Households with gas or propane stoves regularly breathe unhealthy levels of nitrogen dioxide, a study of air pollution in U.S. homes found.
“I didn’t expect to see pollutant concentrations breach health benchmarks in bedrooms within an hour of gas stove use, and stay there for hours after the stove is turned off,” said Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability Professor Rob Jackson, senior author of the May 3 study in Science Advances. Pollution from gas and propane stoves isn’t just an issue for cooks or people in the kitchen, he said. “It’s the whole family’s problem.”
Among other negative health effects, breathing high levels of nitrogen dioxide, or NO2, over time can intensify asthma attacks and has been linked to decreased lung development in children and early deaths.
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You know, at least with guns, I kinda get it. You love guns, you worship them, think they are sexy, fun, cool, Rambo had them, etc.
But gas stoves?
That is a weird hill to die on.
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So some weirdo looked for a picture of his kitchen and they discovered that he has an electric stove. I dunno if he’s lying or if he genuinely believes that it’s a gas stove.
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For a decent summary on the risks of gas stoves, this Scientific American article is worth checking out. One recent study estimated that some 12.7 percent of childhood asthma cases were attributable to emissions from gas stoves.
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Excerpt from this New York Times story:
For decades, scientists have worked to clean up air pollution from factories, cars and power plants. But researchers are increasingly turning their attention to the air that people breathe indoors. And one appliance has come to the fore as a source of pollutants harmful to human health: the humble gas stove.
A new study from researchers at Stanford University sheds light on how much Americans may be exposed, indoors, to nitrogen dioxide, which comes from burning coal and gas and has been linked to asthma and other respiratory conditions.
The researchers found that, across the country, short-term nitrogen dioxide exposure from typical gas stove use frequently exceeded benchmarks set by both the World Health Organization and the United States Environmental Protection Agency. In the longer term, using gas or propane stoves meant that the typical American could breathe in three-quarters of the nitrogen dioxide levels deemed safe by the W.H.O. within their own homes.
As with outdoor pollution, disadvantaged households may be more exposed, the researchers found. Because gas more easily spreads throughout smaller spaces, people in homes smaller than 800 square feet were exposed to four times more nitrogen dioxide in the long term than people in homes larger than 3,000 square feet, the study found. Black and Latino households were exposed to 20 percent more nitrogen dioxide compared with the national average.
Health experts say that the health risks posed by gas stoves are significant. “There really is no safe amount of exposure to these toxicants produced by gas or propane, or any fossil fuel, outside or inside,” said Kari Nadeau, chairwoman of the Department of Environmental Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
The Stanford study estimated that long-term exposure to nitrogen dioxide from stoves was likely causing up to 50,000 cases of asthma in children.
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Burning bright
Isn't it weird that gas stoves are the subject of discussion at a point where
Europe just cut itself off from its primary source of natural gas
The United States promised to fulfill Europes Light Natural Gas energy needs (which it does not have the infrastructure or capacity to possibly do, especially not at the costs that Russia can)
Prices for everything, everything, have gone up, to the point that major economic outlets are saying "we need to crash the economy to save it"
It's purely to avoid having to take responsibility for the blowback of the Ukraine war and its effects on the economy.
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Utilities Have Been Lying to us About Gas Stoves Since the 1970s – Mother Jones
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