”

The Takeaway

At CleanTechnica, we have covered this topic extensively. A year ago, Scott Cooney asked, “Does Cooking With Gas Stoves Hurt Indoor Air Quality?” Not surprisingly, Scott wrote that yes, cooking with gas does hurt indoor air quality. Chefs who cook for a living love gas stoves because they can control the temperature with great precision, but they may not be aware that standing over those stoves is shortening their lives. A brilliantly crafted beef reduction may be a wonderful thing, but so is being on the green side of the turf for as long as possible.

I follow a fellow by the name of Lloyd Alter, who writes a column entitled Carbon Upfront! on Substack. He covered this new research in a post this week and some of what he said will resonate with CleanTechnica readers, I think. Alter writes that in North America, gas stoves are part of a culture war funded in part by the fossil fuel industry, like Enbridge Gas in Canada. “Few subjects attract more comments and controversy. I don’t understand why. It is as if someone was defending gas lighting like we had 150 years ago instead of electric bulbs. I don’t see people screaming for the freedom to have gas lighting in their homes. It was replaced with better, safer, cleaner technology.”

With stoves as well, technology has changed. he says. Induction ranges cook faster with more control and comfort. Some of them even have batteries now, so rewiring isn’t necessary. “We don’t need to cook with 150 year old technology and breathe all these pollutants any more. What are people thinking? All those premature deaths and years of life lost from nitrogen dioxide, benzine, particulates, and carbon monoxide. I find it hard to believe in this day and age that people think cooking over an open flame inside their home is a good idea. Perhaps this latest research might help convince a few more of them that two extra years of healthy living is nice, too.”

Alter includes this antisocial media post, which we think does an excellent job of explaining the situation. For those who don’t know, Ronny Jackson is the lunatic who was Dumb Donald’s personal physician while he was in the White House.

Touché! Game, set, and match.