In the late 1980s, I had a good gig writing a monthly “Healthy Home” column for Rodale’s Practical Homeowner. I was trying to build my career as a freelance writer while raising two kids and building an earth-sheltered home with my husband on five acres near Hattiesburg, Miss. It was helpful to have monthly assignments to count on.
Then I wrote a story called “Gas Stove Blues” published in January 1988. I used the sources suggested to me by my editor. The article began, “There are several reasons to feel queasy upon entering the kitchen: a sink full of dirty dishes that awaits, a refrigerator that needs defrosting, or the prospect of facing yet another frozen dinner.
“And another possibility: emissions from the gas stove, which may be polluting the air in your home and affecting your health.
“Almost half the homes in the United States fire up natural gas stoves at mealtime. The kitchen stove is unique among modern gas appliances because its combustion products—carbon dioxide, nitric oxide, nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, and aldehydes, to name only a few—are emitted directly into the house.”
My column quoted a Johns Hopkins University study of 1,700 adults exposed to gas-stove emissions that showed they were more likely to experience chronic coughing, impacted lung function, and breathlessness.
Then I went into long quotes from the American Gas Association about problems with that study, such as not considering other sources of pollution in the house including passive cigarette smoke exposure. AGA said, “Our tests have shown that smoking and cleaning products produce far more hazardous fumes than a gas stove. Right now, no federal agency requires any type of ventilation for gas stoves because it’s just not a problem. If you made a list of indoor pollution hazards, emissions from gas stoves would rank way down the lists, compared to things like formaldehyde and asbestos.”
The article recommended turning on a hood fan vented to the outside or just opening a nearby window when using the stove.
The article had an illustration showing a woman wearing a gas mask removing a turkey from an oven with trails of emissions. While I thought I was writing an objective piece, the gas stove advertisers in this magazine begged to differ. They withdrew their advertising and I never got another assignment from Rodale’s Practical Homeowner.
Here in 2023, 35 years later, gas stoves have been in the news lately because of a study published in the December 2022 International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health concluding that indoor gas stove usage accounts for about 13 percent of current childhood asthma in the U.S. Predictably, the AGA said the research was not based on sound science.
There was a firestorm of controversy after a commissioner with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) suggested the agency should consider banning gas stoves. There were outraged articles such as one titled, “Keep the Government Out of Our Kitchens; The Gas Stove Ban is Heating Up” by Jenny Beth Martin on townhall.com.
“What’s going on at the CPSC is not science in search of better health for Americans,” Martin wrote. “Instead, it’s a political agenda run amok, an agency wrongly using false claims of ‘science’ to manufacture a desired political end that has nothing to do with science.”
Twenty Republican state legislatures across the country have forbidden cities from banning gas stoves, part of a national trend for Republican-dominated legislatures to dictate policy to Democratic-leaning cities. President Joe Biden immediately caved in saying the feds would not ban gas stoves.
The largest component of natural gas is methane, a far more potent heat-trapping pollutant than carbon dioxide. While I have largely replaced my gas stove with an energy-efficient magnetic induction cooktop, I heat my home with a combination of a vented natural gas stove and an energy-efficient, low-emissions wood stove. Wood is a renewable resource less expensive than gas, but then I am potentially exposing myself and others to the smoke vented from my stack.
There are no perfect solutions, but I recently had solar panels installed on my home and by the time next winter rolls around, I hope to have highly energy-efficient mini split heat pumps installed. A climate wise engineer recently told me that’s the best thing most of us can do to reduce our carbon footprint. Her heat pumps powered by solar panels keep her comfortable during winter and summer with very little energy use.