Highlights: A study this summer found that using a single gas stove burner on high can raise levels of cancer-causing benzene above what’s been observed from secondhand smoke.
A new investigation by NPR and the Climate Investigations Center found that the gas industry tried to downplay the health risks of gas stoves for decades, turning to many of the same public-relations tactics the tobacco industry used to cover up the risks of smoking. Gas utilities even hired some of the same PR firms and scientists that Big Tobacco did.
Earlier this year, an investigation from DeSmog showed that the industry understood the hazards of gas appliances as far back as the 1970s and concealed what they knew from the public.
It’s a strategy that goes back as far back as 1972, according to the most recent investigation. That year, the gas industry got advice from Richard Darrow, who helped manufacture controversy around the health effects of smoking as the lead for tobacco accounts at the public relations firm Hill + Knowlton. At an American Gas Association conference, Darrow told utilities they needed to respond to claims that gas appliances were polluting homes and shape the narrative around the issue before critics got the chance. Scientists were starting to discover that exposure to nitrogen dioxide—a pollutant emitted by gas stoves—was linked to respiratory illnesses. So Darrow advised utilities to “mount the massive, consistent, long-range public relations programs necessary to cope with the problems.”
These studies didn’t just confuse the public, but also the federal government. When the Environmental Protection Agency assessed the health effects of nitrogen dioxide pollution in 1982, its review included five studies finding no evidence of problems—four of which were funded by the gas industry, the Climate Investigations Center recently uncovered.
Karen Harbert, the American Gas Association’s CEO, acknowledged that the gas industry has “collaborated” with researchers to “inform and educate regulators about the safety of gas cooking appliances.” Harbert claimed that the available science “does not provide sufficient or consistent evidence demonstrating chronic health hazards from natural gas ranges”—a line that should sound familiar by now.
Convenient that this comes at a time when people are trying to get away from a dependants on expensive electricity to heat everything.
I’ll stick to my gas stove/oven vs my electric oven/microwave.
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There’s an ongoing war against gas stoves right now.
Several states have outright banned them, and they’re going for brick pizza ovens next. Cooking with gas stoves is a much better experience over cooking with electric
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This is almost as bad as the war on cigarettes 20-30 years ago!!! I’m being oppressed!!!1
And I’m sure leaded gas burns hotter, that doesn’t make it ok to do.
I’ve had both gas and electric stoves. The only benefit I got from gas was faster heating, vs waiting a minute or two for an electric eye to be ready. Totally not worth the risks of flammable gas in the house.
Convenient? Why is your first leap to some kind of a vague conspiracy instead of “more attention is being paid to ecological issues recently because of systemic ecological disasters, so more things have been found out about common appliances that use fossil fuels, which fuel those disasters?”
It’s totally a conspiracy that when more effort is applied towards something, more things happen about that something. Totally.
You can install panels on a roof and never pay a power bill again, man. Depending on where you live, the panels will pay off in 5-10yrs, and last for 30. No one is stopping you from “sticking it” to the electric company, dude.
Who is trying to get away from electric? Electrification is the future, because it’s not reliant on planet-killing fossil fuels (even if much of the electricity today comes from them).