Throughput: Gas Stoves, Water Drops, And Various Kinds of Hot Air
Photo by Sapp, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
[ThTh1] So earlier this week, the Consumer Products Safety Commission floated the idea of a ban on new gas stoves. A few cities have already restricted or banned new apartments building getting gas stoves and Europe is moving toward a ban. The ostensible reason is that gas stoves significantly increased the risk of asthma in young children, causing as much as 12% of the asthma cases in the United States alone. So, putting aside the policy issues, what does the science say about this?
The idea behind this has been brewing for some time. Gas stoves, in theory, combine methane and oxygen to produce carbon dioxide and water vapor. However, in reality, they produce a lot of other indoor pollutants, including nitrous oxide, which are known to increase the risk of respiratory disease.
The paper that caused all the ruckus combines two estimates — a literature average of how much gas stoves increase the risk of asthma and the percentage of American homes that have gas stoves. The second number is not in contention. However, the first one is a bit more uncertain. Dr. Emily Oster dives into it. The long and short:
It is easy to get into the weeds here, and the reality is that this is a hard problem. Gas stoves emit nitrogen oxides. We know that generally air pollution (which includes nitrogen oxides) can exacerbate respiratory issues. Indoor, unventilated air pollution is especially problematic. There may be reasons to move away from gas stoves for climate reasons.
On the other hand, I think the evidence suggesting this factor is responsible for a sizable share of asthma in kids is probably overstated. The papers on this are mixed, the cross-sectional relationship at the state level is nonexistent. And there are reasons to own gas stoves — namely, you may already have one and it’s expensive to replace, and people like cooking with fire.
Estimates of the risk of gas stoves average high but there is a lot of variance in the estimates and, has been pointed out, at least one of these studies was done by running a gas stove in a room completely sealed by plastic. As Oster points out, ventilation may be a huge factor here. Running a hood fan or even a HEPA filter could dramatically cut the air pollution produced by gas stoves. This seems a more sensible approach then forcing people, if their stove goes bad, to completely redo their kitchen.1
The gripping hand here, however, is liability. As a friend pointed out on Twitter, class-action lawsuits have been filed and won against businesses on far more shaky scientific bases. If apartment builders or manufacturers get the idea that could get sued into oblivion over gas stoves, they will disappear quickly or at least get prohibitively expensive.2
In the end, I think a case can be made for notifying the public of the potential risk and encouraging better ventilation and/or the use of oils that produce less chemical emissions. But I don’t think a national ban is justified at this point, given the enormous expense of such a thing and the ongoing scientific debate.
[ThTh2] You may have heard that there has been a huge increase in cardiac deaths among athletes since the vaccines were deployed. This claim, from Peter McCullough, is total garbage. What he has done is compared a careful scientific analysis of athletes under the age of 35 who died from sudden cardiac arrest3 to … a web page listing athletes of any age who “died suddenly” of any cause, including suicide, falls and heart attacks after long battles with heart disease.
Notably, McCullough blocked Dr. Burnett after he pointed this out and invited McCullough to debate the subject. I will leave it as an exercise to the reader as to wether someone of McCullough’s accomplishments and education made such a huge mistake accidentally. McCullough is no stranger to this pages, by the way, having previously made the ridiculous claim that natural immunity is 100% effective and lifelong.
(In related news, excess deaths are lowest in countries with the highest vaccination rates. Rather hilariously, Alex Berenson quote-tweeted this because he thought it said the opposite, then hastily deleted it.)
One of the many frustrating things about Musk Twitter is that it has unleashed a tidal wave of COVID lies. Not “disinformation”. Not “debate”. Lies. False claims that circulate so fast that good people like Burnett are unable to keep up with the flood. And this has clearly spread beyond Twitter since we are in the middle of a bad COVID wave and a bad flu wave but the uptake of the very effective bivalent vaccine has been slow. I never imagined I would see our society turn against the miracles of modern medicine based on nothing but the rantings of delusional grifters. But here we are.
[ThTh3] Simulating water drops:
💧 A Raindrop… but with 8 billion (!) Voxel resolution in 512GB memory across 8 GPUs 🤯
Great project by the smart @ProjectPhysX!
Mini 🧵👇 pic.twitter.com/cXzpolEAT8
— Jousef Murad 🧠 💻 (@Jousefm2) January 11, 2023
[ThTh4] Concrete structure from the Roman Empire have proven much more durable than modern concrete structures. There has been a lot of speculation as to why. One reason may be a substance that most previous studies regarded as an impurity but actually seems to simulate self-repair in the concrete after weathering or damage. Concrete manufacture is a huge contributor to global energy consumption, so even if we can make existing structure a bit more durable, the potential climate impact would be massive.
[ThTh5] In JWST news, we have a confirmed Earth-sized rocky planet. The first of many. The precision on this measurement — .01% — is astonishing.
An eclipse of the star LHS 475 as the planet transited the star on August 31, 2022. Credits: Illustration: NASA, ESA, CSA, L. Hustak (STScI); Science: K. Stevenson, J. Lustig-Yaeger, E. May (Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory), G. Fu (Johns Hopkins University), and S. Moran (University of Arizona)
[ThTh6] Microplastics are a growing environmental problem. How do we get them out of our water? Would you believe … egg whites?
[ThTh7] A neutron star is the shriveled core of a massive stars that stars out with a mass of 1.4 times that of the Sun. But sometimes, they accrete mass off of nearby objects and grow. What happens when they hit a certain mass, somewhere between two and three times that of the Sun? They turn into black holes.
Brief, but glorious. Scientists found the existence of a superheavy neutron star—the collapsed core of a dead star—just before it became a black hole. The evidence for the mega neutron star was lurking in the @NASAUniverse archives: https://t.co/e3Qf8wRLfo#AAS241 pic.twitter.com/nNgqZi7tnD
— NASA (@NASA) January 10, 2023
[ThTh8] One of the weird things about the pandemic was a surge in traffic deaths. Why was that? Some insights here.
[ThTh9] Oh wait, we’re not done with JWST news. New images show a distant spiral galaxy formed when the universe was only a few billion years old. This seemingly innocent galaxy could a few cats amongst a few pigeons though. Spiral galaxies like our own Milky Way were thought to form significantly later because they have to be slowly built up my merging dwarf galaxies. If they are forming this early, it means that JWST is already, only one year after launch, revising a lot of what we thought we knew about galaxy formation.
[ThTh10] I really hope this revival of nuclear power is for real. We need it.
[ThTh11] Here’s me, answering questions about black holes:
12/15/2022 Hotline – Essie's Questions | (corrected)
Coop's 4yr old asks,
"What if a big black hole and a tiny black hole squisheded together with all the strong gravity?"@Hal_RTFLC Answers…https://t.co/HnHtWEo4Tq— MetroNews Hotline (@WVHotline) December 18, 2022
- The Inflation Reduction Act has a subsidy for replacing gas stoves, but it’s only $840-1340.
- For some apartments, this might not be the worst thing. When I lived in Baltimore, my gas stove developed a leak. The maintenance man came in and checked for the leak by … holding a lighter over the pipes to see if it flared. Needless to say, I moved to a different building the next year.
- Which is actually the leading cause of death among young athletes.
Like it all.Report
I don’t have a strong opinion wrt gas stoves.
FWIW, the apartment developers I work with prefer all-electric units if only because the cost of running a gas line to every single unit and the resulting size of the main meter bank. And renters don’t have a strong enough preference to make that worthwhile.
But ventilation has become an important issue because modern buildings have become so good at sealing out drafts its almost like living in a plastic sealed environment. So outside air systems and operable windows are generally necessary.Report
But ventilation has become an important issue because modern buildings have become so good at sealing out drafts its almost like living in a plastic sealed environment. So outside air systems and operable windows are generally necessary.
Our new townhouse has a vent fan that runs constantly because there’s not enough fresh air ingress to maintain acceptable pollutant levels otherwise. This in contrast to the previous house, bought in 1988, where we spent thousands of dollars getting rid of obvious drafts. Our current range hood vents to the outside for similar reasons. The whole place smells like garlic and onions if I forget to flip the (quite noisy) vent fan on.Report
When we were looking at purchasing a home, one of my demands was a gas stove. I am used to looking on a gas range and in a gas oven. My experiences at cooking on electric stoves and ranges has been unpleasant. That being said, it would never occur to me to seethe in rebellion on “maybe gas stoves are not great” as a political ax to grindReport
“maybe gas stoves are not great” is a disingenuous framing. As the OP says: “the Consumer Products Safety Commission floated the idea of a ban on new gas stoves,” and actually I believe the idea that it would just be on new stoves was a later clarification after the storm had already begun.Report
Yeah, it would be on new construction/appliances, if anything happened but right-wingers went wild with it.Report
Old stoves will be grandfathered in! I don’t know why right-wingers are so upset! They already own homes! This is screwing over people who can’t afford new houses anyway!
You’d think that they’d be more sympathetic to this encroachment!Report
Fox needs to give it a catchy name, like Stovemageddon, or Stovepocalypse.
And there’s got to be a government memo somewhere suggesting that vaccinated people can keep their stoves. Or that guns will be confiscated as well.Report
Random thought… In the long term, natural gas will be phased out just as coal is being phased out currently (assuming we really mean to get rid of greenhouse gas emissions). At some point, as gas furnaces and stoves are replaced with electric ones, there will come a day when the natural gas utility simply says, “There aren’t enough customers in this area to justify keeping all the pipes maintained and pressurized.”Report
The conspiracy theory being kicked around is that selling to US customers is leaving money on the table in the short term given Europe’s current dire need.
We should be getting those Euros!Report
Right so like I said, your initial framing was BS — there’s a big difference between “maybe gas stoves are not great” and “the Federal government is considering banning new gas stoves”. Beyond that, it’s funny that your only take is the “right-wingers” who “went wild” — I’m opposed to this and i’m not a right-winger and I didn’t go wild, I just think it’s a stupid overreaction to this study (without even getting into the question of whether this should be in the executive branch’s ability to do unilaterally).
Any issue that comes up will have silly overreactions on both sides, but if your only response is to point at the silly people on the other side rather than considering the issue on the merits, you’ll let all kinds of stupid BS through.Report
ThTh4:
🎶 You put the lime in the concrete and mix it all up 🎶Report
Reading this article (and others), they all note that somewhere along the line are reactions much more exothermic than current mixtures. It raises the question of whether upgrades will be needed in the dry mix portion of production, how it might affect the speed and size of pours at construction sites, etc. Wasn’t a limiting factor on the Hoover Dam construction heat dissipation from curing concrete?Report
It sure wasn’t worker safety (at least 112 deaths).Report
ThTh8: What I observed during the early part of the pandemic was streets being almost deserted and drivers assuming they’d be unlikely to encounter cross-traffic, so more near-misses when they did. Stoplight timing seemed to be altered to increase the amount of “both direction red” time, I presume as a safety measure.Report
ThTh10: $40B over ten years is three to five nuclear power stations, which is hardly a dent in what needs to be done for carbon retirement over the next ten years. TTBOMK, the only nuclear plants anyone is serious about are Vogtle 3 and 4 in Georgia, the UAMPS small modular thing in Idaho, and the Gates/Buffett still-undesigned molten salt reactor in Wyoming. All of those appear at present that they will be some of the most expensive electricity in the regions where they will operate.Report