The burning truth behind gas stoves — and how it fanned the flames of a culture war

There’s nothing like cooking to get people’s backs up.

Debates over whether rice should be rinsed before cooking, when the spice should be added to a crawfish boil, or if ribs should be boiled at all have broken down many a friendship.

It’s no wonder, then, that gas stoves have sparked a full-blown culture war south of the border, with one U.S. congressman tweeting a video of his blue flamed burners with the caption: “You’ll have to pry it from my COLD DEAD HANDS!”

It all started last week, when an official with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission said the agency was considering banning new gas stoves amid research that links them to childhood asthma.

The backlash was swift and hyperbolic, perhaps best encapsulated in the image of a chef and regular Fox News guest taping himself to a gas stove in protest.

This prompted reassurance from the White House that the government was not, in fact, going to seize anyone’s stove.

But the eye-rolling antics of Americans have brought new attention to a long-standing debate over the health impacts of combusting methane with an open flame in millions of homes.

The science

For decades, there have been studies linking an increased risk of childhood asthma with having a gas stove in the home. Depending on the study, the increased likelihood of kids developing respiratory disease varies between 12 and 42 per cent.

In 2005, the World Health Organization put out guidelines recommending limiting exposure to nitrogen dioxide (NO2), one of the toxic compounds released when a gas stove is turned on. However, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, despite having conducted its own research linking NO2 levels to childhood asthma, has not published indoor air quality regulations.

In 2015, Health Canada revised its residential indoor air-quality guidelines, cutting the previous short-term exposure limit by almost two thirds. The agency admitted, however, that 25 per cent of houses with gas stoves would exceed the limit “for brief periods of time after cooking,” even with “moderate ventilation.”

That ventilation, or the absence of it, quickly becomes the crux of the matter.

The natural gas industry has countered claims that natural gas stoves are hazardous for your health by stating the science is “inconclusive,” especially when “proper ventilation” is used.

According to a fact sheet produced by the Canadian Gas Association, a range hood should be vented to the outdoors, cover all the burners on your stove, be inspected and maintained annually, and run on the highest setting during and after cooking.

Cooks should only use the back burners and should open a window or a door while their stove is in operation, the fact sheet says.

If you do all this, cooking with gas is safe.

But, as Dr. Samantha Green, president-elect of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE), points out, people often don’t follow these practices in the real world.

‘Most people are not using their product perfectly’

“The companies are aware that these products need to be used perfectly in order to be safe. And they are aware that most people are not using their product perfectly,” she said. “Most of the time, people are not only using the back burner. People are not necessarily turning on their hood system every single time they use their stove.”

Whether it’s because turning on a hood fan at full blast is often so loud you can’t have a conversation or because not everyone wants to crack a window in February, the use of gas stoves in kitchens isn’t going to be as safe as it is in a lab, said Green.

Green, who is a family physician in Toronto, recommends using the precautionary principle around gas stoves.

“Given that there is a signal in the scientific literature indicating a likely risk, I do think we need to pay attention to it now. I don’t think we need to do anything rash. I’m not going to advise all my patients to go out and buy a new stove. But I do think it makes sense to make sure that people are aware of this so that they are turning on the ventilation whenever they’re using their gas stove and that they are cracking a window,” she said.

“And if you’re thinking about getting a new stove, don’t buy gas. If you’re already going to spend money on a new stove, you should definitely buy induction or electric.”

A ban on advertising — as with cigarettes and alcohol?

The Canadian Gas Association did not respond to a request for comment. But in a statement posted to its website, it says: “cooking with natural gas is safe.”

“The relationship between cooking with natural gas and asthma appear to be more coincidental than causal,” it wrote, citing a study that found “There’s no significant difference between cooking with natural gas and electric stoves in terms of indoor air quality.”

CAPE is unconvinced. Due to the health risks posed by petroleum products, the group is advocating for a fossil fuel ad ban modelled on the ad bans for tobacco and alcohol already in place.

“Fossil fuels make us sick just like tobacco makes us sick,” she said. “These companies push their products as safe, as healthy. … We shouldn’t permit them to promote their products to us.”

As it turns out, the popularity of natural gas stoves is due to one of the most successful advertising campaigns in history, with a slogan you may not have even realized started out as a jingle: “Now you’re cookin’ with gas.”

According to an extensive report in Mother Jones magazine, the phrase was coined by the American Gas Association in the 1930s, and really took off when Bob Hope began using it in his comedy routines on the radio.

While initially the gas industry distanced itself from the phrase, it later grew to embrace it, even producing a now-cringeworthy rap video in 1988. Those marketing tactics have evolved in the era of social media, with influencers now paid to promote gas cooking on social media, using the hashtag #CookingWithGas.

The climate change connection

But with last week’s American hysterics over gas stove, the online debate took a different turn. Rather than focusing on health impacts, many pointed to the role gas stoves play in climate change.

Natural gas is actually a marketing term for a chemical compound that is mostly made up of methane. And while carbon dioxide has long held centre stage as the villain causing climate change, methane has belatedly become recognized as CO2’s sidekick.

In the atmosphere, methane causes 86 times more warming than carbon dioxide, according to Environment and Climate Change Canada. But because it breaks down much faster than CO, that warming effect wanes after 20 years, rather than the hundreds it takes for released carbon to stop warming the planet.

Critics have pointed out that emissions from gas stoves make up a tiny proportion of the average household’s emissions. According to Natural Resources Canada, in 2019 gas stoves account for 370,000 tons of CO2 equivalent emissions. That’s only 0.8 per cent of total residential emissions.

By contrast, natural gas furnaces account for 60 per cent of all household emissions.

But the problem with those numbers is that they only count the emissions produced when the elements are on, combusting methane into CO2 and other compounds.

New research is showing methane has an outsized impact on global warming when it isn’t burned, because the pipeline system that brings natural gas from the oil fields to your house is riddled with leaks.

These “fugitive emissions” have been difficult to detect in the past. But new fly-over and satellite technology has discovered that more than twice as much methane is leaking out of pipelines than previously thought.

And like pipelines, gas stoves leak all the time — even when they’re turned off.

Despite their relatively minor emissions, climate campaigners point to gas stoves as a “gateway drug,” requiring a gas line that enables all the other, far higher emitting, appliances.

“People feel emotional about their gas stove, they don’t feel emotional about their gas furnace,” said CAPE’s Green. “So if we can get people to switch away from gas for cooking, then it becomes a lot easier to switch away from gas for heating and water heating.”

A greener home front

Merran Smith, executive director of Clean Energy Canada, a climate program based at Simon Fraser University, says people need to start looking at their kitchens and their lives in a new way.

“Every single thing we can do to reduce our carbon emissions, we need to do it and we need to do it now,” she said. “Start somewhere. Maybe it’s your stove because of the health impacts, but also look at converting your furnace and hot water to a heat pump. They’re not only better for the environment, they’re cheaper to run.”

In an effort to avoid locking in future housing emissions, dozens of cities in the U.S. have started banning natural gas hookups in new homes. While similar laws have been passed in Vancouver and Victoria without incident, south of the border, the backlash has been fierce.

Recognizing the threat, the natural gas industry lobbied state governments to pre-empt the cities by banning their right to ban natural gas. To date, some 20 states have either proposed or passed such legislation.

As legislators continue this tit-for-tat, ditching the gas stove starts looking like an easier decision.

Electric induction stoves, which have the speed and precise temperature control of gas and can boil a pot of water in 90 seconds, are popular in Europe, but haven’t caught the public’s imagination in North America yet.

Some cooks remain skeptical about giving up the romantic experience of cooking on a blue flame.

But this shouldn’t stop anyone, says Pierre Gagnaire, a three-Star Michelin chef who was voted the best in the world in 2015. Like most Parisian chefs, Gagnaire uses induction in all his restaurants — a technology he calls “formidable.”

“It’s clean. It doesn’t pollute. The equipment today is perfectly tuned, it’s high performance,” he said in a 2015 interview. “It’s ideal for domestic use — unlike gas, which I abandoned.”

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