This past Tuesday was my birthday, and one of my gifts was a subscription to the Washington Post. I'd asked for this specifically because my mom, who is a Post subscriber, keeps sending me links to articles she finds interesting, and I can never read them because the Post only allows non-subscribers to view one free article per month. And one of the first articles I was able to read with that new subscription was an op-ed from writer Tove Danovich entitled "I bought an induction stove. Then the power went out."
You probably won't be able to read the piece if you're not a subscriber yourself, so I'll just sum it up briefly: Like many people, Danovich recently jumped on the bandwagon and swapped out her gas stove for an induction stove powered by electricity. And like most people who do this, she went on and on to her friends about how wonderful it was: so fast, so responsive, so easy to clean! Why would anyone ever choose gas? Then, as foreshadowed in the headline, she got an answer to that question when a storm knocked out her electricity—a problem she says she'd never once experienced before in her Portland, Oregon home. With no way to cook a meal or even brew a pot of coffee, she was driven out into the storm "in search of caffeine."
Despite the headline, this story itself occupies only the first few paragraphs of the article. Danovich spends the rest of it explaining why, even after this incident, she's still absolutely convinced that ditching her old gas stove was the right thing to do. Gas stoves, she points out, emit pollutants that are dangerous to both our health and to the planet—though she's a little unclear on exactly why. (She seems to think the reason they've been linked to childhood asthma is that they "constantly leak methane," even when they're not running; in fact, the primary compound responsible is nitrogen dioxide, or NO2, which is produced only when the gas is burned.) She maintains that the reason most people continue to cling to their gas stoves is that they're snobs who don't want to give up their "high-end status symbols." For her, the fact that they don't work during a power outage is at most a minor inconvenience, not something that would ever deter any reasonable person from making the switch.
I know that global warming is the single biggest threat currently facing humanity—perhaps even the biggest threat we've ever faced. I know that keeping the overall temperature rise below 1.5°C (2.7°F) is our best chance to avoid the deadliest impacts of climate change. And I know that we have no chance of meeting this goal unless we completely eliminate fossil fuel use—including my trusty gas stove—by 2050.
But I also know that no matter what we do, we can't avoid all the impacts of global warming. Many of them are already here, and even if we manage to meet the 1.5°C target, they won't go away. One of the effects we've already begun to see is more frequent and more powerful storms—the kind of storms that tend to result in power outages. Already, here in our New Jersey home, we experience power outages regularly—in extreme cases, several in a week. The one triggered by Superstorm Sandy lasted 24 hours at our house, and we got off easy; some of our neighbors were without power for days.
One of the reason we made it through these disasters relatively unscathed was that our stove continued to work (except for the electric igniters, but we could easily light the burners with a match), so we didn't have to go hungry. Our battery-powered emergency gadgets can provide us with light, communication, even entertainment, but we don't have a backup for the stove. And with global warming increasing the odds that there will be more superstorms in our future, going without a backup seems more unwise than ever. (In fact, while so many of my fellow environmentalists are exulting about going all-electric and capping off the gas lines to their homes, getting fossil fuels out of their lives forever, I've actually gone the other way, adding a natural gas fireplace to our home specifically as an emergency heat source.)
This is why it frustrates me so much that environmentalists have chosen gas stoves, out of all the gas-burning appliances in a home, to fixate on. Even though cooking is responsible for only a tiny percentage of household natural gas use, they seem to think that they should attack stove use first because a stove is easier to replace than an entire heating system, and therefore it's an easier sell. But for me, the stove is much harder to replace than the heating system or anything else that runs on gas—and that's entirely due to the fear of power outages. My gas heating system, which is a much bigger offender than the stove, would be much costlier to replace, but much easier to get along without. It's useless in a power outage anyway because it relies on an electric heat pump to circulate the water, so I wouldn't be risking anything by replacing it with a more efficient electric heat pump. Replacing my gas dryer with an electric one would likewise pose no risk, since I can't do laundry anyway if the washer isn't working. The gas water heater would be a little harder to part with, since it allows me to enjoy a hot shower during a power outage, but that's a luxury I can manage without for a couple of days if I have to. But without my gas stove, no electricity means no hot water, no hot coffee, and no hot food. And if the power outage is due to a severe storm, I can't even leave the house to get these things.
There is one possible way out of this dilemma: find a backup system for cooking, similar to the gas fireplace that serves as a backup for heating. I've looked into this before, but most of the sources I found suggested either hauling out the charcoal grill or cooking with a solar oven—both options that won't work in the middle of a severe storm. However, after reading Danovich's piece, I decided it was worth digging into the topic a little bit more. And this time, I managed to track down an article on the self-sufficiency site Common Sense Home that offered a couple of ideas that were at least technically feasible. The first option, a flameless heater designed for use with MREs (meals ready to eat), wouldn't be ideal for us because we probably couldn't find any MREs that would fit our dietary needs. But the second, a camp stove that could be used with canned fuel (such as Sterno), seemed to have some merit. A quick search revealed that I could buy a folding stove for around $10 and a dozen cans of Sterno (good for 6 hours each) for around $40. Together, these would enable us to enjoy hot meals with neither gas nor electricity for a week or more.
Of course, even with this backup, we still wouldn't be able to go fully all-electric at home, since the gas fireplace would still have to stay. But since it's only there for an emergency backup, it wouldn't be used very often. Of course, if America actually does get its act sufficiently together to eliminate fossil fuel use entirely, we'd eventually lose our gas service and have to find an alternative, but I'm sure we'd have plenty of time to figure that out.
But even if swapping out our gas stove is a viable option, I remain unconvinced that it's crucial to do it immediately. Yes, there is definitely a link between NO2 from gas stoves and asthma. But we don't have asthma, and we don't have children at risk of developing it. And we do have a decent range hood, which (according to the experts at both Good Housekeeping and Wirecutter) can remove most of the dangerous fumes associated with cooking.
I do want and intend to go all-electric at home eventually. But given that our gas boiler and water heater are responsible for the lion's share of our fossil fuel use—and that there's a much better technology available to replace them—I think those, not the much-maligned gas stove, should be our primary targets.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment