Complex Numbers

It's a Gas

I want to help make the world a better place. Okay, well, that's not entirely true, but I want to at least not make it a worse place.

We need to talk about your gas stove, your health and climate change  

Articles like this one make me stop giving a shit, though.

Americans love their gas stoves. It's a romance fueled by a decades-old "cooking with gas" campaign from utilities that includes vintage advertisements, a cringeworthy 1980s rap video and, more recently, social media personalities. The details have changed over time, but the message is the same: Using a gas stove makes you a better cook.

I couldn't care less about those ads, rap videos, or especially social media personalities. Gas stoves are simply superior.

But the beloved gas stove has become a focal point in a fight over whether gas should even exist in the 35% of U.S. homes that cook with it.

Let's just use less efficient electricity instead. Some of which comes from gas.

If you have an electric stove, the energy for cooking may come from fossil fuels, but the combustion happens at a power plant far away, Kephart says. "When you have a gas stove, that combustion is actually occurring right in your kitchen — you can see the blue flame down there," he says. "There is no smoke-free combustion."

And?

This reminds me of the whole California Proposition 65 thing. I'm sure it means well. But as with "this product contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer," there are problems.

First, say you have Substance A, which has a 0.0001% chance of causing health issues, and Substance B, which has a 10% chance of causing health issues. You lump these two together, and it's misleading as hell. Sure, you can say "But I only want products that have a 0% chance of causing health issues," but you can also say "I want a pet unicorn."

Second, if you put a warning label on everything, pretty soon it's going to be utterly ignored. It becomes background.

Point is, I don't care if the combustion comes from my gas stove or a gas-powered plant, it's still going to happen, and I don't run the gas stove 24 hours a day.

Well, my local power mostly comes from nuclear, so I guess that's better somehow? (Keep in mind you have to consider waste disposal in the equation).

There is no hood over Kephart's stove to vent the pollution outside. Instead, like many Philadelphia row houses, there's an old room fan high up in a wall. It vents outside, but even after Kephart turns it on, NO2 levels remain high. Kephart says that's because the fan is about 6 feet away.

This is an argument for venting gas stoves, not for eliminating them. These days, houses are way more insulated than they used to be, in order to save on energy in general. When I was a kid, the house was drafty as fuck. No chance for NO2 or CO2 or our farts to accumulate inside.

In the absence of federal oversight, California is taking action.

Because of course.

To encourage more people to ditch natural gas, environmentalists are focusing on the gas stove. At first it may seem like an odd choice because other gas-burning devices in the home consume more fuel, notably furnaces.

I'm going the other direction. I'm putting in more natural gas appliances. I bought the house with a gas furnace nearly 30 years ago. When it came time to replace the water heater, I switched to gas. Then I changed the electric stove to gas, which of course improved my overall quality of life. I put in a gas fireplace. Then I added a gas-fired emergency generator, which required upgrading my gas meter.

Now, I want gas lights for my deck. They'd look cool.

I'm sure my idiotic city council will pull some shit about increasing the price or cutting me off, but until they do, I'm going to live in my own little methane utopia.

I'm not going to rant too much more about this, but I will point out the major flaw in the "anti-gas" movement, which is that right now, they burn that shit off at the source because there's a surplus and they can't sell it fast enough. Burn it in Oklahoma and waste it and still warm up the climate, or burn it here and at least make me warm before it contributes to climate change? Hm, tough choice.

In other words, you can pry my natural gas from my cold, dead fingers. And they will be cold.

I saw a movie in the theater on Thursday but I keep forgetting to review it. So here it is:

One-Sentence Movie Review: Cyrano

Part stage play adaptation, part 80s music video, part Renaissance painting, this film celebrating the utter foolishness of humans is about 45 minutes longer than it needs to be.

Rating: 3.5/5