The war over gas stoves hides easier ways to fix indoor air pollution

For years, I’ve been interested in air pollution – and you should be, too.

I’ve covered research finding that dust storms in the Sahara lead to 22 percent higher child mortality and evidence that students do worse in school when exposed to poor air quality. My colleagues have written that indoor air pollution causes 4 million deaths a year, mostly in Africa and Asia, and that repealing US air quality regulations could lead to the premature deaths of thousands of Americans.

While we often focus on outdoor air pollution – thinking smog is caused by fossil fuel power plants and car traffic – indoor air quality tends to be hidden, because its impact is so great. But in the past month, thanks to the frenzy over gas stoves, the quality of indoor air has hit the discourse – and messy, nuanced conversations that cause cleaner air to do no favors.

Crazy gas stove

For those of you who are not very online, the gas stove war goes like this: first, there is a study that examines the relationship between gas stoves and children’s asthma, which is carried out by the media.

“Gas stove pollution causes 12.7 percent of childhood asthma,” reported the Washington Post. “It’s like a car exhaust at home,” said one writer in the Post. Then, reporting the news, some activists called for a government ban on gas stoves.

The Post story came out just after the comments by the regulator in the Consumer Product Safety Commission were used as implying the ban of gas stoves is on the table. While some cities have actually banned gas stoves in new construction, the Biden administration, responding to the outrage, has said it will not implement a nationwide ban.

But speculation about the ban on gas stoves naturally generated a reaction, with many people declare they will not allow the government to take away their gas stoves. Then there are arguments, and counter-counter-back, all connected to the debate about what cooking you need a gas stove, why gas stoves are usually owned by rich people, whether you can use a range hood. , whether government bans are an appropriate response to minor health hazards, and more.

Why is this debate burning the way it is? Gas stoves, as the name suggests, burn natural gas, which creates an impact on the climate, and many people suspect – enough, I argue – that the sudden concern with health effects has more to do with the climate than with health.

That’s because, as economist Emily Oster pointed out in Slate, the original study on asthma affected by the controversy was flawed. It did not find – as many headlines represented – that pollution from gas stoves is responsible for 12.7 percent of childhood asthma. Instead, it cited existing research that found that asthma was more common in families with gas stoves, and then tried to speculate whether asthma could be related to stoves if the previous findings were correct.

But families with gas stoves are different from families without gas stoves, and in the end, the effect size is quite small. The states with the highest rates of gas stove use don’t have particularly high rates of asthma, which suggests that the way you cook your food may not be linked to future breathing problems.

Gas stoves have a greater negative impact on health than electric induction stoves, which emit pollutants like nitrogen oxides. But all in all, the effect isn’t as big – or at least, not as big as the debate suggests.

It’s important to remember that we make trade-offs involving our health every day. But we have to make those trade-offs in the smartest way possible, and the culture war over gas stoves only makes it harder.

Troubleshooting: the easy way

It is really worth trying to reduce indoor air pollution. But the cheapest and easiest way, for most Americans, is to run the stove hood fan, or keep the window open while cooking. Next on the list is to get a large, continuous air filter (we use Coway and BlueAir, based on Wirecutter recommendations).

Air filters appear to improve respiratory health, improve heart health in the elderly, and significantly reduce pollutants, with effect sizes that appear to be larger than those associated with replacing gas stoves. (One downside: air filters can’t fully filter out nitrogen oxides from gas stoves, which could replace your stove for elderly people with asthma.)

For most of us, replacing the stove is an expensive step compared to the benefits you will get in cleaner air. And cost is not important: if we want to improve indoor air quality widely, we must focus on the cheapest and most convenient interventions. Cooking with a hood fan or opening a window is free of charge. Getting and consistently running a good air purifier in your home is relatively inexpensive, and can actually make a difference in your health and especially the health of your little ones, regardless of how you cook your food.

If you want to go ahead and replace your gas stove with an induction stove, go for it. But if you’re worried about the possibility that the air in your home is making your child sick, start with simple steps — and relax about the gas.

Exaggeration is not good activism

From a climate perspective, while gas stoves can leak methane, this is a small part of methane emissions – only 3 percent of household gas emissions, and household emissions are a small part of overall emissions. Trying to scare people about gas stoves for the sake of the climate means picking what could be a politically unpopular battle, while bypassing easier progress on more important issues.

Some experts have defended the gas stove approach as creating a “gateway” to further educate the public about methane in general. But I don’t think it takes away when people see absurd horror stories about circulating gas stoves, accompanied by admonitions to replace gas with something that is not better for health or the climate, and often more expensive. I don’t think people are asking to be educated about the dangers of methane this way – I think they are becoming angry and disbelieving, which makes the task of communicating about the real danger and the real trade more difficult.

In essence, it is the media’s job to provide an accurate understanding of new scientific results. They must be contextual, and must be presented accurately. In this case, I think science communicators dropped the ball. The scary language about the car exhaust in your house is not appropriate for the uncertain and limited findings of the original asthma study.

Warnings about the risks to your children must be accompanied by realistic, actionable advice – and that advice must respect the limited budgets that most families work with. Spreading questionable information and not informing people about adequate solutions to the problem does not create a “gateway” to educate about climate change; it’s alienating, frightening, and confusing them – at a real cost to their health, because indoor air quality really matters!

The whole saga feels like part of the sacrificial climate politics, which makes a big demand from people – change your stove, at a significant cost! Ban those stoves, at a greater cost! – only feel more suitable for big issues like climate change than making small demands. But problems will be easier to solve, and easier to solve, if there are cheap and easy solutions. Better politics and better policy to push for easy solutions rather than hard solutions.

Hard sacrifice makes some people feel good, and it can be detached in a way that helps them master the discourse. Easy fix…causes the problem to go away. But making the problem go away – at least hopefully – is what we’re all here for. The point is not to win in the Twitter arena; the point is to prevent children from developing respiratory problems.

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