This article could alternatively be titled “progressivism is not a serious ideology”. It’s actually too easy on the environmental left - we all know that if utility scale solar was being planned in an even mildly pretty natural area, there would be a progressive uprising against the evil for-profit power company trying to ruin our beautiful natural lands (this is already happening with basically every newly planned mine for metals important to electrification).
This is an absurd takeaway from the article. Regulation of class VI wells is regulatory minutiae that has been overlooked as part of the implementation of the climate change agenda that democrats have enacted and the vast majority of progressives have supported. The only reason you think this looks bad on progressives is if you go into every article thinking about how it might make progressives look bad.
I apparently missed where permitting reform passed; my apologies.
To be clear I think liberalism is a worthy ideology to the extent that it accepts that we need to beat climate change in a way that involves technology, just not the part of the left that thinks ending capitalism is the only way forward. But NY state for example is trying to decarbonize while shutting down nuclear plants, and has done literally nothing harder than rooftop solar. The anti-building-things left (which has a very strong overlap with self-described “progressives”) is worse than useless.
Maybe on the west coast? I’m in NY and the left-wing politicians here are pretty NIMBY and just want to overthrow capitalism. Which I honestly don’t mind that they believe that, but we have to live in the real world where solving problems like housing and climate generally means building things and not just banning them. In CA it seems like progressives are more in touch with reality and actual YIMBY progressives exist.
I mean part of it in fairness might just be that as an NY resident, I’m most familiar with NYC “progressives” who are a bunch of AOC wannabes and are just not that smart. I actually like AOC herself and she seems reasonably flexible on practical issues even though she’s quite far left. But the NY state legislature is full of 2nd-rate communists who have no plan for how to get anything done in our actual society. We also have Long Island NIMBY center-right Republicans, Westchester NIMBY center-left Democrats, and upstate far-right rednecks so in fairness they are not the only stupid people in our state legislature. Our bad politicians span the entire political spectrum here!
Sounds familiar and not too different than PA to be frank.
I wish the decent and respectable politicians could get a lil more air time. It apparently doesn't hold enough attention to sell the required ads to cover policy wonks talkin about carbon taxes and nuclear deregulation.
The only reason any type climate change reform or incentives at all are passing in congress is because of progressives. Republican senators are still lobbing snowballs around the senate floor to 'disprove global warming'
The mental gymnastics you're going through to blame the left, and NOT the right, for holding back climate causes, is hilarious.
The right is worse! But the progressive left is more frustrating because they know the problem exists, but whenever anyone proposes a solution they start yelling about how somebody somewhere might make money from it.
I agree that the progressive left is more "frustrating" because they do indeed know better and have taken on a moral responsibility to confront the problem and yet fight important steps forward.
But it's interesting that the right is not seen as "frustrating." That's because we take it as a given that they simply don't care and don't want to fix the problem. They've even stopped denying the problem, but they still simply don't want to do anything about it.
So, no, I wouldn't apply the term "frustrating" to them. "Evil"? "Morally bankrupt"? "Unfit for human society"? "Criminally uncaring"? All interesting possibilities. But let's always remember that, no matter the progressive left's frustrating shortfalls here, it's the right that bears most of the moral blame.
Definitely true and unfortunately it’s very hard to tackle climate when only one side has any interest. The center-right is particularly annoying because they know that climate change is real but won’t admit it too openly for fear of losing a primary. At least we can maybe watch Elon Musk’s wealth burn to ashes because he’s gone all-in on the side of the political spectrum that will never buy his products and he’s too scared of the right to give them real talk about climate change, which will be entertaining if nothing else.
I think the right’s reaction on climate follows the same pattern as it did on Covid and woke issues. When the conversation starts with thünbergian hysteria, followed by claims of having a monopoly on ‘moral responsibility’, and on ‘the science’, and a marked unwillingness to compromise or to include nuance in the discussion or to discuss costs vs benefits of policies - history shows the right is typically not willing to go along. Some are dead-ender snowball throwing dinosaurs, yes. Many others are potential allies who would be gettable if the tone was a little different. Does that make it the left’s fault or the right’s fault? Who cares? If the climate activists are serious about making progress, they should focus less on screaming at (R)s about how they MUST care more, and figure out a way to get their votes.
I really think the increasing wealth and social status of the progressive left is an issue. Honestly few of us have skin in the game. Biden isn't smarter than Warren, but he is an old-fashioned labor Democrat so he is actually accountable to working class voters who want jobs and a decent quality of life. They will get jobs and cheap electricity if we build power lines and battery storage.
Warren might be well-meaning, but college professors and doctors and lawyers with big 401k accounts and high incomes and lake cabins are probably better off fiscally if they propose dumb plans and the right wins and cuts their taxes, and their lake cabins will be nicer because there are no power lines or batteries nearby.
I think this is the case in the EU (so maybe it'll be the case in the US in the future as well). All opposition I can recall to wind and solar has come from environmentalists who in general agree that these are good things, but it just happens that every location where they could be placed has an ecosystem whose preservation is more important than placing there wind/solar.
It does seem that Sierra Club Maine joined forces with a company that generated electricity from fossil fuels to prevent the replacement of fossil fuels by hydro power. So there are already cases of what I describe in the US as well.
This isn’t the story in Australia. While there have been left/green opponents to wind farms and transmission lines, most of the opposition has come from the conservative side of politics, with a fair helping of rural NIMBYism.
Much of that opposition has been at the very least helped along with quiet money from the fossil fuel industry.
Matt Yglesias is a microcosm of Democratic dysfunction. A healthy political party would not need a Harvard educated urbanist who attended black tie formals during college and has solar panels on his roof to keep its elites and functionaries in touch with normie voters. Matt does have some influence with white house and hill staffers and his ideas are quite good. The absurd part is that, without his solar panels and sincere interest in urbanism, Democratic staffers would pay Matt no more heed than Ross Douthat. The populist voices of a functional party would be more populist.
I’ll still take that any day as the lesser of two evils juxtaposed to the Santos-McCarthy-MTG party of shameless arsonists. Wish their opposition was a bit more buttoned up
I think Biden and Obama actually both did a pretty good job of pandering to the normies. Even Trump did it decently (at least more so than HRC)
It's just that AOC & MTG are the ones always in the news, not the 'head down get to work" congressional types. I've met a bunch of representatives and most of them are about as exciting as a plank of wood.
Very real problem of our current media format - the wonkish types that we actually need to get the job done constantly get overshadowed by the WWF pro wrestling style idiocy that apparently sells more ads on CNN and Fox News and crazy gets more shares on Facebook.
How do we get the sober honest ones that we need to be appealing and popular?
What is the negative externality that EPA is trying to prevent by requiring prior approval for drilling a hole in the ground? Why is a Class IV well a Thing? I can see fracking -- methane leaks into the atmosphere across state lines. Any hole can disturb ground water, but except in RI or DC or close to a state line, that seems unlikely to cross state lines. So why national regulation at all? Why is state regulation the exception rather than the rule?
This looks like the CDC error of regulation (by recommendation) at the national level rather than giving local regulators and individuals the information to let each place find the most cost effective ways of preventing spread in each specific place and circumstance.
EPA’s responsibility here is under the Safe Drinking Water Act. There is a long history of how the federal government took on responsibility for drinking water safety; I’m not sure many people actually want to go back to the local-authority-crapshoot when it comes to public drinking water supply (e.g. Flint), but maybe you’d like to make the argument
I can see externalities involved in surface water as most flows into interstate streams. I'd think groundwater would be different. But OK , let EPA sign off on the well not contaminating interstate groundwater. But this looks like a case where Federal involvement should be the exception, not the rule.
EPA has the authority to delegate permitting for Class VI wells to state’s environmental agency if the state applies. So far WY and ND have achieved that and several other states have applied.
John has this right. Many federal laws requiring permitting are delegated to state level agencies. My guess is most states haven’t pursued authority to permit these wells because it hasn’t been much of an issue for them. If industry in a particular state pushed for it then the state would have incentive.
The idea is that we want the government to certify that sequestered carbon dioxide really is being sequestered and isn't just leaking vack into the atmosphere. In practice it seems to not be working well.
But that does not require prior approval of each well, just monitoring of the escape and fines the same tax as on the emission of the CO2 in the first place, or netting the escape out of the subsidy for the sequestration.
I don’t believe there is any tax on the emission of CO2, and while we should obviously fix that, figuring out how to develop wells that work before then is very important too. We can’t just wait until the political conditions are right for a carbon tax.
Agree. But it still seems it would be better to set a standard for leakage with fines for excess rather than pre-approving the specifications of the well. And whatever they do the cost benefit analysis should consider the cost of the delay in approving the well.
Yeah, I think best practices would be to regulate actual performance and propose measures, rather than setting procedural criteria for pre-approval with no check afterwards. And best practice would also involve cost-benefit analysis. Unfortunately, adopting either of those types of measures probably is a bigger lift than just getting them to start approving some wells right now.
One important point about both DAC and hydrolysis is that they are electricity demand that is entirely OK with being turned off when electricity supply is inadequate.
This means that if you have lots of variable-supply renewables (solar and wind, basically), then you can switch the DAC and hydrolysis off on a still cloudy day.
This means that you still have security of supply with a much higher percentage of solar and wind in the electricity generation mix.
This would definitely be nice, but for chemical plants, startup and shutdown tend to be complicated, and time spent not running is a waste of capital. So someone in the energy system is going to bite the bullet of paying for spare capacity that we don’t need all the time. And it should probably be the government, like the example of state owned natural gas plants in California. Otherwise you wind up with rampant blackouts like PG&E.
Induction range to be delivered next week! (replaces electric range, not gas)
So back in public health grad school in ~2005/6 or so, I was in an environmental health epidemiology course (read environment as "things humans contact," not "nature") where the respiratory effects of combustion fueled household cooking was presented. Much was made of the disease burden caused by cooking over open (often sooty) flame in developing parts of the world (MY help me with my terminology here...), but I recall enough data being presented about the harms of typical natural gas stoves, particularly for children and adults with respiratory diseases, that it really stuck with me in a way that has prevented me from ever wanting to own one since....like avoiding secondhand smoke. I can't pull the data and numbers from my head, but it's just one of those things that you learn that was compelling enough to stick with you and functionally change your outlook on a common thing moving forward.
Edit for FYI: neither in favor of bans nor thinking stove emissions are a particularly meaningful contributor to the overall climate.
If the information on the health costs of open gas flames has been know before, (Emily Oster downplays the costs) why are we just now hearing about it and "it" being "hazardous" rather than "causes $x of childhood asthma per year depending on ventilation, age of children, etc.." Why haven't electric range companies been touting them for their health benefits? Or is cities thing that people will not take the health costs seriously in their decisions, why haven't they taxed gas for domestic use? The whole thing sounds bogus.
I mean, it's my personal perception (having read her blog and books) that Oster downplays the risks of most things, particularly things that (I infer) threaten her chosen or preferred lifestyle. She's smart, but she also falls into the "economists know best about everything" trap a lot.
I would guess, having just shopped for new kitchen appliances, that there is still much more economic incentive to market and sell gas ranges due to percieved "high-end" appeal (and profit margins), and that overwhelmingly the electric range companies are the exact same companies as the gas range companies (GE, Bosh, Whirlpool, etc.).
I have a wife with mild asthma, and a baby, I'm not buying a gas stove. You do you.
If only "you do you" were the credo of the environmental authoritarians who are hell-bent on restricting consumer choices among competing products and technologies.
Instead, they use the regulatory power of the state to implement their preferences and force everyone else to comply. From the important (banning ICE vehicles) to the mundane (shower heads suck today versus 30 years ago), the impulse to use state power to force inferior products is really frustrating.
>>the impulse to use state power to force inferior products is really frustrating.
Even absent health risks (I'll take Matt's word for it they're hyped, though that's not the same as nonexistent) if we're really serious about decarbonizing the economy, we can't have hundreds of millions of people around the world cooking with gas. At some point gas stoves gotta go, at least as a mass consumer option (maybe they'll survive for certain restaurant cooking niches?).
WE aren't serious about decarbonizing the economy. You might be, and the environmental justice people might be, but we as a society are not serious about it.
So for those who are serious about it, the options seem to be: (1) convince the rest of the population that they SHOULD be serious about decarbonizing the economy or (2) capture the ever-expanding number of regulatory offices and force compliance.
Having seen the success of regulatory capture in everything from medical doctors to car dealers to hairdressers, they have chosen option #2.
I dunno, the US Congress recently passed a bill plowing several hundred billion into the effort to decarbonize the economy. I don't think it's a binary. thing—you know, either we're serious about decarbonization or we're not. I'd say we're more serious than we were five years ago and less than we'll be five years hence.
I guess my point is, it would be better if we ran pretty much everything that can be electrified on electricity. I realize not everyone sees it this way. I guess ultimately (like everything) it will ultimately come down to winning elections. For the record I don't think anybody should feel under pressure to go out tomorrow and buy an induction stove. It's not as big a priority as heating or EVs. I think gas stoves are likely to be with us in large numbers for quite a while (same, obviously, with gasoline cars, and with jets). And they're not cheap, and often people need priceyish electrical upgrades and new cookware (though I think there's a tax credit available?).
But I do think if you're going to be buying a stove in any event (say, you're moving house, or renovating your kitchen) you'll regret it 3-4 years down the road if you buy gas. They're by all accounts inferior to induction stoves in a lot of ways related to cooking. They also heat up your kitchen (my little kitchen in BJ feels like a sauna just boiling an egg), and there's a non-zero fire risk whenever you're dealing with an open flame. And yes, the health risks.
We'll know the jig is up for gas stoves when brokers start telling home sellers they're a disadvantage. I give it another five years.
We here in California seem perfectly fine with the gradual elimination of the sale of new ICE vehicles and the elimination of gas hookups in new construction. It seems like smart politics to me: fight climate change, and take major steps that don't demand immediate sacrifice by the population.
Because California is such a large market, I suspect its ICE vehicle ban will so help spur the EV market that in the future it will become easier and more enticing to buy EVs even in states that don't follow California's lead. And that's fine; I don't care if Idaho doesn't follow our lead in banning ICEs -- California is giving EVs a healthy push and the market will do most of the remaining work.
And we should NOT be serious about decarbonization (making gross emissions zero), but making net emissions zero (probably after a period of net negative
From what I've heard, environmental justice folks are NOT serious about achieving negative net emissions. If they were they would get on board with taxing net emissions. Matt says they are just interested in driving the net worth of fossil fuel companies to zero.
I think those of us who earnestly would like to reform the economy and head off climate change are just losing the battle to convince the masses that climate change is a real threat to their prosperity. Its not that we’re not trying.
Just so happens the other side of this battle has a shit ton of oil money and a whole lot of interests to protect. PR firms are bought, research is bought, policy is more or less bought after Citizens United Ruling (or we really have no way of finding out if it has or has not been practically speaking).
Post truth is a whole lot about denying climate change. A whole lot of extremely powerful people are a whole lot richer that way.
We don't really know whether all combustion of natural gas needs to be eliminated or not; it depends on the cost of CO2 removal. But cooking with gas should be discouraged just as any other net emission of CO2.
This however is totally separate from whether cooking causes health damage. That would call for different kind of taxation, on the apparatus and it ventilation itself. I still have not seen any numbers to suggest just how big a problem this is and analysis to show that any tax is needed at all compared to just making consumers aware of the relative health costs of gas v electric cooking.
I mean, I agree the degree of regulatory response depends heavily on the product or technology in question. I don't particularly agree with the gas stove thing as I said initially, and agree risks generating more blowback then progress, though I perceive I am less frustrated about this and low-flow plumbing fixtures than others.
How do you know that Oster unduly downplays risks i.e. more than from excess to just right?
Could you elaborate of the "economists know best about everything?" It seems to me that the typical economist position is that they do NOT know best; that only people transacting in a (sometimes needfully regulated) market know best.
Oster received vitriol on Twitter from Branch Covidians for suggesting that Covid bore little risk for children. I do not think she excessively downplayed the risks with regards Covid.
Agreed. I made mistake in saying "downplaying" which is properly taken to mean "unduly minimized." I intended to say only that she considers the risk (of gas stoves in this case) as less than the CPSC guy implied and she showed her work.
Emily Oster has a long, well-sourced breakdown of the risks demonstrated and not demonstrated by the science on gas stoves, and you've got ~~vibes about downplaying~~, so I guess it's impossible to say who's more trustworthy.
I agree that the whole health thing being elevated sounds like its being elevated by people who want to ban them for climate reasons but that doesn't mean we should react by calling the whole thing bogus. There is a lot of research that shows that gas stoves are harmful (and answers some of the questions you raise) to people's health. It is also true that induction stoves are part of a long term climate solution. None of this means that we can't call BS on people who want to ban them.
What strikes me as "bogus" (maybe that is too strong) is the sudden appearance of the issue and that the costs of this new hazard have not been publicized. If they are really high why has it not been an issue before? Also the way it came out in a sort of offhand remark by the head of the agency. Fishy.
Firstly, I somewhat disagree with your description as the issue being "sudden". I and I suspect many others here in the comments have long known about the harms caused by gas stoves and other sources of indoor air pollution. I agree that the reasons why it's having such a big moment are a bit fishy, but just because you hadn't heard of it prior does not mean its not a serious issue. There are a million things that are serious issues that are not well known, and just because they have a sudden influx of interest does not make them bogus. I think the piece we are currently commenting on is a perfect example. Most of us had probably never heard of of Class VI wells before today but MY wrote a piece, most of us probably agree with his take and now we think permitting wells is an important worthwhile issue. All of us should question the gas stove ban advocates and why the head of agency would act as they did but don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Gas stoves are quite bad for health, plain and simple.
Lots of things are quite bad for health, plain and simple: skiing, being overweight, smoking, motorcycles, rock climbing, smoking marijuana, mountain biking, driving, walking to the store, getting out of bed, having a swimming pool.
The question is at what point do we decide to ban certain activities or otherwise use the power of the state to enforce safety at the expense of liberty. Count me on the "You Do You" side of that question.
I can't speak to the gas stove debate specifically, but there's been a ton of research about the effects of particulate air pollution in the last decade showing that it's much worse for you than previously thought. A lot of it is recent and surprising, and it shows up across a wide variety of contexts. Why is Twitter focusing on gas stoves right now? I'm not sure, but I've been seeing some people in development contexts talking about them for years. Although that was mostly about reducing the harm of much worse wood-burning stoves.
Again, this isn't about gas stoves specifically, but Alex Tabarrok (who's a libertarian, so not exactly one who I'd think would be prone to overselling this stuff) has a decent overview of the research on particulates in 2021.
The discussion has pushed my priors toward taking NOx from gas flames more seriously. Added to CO2 emissions, it seem worthy of phasing out gas for domestic use. I'd want to see much stringer evidence before trying to get people to change exiting gas for electric appliances.
For what it's worth, I have an air quality monitor in my kitchen that monitors particulate pollution. It spikes up much more from cooking something in my electric toaster than boiling water on the gas stove.
Granted, the monitor doesn't measure all pollutants, but given that my stove is only on a few minutes a day, it hardly seems like a concern worth freaking out about. If it matters at all, it would be in places like restaurant kitchens, where the stove is running all day, but I would hope that the stoves in restaurant kitchens have better ventilation than the stoves in home kitchens.
What PH establishment needs to do is give people the information they need to make decisions, not make the decision for them. The CPSC guy said nothing useful.
I agree. Atmospheric pollution by particulates is well know and, as far as I know, well regulated/taxed in developed countries. If not, well, the parameters of the relevant cost benefit equations should be adjusted.
I don’t have a public health background, but in the service of getting some numbers in here, here is a lit review which I haven’t personally checked, so I can’t necessarily endorse it, but which was sufficiently reasonable-looking to put me on the induction bandwagon: https://dynomight.net/stoves/
Useful. I'd look at this as discounted value of the reduced life expectancy (not a vey high discount rate) but it looks at the least like it would be worth definitely replacing gas with induction when every you change ranges.
It's the way I'd like to see the information given (bottom line): "If you are a family of two middle age adults and two children, your gas range is costing you $x/year compared to an induction range."
Not the first to link this here, but I found this write-up last week pretty convincing, from the same priors (though there's a noted problem of lots of research lumping induction together with heat coils). Everybody Knows that combustion is bad...but when one actually goes looking for the badness, the effects are a lot smaller than one would expect. Too many confounds. Gas stoves being anti-correlated with asthma was particularly surprising - obviously there's no mechanism whereby combustion would __reduce__ asthma, but it shows that the effect size is simply not that large vs. other contributors, if it can be swamped like that.
If there is clear consensus that gas is worse for the home consumer as opposed to electric or induction in terms of health and safety, then I see no reason why the state can't encourage people to make the switch by taxing gas more and subsidizing induction a bit. Moreover, it would appear a serious failure of public health that the public was not made aware of the added risks of gas stoves. Seems to me that promoting public health is a common interest for both moral and economic reasons (to put it bluntly - we all end up worse off if we have a higher percentage of people with chronic diseases in our society).Moderate interventions such as the above seem to me very reasonable, without even getting into the debate on the effects on global warming.
Yes...as someone very wedded to gas stoves and cooking a lot with them (I'm Chinese, sorry, it's just not the same even with induction), I'd be perfectly fine with paying higher taxes to carbon capture some of that externality. And in the very unlikely event I'm ever well-off enough to choose between gas or induction-plus-gas*, subsidies would go a long way towards making the greener choice.
(Relatedly, I'd love if there were more advancements made in range hoods so they weren't so damned loud. A large part of me not using them is because I don't want to disturb housemates.)
I do think there's also a neglected second-order consequence of misaligned stove interests. If one's stove sucks, one is less likely to cook at home. This is unfortunate, cause Everybody Knows - in a much, much less ambiguous way, with much larger effect sizes - that processed food is pretty bad, that restaurant food is pretty bad, that convenience commands a steep price premium. Anything which accelerates the trend away from home cooking seems likely to exacerbate poor diets and obesity. Which are doing a great job of harming humanity right now, as opposed to in 2035 or 2050 or whenever...
*No need for gas when boiling pasta or whatever. But I still want the option...especially with the lurking threat of blackouts in CA. Still being able to cook hot food when all other appliances fail is a nontrivial piece of peace-of-mind.
Health is an information problem. One might think that the so clear and important (but ignored) that the state should paternalistically intervene in the decision _for the person's own good_.
CO2 is an incentive problem. Even if you know that your flame adds to the accumulating harm the CO2 emitters are themselves unharmed. The value to the emitter of the emission must be greater than the than the harm _felt_ but may be less than the harm _done_. Here the state has a clear role in adjusting incentives so that the value to the emitter [plus the cost of "adjusting the incentives"] is at least as great as the harm done (but no more).
I agree. A small tax on gas would be OK. Or even just a ban on sale of new gas ranges in the jurisdiction. I'm just suspicious of the way the issue surfaced. Matt is right, the CPSC really screwed up.
You can carry forward that same argument for burning fossil fuels, particularly coal, to generate electricity. That pollution is a public health menace as well, responsible for unholy amounts of cancer and asthma.
When we have other options, its just dumb, frankly.
Sure we should shift away from coal based electricity generation (and eventually gas too). Problem is sometimes the transition is complex eg wind and solar can’t stand on their own. That’s one reason I’m a big supporter of nuclear.
Great post Matt. But you ignored what may be the most promising way to sequester carbon, letting woody plants capture the carbon, harvesting that biomass, and then turning some of it to charcoal via pyrolysis. Charcoal can be added to soils with beneficial results and is likely to retain its carbon for centuries. Unlike other carbon sequestration approaches, this method actually produces some energy. A question is whether this approach could scale to the size needed. Some analyses suggest it could. See Lenton, T., 2010, The potential for land-based biological CO2 removal to lower future atmospheric CO2 concentration, Carbon Management 1, 145–160 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.4155/cmt.10.12 and Lehmann, Johannes, 2007, A Handful of Carbon, Nature, 447, 143-144. https://www.nature.com/articles/447143a
I really want this to work. I think that forestry is one of the only places in the economy with big enough scale and low enough cost to make a dent at a planetary scale.
I’ve always imagined somehow speeding up photosynthesis under artificial conditions to sequester carbon, I wonder if thats feasible  outside of science fiction 
I’m convinced the capture tech will eventually convert to solid, safe stable forms. Burying so much gas is expensive (and may result in leakage with earthquakes etc).
I love the idea of creating calcium carbonate factories at geothermal hotspots. Or another safe and durably sequestered form of carbon. It can be just piled up, need not be buried deep underground.
Less appreciated than the fossil fuel cycle, concrete production from limestone deposits (calcium carbonate from coral and shellfish) releases some 8% of global carbon emissions, which is estimated to be more than from air travel.
And agree wholeheartedly on the gas stove thing. Beyond the politics of it, which I agree with, this is a freedom and performance issue too. As a foodie and restauranteur, gas is a more functional stovetop cooking fuel than electric. I would not want to try to have our chef and cooks cook use only electric - they’d murder me. People will want choice aka freedom and an open flame offers many cooking advantages. So before we go banning any sort of gas anything, we should probably make sure there are viable alternatives on the market. Or the backlash will indeed be swift and justified
Now I'm imagining captured carbon being sequestered in the form of diamonds, thus paying for itself many times over and also breaking a different malign monopoly responsible for great bloodshed and suffering.
I think it was David Roberts at Vox who pointed out that, as heavy as concrete emissions are, it's unfortunately a really difficult process to decarbonize. In the future I'd hope to see more developments in advanced materials science...the cool things they're doing with wood these days are incredible, for example.
People also, I think, underestimate the symbolic power of an open flame. There's a reason fire shows up so often in religious iconography, meditative practices, seasonal rituals...it's one of those Very Human things, in a way that the technological whiz-bang of magnetic current resistance just isn't. (But imagine a transparent induction cooktop with embedded plasma ball technology. That would be very cool in many of the same ways! Name that stove company Thor or Zeus or something and you've cornered the market.)
Gas vs electric or gas vs induction? I understand that resistant coils suck, but induction appears to be on par with gas on net. The disadvantages to induction (magnetic pots, wok cooking, learning to monitor temp) do not appear to be show stoppers, but I'm not running a restaurant. Perhaps the electric service size needed to power a commercial kitchen is a show stopper in some areas?
I've heard some chefs love induction as another option and can offer great (and much more safe) high heat performance. But as you mention it locks you into certain cookware and many culinary creatives will not want to limit options even a lil. I think that's the biggest reason induction is not more widely embraced in commercial cooking, but I do see it more and more. The visual indicator of the flame is more important than it might sound in a fast moving kitchen too. And the flame itself can sometimes come in handy for scorching etc. Our kitchen uses both gas and electric oven. Some prefer electric ovens esp for baking because it is totally dry and more even/steady but the gas is cheaper to run for sure and some like it better for roasts.
If you're not dying to use your wok, I wouldn't balk for a second at induction for home use for an instant, especially because of the safety.
Those are good questions, and I have personally made the choice for gas at home and induction at a small condo we own. I think I should be allowed to make those choices, based on my circumstances, risk tolerance and desires. I don't think the government -- federal or state -- should be allowed to make that choice for me.
One quick comment- I believe there are two operating EPA permitted Class VI injection wells at the Archer Daniels Midland plant in Decatur, Illinois. So very few, but not quite zero.
The worry for me is that the carbon captured will be generating permits that allow other companies to continue their emissions leading to maybe a net-zero but maybe something worse. There's a lot of fraud and near-fraud out there. I'm thinking here of companies like Pachama but also of ESG investing that seems to be selling carbon credits to emit carbon *now* for future projects that may *someday* remove carbon. A recent example: The Nature Conservancy found that it was selling meaningless carbon credits to companies like Disney, BlackRock etc. which allowed them to claim they'd lowered their emissions. I feel like this whole area needs to be carefully watched to make sure that the amount of carbon being removed from the atmosphere is greater than the amount being emitted by people purchasing their credits. Otherwise, what's the benefit?
I agree with this article, but Matt is too pessimistic about internal combustion engines. There will be a threshold where most gas stations are not viable, and then it becomes a real pain to refuel your car. There will always be some classic car enthusiasts, but as a practical form of transportation, ICE's days are numbered.
So -- what’s your timeline for “days are numbers” here? In the US, current EV new vehicle sale rates put EVs reaching 50% of the 300m vehicles in operation around 2040. I expect ICEs to be running through 2060.
I wonder if the same will happen with natural gas. At some point (fingers crossed!) there will so few houses with gas stoves, central heating and water heaters that maintaining the grid will be uneconomical.
Gas grills are way more convenient. I genuinely cannot remember the last time I went to a cookout where the host was using charcoal, but I suspect it's approaching 25 years. (I know my parents replaced their charcoal grill with a gas grill in the 1990s.)
Agree with the overall thrust of this, but for the California ICE example--if they actually ban all new ICE car sales in 2035, what type of gasoline station network will exist in 2050? The vast majority of cars on the road are not 15 years old, and I'd think a lot of the infrastructure to sell gasoline (which I believe is already low margin but made up for on non-gas services) would cease to exist which would create range issues kind of like with EVs but worse since you would not have the option of refueling at your destination. I'd think there'd be a tipping point where ICE's are not a feasible transportation option.
Companies distribute industrial chemicals and gases all day every day to all kinds of businesses. If gas stations go the way of the dodo, which they will, then if you needed gas for you ‘57 Chevy or early 2000s M3 you’d just order 15 gallons online and have it delivered. It would be a lucrative sideline for someone.
But it would be expensive enough that the traditional purchasers of old used cars would skip to medium aged used electric cars rather than deal with this.
EVs have a non linear deprecation curve because the battery needs to be replaced at some point in the lifecycle. This will keep used EV prices greatly above the tradition ICE used vehicle market.
I’m not saying you couldn’t have a vintage ICE of some sort or find a way to power it. But this would be a novelty, not something you’d use for normal transport.
Hydrogen powered self-driving gasoline distribution truck as a service. You subscribe. Your ICE car has a little gadget that pings the truck when low and coordinates that with your typical parking patterns so that the truck is there when you are about to need to drive.
The average (not sure if this mean or median or what) car on US roads is slightly over 12 years old. Even if California does succeed in banning ICE sales in 2035, there will still be millions of ICE cars on their roads in 2050. Gas stations will be accessible for a long time, although the density might decrease.
12 years isn’t a law of nature. It was 8 year avg not that long ago, but increased used car prices and lower car production have increased cost of changing cars and it has ticked up year by year. If the costs and annoyance of keeping your ICE go up and EV goes down, I think you’ll see this number flip for ICEs. But I guess we will see!
The average vehicle age in operation in the US is 12 model years old and continuing to age. The current gas station network will exist as is through 2060. Post that tbd. Don’t forget the major profit driver of a gas station is the convenience store. The gas is thin margin.
Heavy trucks will take a long longer to electrify than ordinary passengers cars. So long as gas stations remain for them, passenger cars still running on gas will be able to use them.
Drivers of ICE cars will not run into any problems finding a gas station for a long, long time.
Without changes to the processes around building transmission lines, not sure we ever get to a good grid. Been trying to build the Grain Belt Express since 2006 or 2008, somewhere in there. Year after year, fight after fight, one county and one landowner at a time. And I don't think any ground has been broken.
I was looking forward to Matt’s take on the Class VI well program but was disappointed in the dearth of actual information and inaccuracies in the post. I think it is great to throw some light on this issue but let’s use some good information! Eg EPA regulates these wells under the Safe Drinking Water Act, it has long regulated injection wells, that’s why this is the sixth class. EPA genuinely seems to be slow on approving state programs. I can’t tell how slow they are on permits without more digging but as of their October 2022 report to Congress they had issued six permits, not zero, though only two were actually constructed. They had permit applications for nine projects pending, some of which involve more than one permit. That report also describes EPA’s efforts to streamline their processes from those used to process the first applications.
Are they on the right track? Should they be doing more? Is the White House not paying enough attention? I don’t know, but hoped for a more informed take here.
This article could alternatively be titled “progressivism is not a serious ideology”. It’s actually too easy on the environmental left - we all know that if utility scale solar was being planned in an even mildly pretty natural area, there would be a progressive uprising against the evil for-profit power company trying to ruin our beautiful natural lands (this is already happening with basically every newly planned mine for metals important to electrification).
This is an absurd takeaway from the article. Regulation of class VI wells is regulatory minutiae that has been overlooked as part of the implementation of the climate change agenda that democrats have enacted and the vast majority of progressives have supported. The only reason you think this looks bad on progressives is if you go into every article thinking about how it might make progressives look bad.
I apparently missed where permitting reform passed; my apologies.
To be clear I think liberalism is a worthy ideology to the extent that it accepts that we need to beat climate change in a way that involves technology, just not the part of the left that thinks ending capitalism is the only way forward. But NY state for example is trying to decarbonize while shutting down nuclear plants, and has done literally nothing harder than rooftop solar. The anti-building-things left (which has a very strong overlap with self-described “progressives”) is worse than useless.
The pro-building-things left also has a strong overlap with self-described “progressives”.
Maybe on the west coast? I’m in NY and the left-wing politicians here are pretty NIMBY and just want to overthrow capitalism. Which I honestly don’t mind that they believe that, but we have to live in the real world where solving problems like housing and climate generally means building things and not just banning them. In CA it seems like progressives are more in touch with reality and actual YIMBY progressives exist.
Unfortunately, like so many other political terms, "progressive" is super loose and means different things to different people.
Progress seeking, an opposite to conservatism, is how I see it.... not an ideology, but rather an impulse.
I mean part of it in fairness might just be that as an NY resident, I’m most familiar with NYC “progressives” who are a bunch of AOC wannabes and are just not that smart. I actually like AOC herself and she seems reasonably flexible on practical issues even though she’s quite far left. But the NY state legislature is full of 2nd-rate communists who have no plan for how to get anything done in our actual society. We also have Long Island NIMBY center-right Republicans, Westchester NIMBY center-left Democrats, and upstate far-right rednecks so in fairness they are not the only stupid people in our state legislature. Our bad politicians span the entire political spectrum here!
Sounds familiar and not too different than PA to be frank.
I wish the decent and respectable politicians could get a lil more air time. It apparently doesn't hold enough attention to sell the required ads to cover policy wonks talkin about carbon taxes and nuclear deregulation.
The only reason any type climate change reform or incentives at all are passing in congress is because of progressives. Republican senators are still lobbing snowballs around the senate floor to 'disprove global warming'
The mental gymnastics you're going through to blame the left, and NOT the right, for holding back climate causes, is hilarious.
The right is worse! But the progressive left is more frustrating because they know the problem exists, but whenever anyone proposes a solution they start yelling about how somebody somewhere might make money from it.
I agree that the progressive left is more "frustrating" because they do indeed know better and have taken on a moral responsibility to confront the problem and yet fight important steps forward.
But it's interesting that the right is not seen as "frustrating." That's because we take it as a given that they simply don't care and don't want to fix the problem. They've even stopped denying the problem, but they still simply don't want to do anything about it.
So, no, I wouldn't apply the term "frustrating" to them. "Evil"? "Morally bankrupt"? "Unfit for human society"? "Criminally uncaring"? All interesting possibilities. But let's always remember that, no matter the progressive left's frustrating shortfalls here, it's the right that bears most of the moral blame.
Definitely true and unfortunately it’s very hard to tackle climate when only one side has any interest. The center-right is particularly annoying because they know that climate change is real but won’t admit it too openly for fear of losing a primary. At least we can maybe watch Elon Musk’s wealth burn to ashes because he’s gone all-in on the side of the political spectrum that will never buy his products and he’s too scared of the right to give them real talk about climate change, which will be entertaining if nothing else.
I think the right’s reaction on climate follows the same pattern as it did on Covid and woke issues. When the conversation starts with thünbergian hysteria, followed by claims of having a monopoly on ‘moral responsibility’, and on ‘the science’, and a marked unwillingness to compromise or to include nuance in the discussion or to discuss costs vs benefits of policies - history shows the right is typically not willing to go along. Some are dead-ender snowball throwing dinosaurs, yes. Many others are potential allies who would be gettable if the tone was a little different. Does that make it the left’s fault or the right’s fault? Who cares? If the climate activists are serious about making progress, they should focus less on screaming at (R)s about how they MUST care more, and figure out a way to get their votes.
I really think the increasing wealth and social status of the progressive left is an issue. Honestly few of us have skin in the game. Biden isn't smarter than Warren, but he is an old-fashioned labor Democrat so he is actually accountable to working class voters who want jobs and a decent quality of life. They will get jobs and cheap electricity if we build power lines and battery storage.
Warren might be well-meaning, but college professors and doctors and lawyers with big 401k accounts and high incomes and lake cabins are probably better off fiscally if they propose dumb plans and the right wins and cuts their taxes, and their lake cabins will be nicer because there are no power lines or batteries nearby.
I think this is the case in the EU (so maybe it'll be the case in the US in the future as well). All opposition I can recall to wind and solar has come from environmentalists who in general agree that these are good things, but it just happens that every location where they could be placed has an ecosystem whose preservation is more important than placing there wind/solar.
edit: I just checked here: https://ballotpedia.org/Maine_Question_1,_Electric_Transmission_Line_Restrictions_and_Legislative_Approval_Initiative_(2021)
It does seem that Sierra Club Maine joined forces with a company that generated electricity from fossil fuels to prevent the replacement of fossil fuels by hydro power. So there are already cases of what I describe in the US as well.
Wind is often also often opposed by owners of seaside Cape Cod estates.
This isn’t the story in Australia. While there have been left/green opponents to wind farms and transmission lines, most of the opposition has come from the conservative side of politics, with a fair helping of rural NIMBYism.
Much of that opposition has been at the very least helped along with quiet money from the fossil fuel industry.
Matt Yglesias is a microcosm of Democratic dysfunction. A healthy political party would not need a Harvard educated urbanist who attended black tie formals during college and has solar panels on his roof to keep its elites and functionaries in touch with normie voters. Matt does have some influence with white house and hill staffers and his ideas are quite good. The absurd part is that, without his solar panels and sincere interest in urbanism, Democratic staffers would pay Matt no more heed than Ross Douthat. The populist voices of a functional party would be more populist.
"Matt Yglesias is a microcosm of Democratic dysfunction."
I think that really understates Matt's size. He's a mesocosm, at least.
I’ll still take that any day as the lesser of two evils juxtaposed to the Santos-McCarthy-MTG party of shameless arsonists. Wish their opposition was a bit more buttoned up
I 100% agree. It’s just remarkable how poorly the two parties pander to normie voters.
I think Biden and Obama actually both did a pretty good job of pandering to the normies. Even Trump did it decently (at least more so than HRC)
It's just that AOC & MTG are the ones always in the news, not the 'head down get to work" congressional types. I've met a bunch of representatives and most of them are about as exciting as a plank of wood.
Very real problem of our current media format - the wonkish types that we actually need to get the job done constantly get overshadowed by the WWF pro wrestling style idiocy that apparently sells more ads on CNN and Fox News and crazy gets more shares on Facebook.
How do we get the sober honest ones that we need to be appealing and popular?
Wow, that sounds harsh and I'm not even a Democrat!
What is the negative externality that EPA is trying to prevent by requiring prior approval for drilling a hole in the ground? Why is a Class IV well a Thing? I can see fracking -- methane leaks into the atmosphere across state lines. Any hole can disturb ground water, but except in RI or DC or close to a state line, that seems unlikely to cross state lines. So why national regulation at all? Why is state regulation the exception rather than the rule?
This looks like the CDC error of regulation (by recommendation) at the national level rather than giving local regulators and individuals the information to let each place find the most cost effective ways of preventing spread in each specific place and circumstance.
EPA’s responsibility here is under the Safe Drinking Water Act. There is a long history of how the federal government took on responsibility for drinking water safety; I’m not sure many people actually want to go back to the local-authority-crapshoot when it comes to public drinking water supply (e.g. Flint), but maybe you’d like to make the argument
I can see externalities involved in surface water as most flows into interstate streams. I'd think groundwater would be different. But OK , let EPA sign off on the well not contaminating interstate groundwater. But this looks like a case where Federal involvement should be the exception, not the rule.
EPA has the authority to delegate permitting for Class VI wells to state’s environmental agency if the state applies. So far WY and ND have achieved that and several other states have applied.
John has this right. Many federal laws requiring permitting are delegated to state level agencies. My guess is most states haven’t pursued authority to permit these wells because it hasn’t been much of an issue for them. If industry in a particular state pushed for it then the state would have incentive.
Large aquifers often cross state lines and are common (and often overexploited) resources. The Ogallala isn't in great shape and spans eight states.
Excellent point on the Federal/State issue groundwater issue.
Is there an aquifer half full or empty joke in there somewhere?
The idea is that we want the government to certify that sequestered carbon dioxide really is being sequestered and isn't just leaking vack into the atmosphere. In practice it seems to not be working well.
But that does not require prior approval of each well, just monitoring of the escape and fines the same tax as on the emission of the CO2 in the first place, or netting the escape out of the subsidy for the sequestration.
I don’t believe there is any tax on the emission of CO2, and while we should obviously fix that, figuring out how to develop wells that work before then is very important too. We can’t just wait until the political conditions are right for a carbon tax.
Agree. But it still seems it would be better to set a standard for leakage with fines for excess rather than pre-approving the specifications of the well. And whatever they do the cost benefit analysis should consider the cost of the delay in approving the well.
Yeah, I think best practices would be to regulate actual performance and propose measures, rather than setting procedural criteria for pre-approval with no check afterwards. And best practice would also involve cost-benefit analysis. Unfortunately, adopting either of those types of measures probably is a bigger lift than just getting them to start approving some wells right now.
I did my bait-y, hippy punching on the induced demand thread earlier in the week, so I'll just say that this article in entirely correct.
One important point about both DAC and hydrolysis is that they are electricity demand that is entirely OK with being turned off when electricity supply is inadequate.
This means that if you have lots of variable-supply renewables (solar and wind, basically), then you can switch the DAC and hydrolysis off on a still cloudy day.
This means that you still have security of supply with a much higher percentage of solar and wind in the electricity generation mix.
This would definitely be nice, but for chemical plants, startup and shutdown tend to be complicated, and time spent not running is a waste of capital. So someone in the energy system is going to bite the bullet of paying for spare capacity that we don’t need all the time. And it should probably be the government, like the example of state owned natural gas plants in California. Otherwise you wind up with rampant blackouts like PG&E.
Induction range to be delivered next week! (replaces electric range, not gas)
So back in public health grad school in ~2005/6 or so, I was in an environmental health epidemiology course (read environment as "things humans contact," not "nature") where the respiratory effects of combustion fueled household cooking was presented. Much was made of the disease burden caused by cooking over open (often sooty) flame in developing parts of the world (MY help me with my terminology here...), but I recall enough data being presented about the harms of typical natural gas stoves, particularly for children and adults with respiratory diseases, that it really stuck with me in a way that has prevented me from ever wanting to own one since....like avoiding secondhand smoke. I can't pull the data and numbers from my head, but it's just one of those things that you learn that was compelling enough to stick with you and functionally change your outlook on a common thing moving forward.
Edit for FYI: neither in favor of bans nor thinking stove emissions are a particularly meaningful contributor to the overall climate.
If the information on the health costs of open gas flames has been know before, (Emily Oster downplays the costs) why are we just now hearing about it and "it" being "hazardous" rather than "causes $x of childhood asthma per year depending on ventilation, age of children, etc.." Why haven't electric range companies been touting them for their health benefits? Or is cities thing that people will not take the health costs seriously in their decisions, why haven't they taxed gas for domestic use? The whole thing sounds bogus.
I mean, it's my personal perception (having read her blog and books) that Oster downplays the risks of most things, particularly things that (I infer) threaten her chosen or preferred lifestyle. She's smart, but she also falls into the "economists know best about everything" trap a lot.
I would guess, having just shopped for new kitchen appliances, that there is still much more economic incentive to market and sell gas ranges due to percieved "high-end" appeal (and profit margins), and that overwhelmingly the electric range companies are the exact same companies as the gas range companies (GE, Bosh, Whirlpool, etc.).
I have a wife with mild asthma, and a baby, I'm not buying a gas stove. You do you.
If only "you do you" were the credo of the environmental authoritarians who are hell-bent on restricting consumer choices among competing products and technologies.
Instead, they use the regulatory power of the state to implement their preferences and force everyone else to comply. From the important (banning ICE vehicles) to the mundane (shower heads suck today versus 30 years ago), the impulse to use state power to force inferior products is really frustrating.
>>the impulse to use state power to force inferior products is really frustrating.
Even absent health risks (I'll take Matt's word for it they're hyped, though that's not the same as nonexistent) if we're really serious about decarbonizing the economy, we can't have hundreds of millions of people around the world cooking with gas. At some point gas stoves gotta go, at least as a mass consumer option (maybe they'll survive for certain restaurant cooking niches?).
WE aren't serious about decarbonizing the economy. You might be, and the environmental justice people might be, but we as a society are not serious about it.
So for those who are serious about it, the options seem to be: (1) convince the rest of the population that they SHOULD be serious about decarbonizing the economy or (2) capture the ever-expanding number of regulatory offices and force compliance.
Having seen the success of regulatory capture in everything from medical doctors to car dealers to hairdressers, they have chosen option #2.
I dunno, the US Congress recently passed a bill plowing several hundred billion into the effort to decarbonize the economy. I don't think it's a binary. thing—you know, either we're serious about decarbonization or we're not. I'd say we're more serious than we were five years ago and less than we'll be five years hence.
I guess my point is, it would be better if we ran pretty much everything that can be electrified on electricity. I realize not everyone sees it this way. I guess ultimately (like everything) it will ultimately come down to winning elections. For the record I don't think anybody should feel under pressure to go out tomorrow and buy an induction stove. It's not as big a priority as heating or EVs. I think gas stoves are likely to be with us in large numbers for quite a while (same, obviously, with gasoline cars, and with jets). And they're not cheap, and often people need priceyish electrical upgrades and new cookware (though I think there's a tax credit available?).
But I do think if you're going to be buying a stove in any event (say, you're moving house, or renovating your kitchen) you'll regret it 3-4 years down the road if you buy gas. They're by all accounts inferior to induction stoves in a lot of ways related to cooking. They also heat up your kitchen (my little kitchen in BJ feels like a sauna just boiling an egg), and there's a non-zero fire risk whenever you're dealing with an open flame. And yes, the health risks.
We'll know the jig is up for gas stoves when brokers start telling home sellers they're a disadvantage. I give it another five years.
We here in California seem perfectly fine with the gradual elimination of the sale of new ICE vehicles and the elimination of gas hookups in new construction. It seems like smart politics to me: fight climate change, and take major steps that don't demand immediate sacrifice by the population.
Because California is such a large market, I suspect its ICE vehicle ban will so help spur the EV market that in the future it will become easier and more enticing to buy EVs even in states that don't follow California's lead. And that's fine; I don't care if Idaho doesn't follow our lead in banning ICEs -- California is giving EVs a healthy push and the market will do most of the remaining work.
And we should NOT be serious about decarbonization (making gross emissions zero), but making net emissions zero (probably after a period of net negative
From what I've heard, environmental justice folks are NOT serious about achieving negative net emissions. If they were they would get on board with taxing net emissions. Matt says they are just interested in driving the net worth of fossil fuel companies to zero.
I think those of us who earnestly would like to reform the economy and head off climate change are just losing the battle to convince the masses that climate change is a real threat to their prosperity. Its not that we’re not trying.
Just so happens the other side of this battle has a shit ton of oil money and a whole lot of interests to protect. PR firms are bought, research is bought, policy is more or less bought after Citizens United Ruling (or we really have no way of finding out if it has or has not been practically speaking).
Post truth is a whole lot about denying climate change. A whole lot of extremely powerful people are a whole lot richer that way.
We don't really know whether all combustion of natural gas needs to be eliminated or not; it depends on the cost of CO2 removal. But cooking with gas should be discouraged just as any other net emission of CO2.
This however is totally separate from whether cooking causes health damage. That would call for different kind of taxation, on the apparatus and it ventilation itself. I still have not seen any numbers to suggest just how big a problem this is and analysis to show that any tax is needed at all compared to just making consumers aware of the relative health costs of gas v electric cooking.
I mean, I agree the degree of regulatory response depends heavily on the product or technology in question. I don't particularly agree with the gas stove thing as I said initially, and agree risks generating more blowback then progress, though I perceive I am less frustrated about this and low-flow plumbing fixtures than others.
How do you know that Oster unduly downplays risks i.e. more than from excess to just right?
Could you elaborate of the "economists know best about everything?" It seems to me that the typical economist position is that they do NOT know best; that only people transacting in a (sometimes needfully regulated) market know best.
Oster received vitriol on Twitter from Branch Covidians for suggesting that Covid bore little risk for children. I do not think she excessively downplayed the risks with regards Covid.
Agreed. I made mistake in saying "downplaying" which is properly taken to mean "unduly minimized." I intended to say only that she considers the risk (of gas stoves in this case) as less than the CPSC guy implied and she showed her work.
Emily Oster has a long, well-sourced breakdown of the risks demonstrated and not demonstrated by the science on gas stoves, and you've got ~~vibes about downplaying~~, so I guess it's impossible to say who's more trustworthy.
I agree that the whole health thing being elevated sounds like its being elevated by people who want to ban them for climate reasons but that doesn't mean we should react by calling the whole thing bogus. There is a lot of research that shows that gas stoves are harmful (and answers some of the questions you raise) to people's health. It is also true that induction stoves are part of a long term climate solution. None of this means that we can't call BS on people who want to ban them.
What strikes me as "bogus" (maybe that is too strong) is the sudden appearance of the issue and that the costs of this new hazard have not been publicized. If they are really high why has it not been an issue before? Also the way it came out in a sort of offhand remark by the head of the agency. Fishy.
Firstly, I somewhat disagree with your description as the issue being "sudden". I and I suspect many others here in the comments have long known about the harms caused by gas stoves and other sources of indoor air pollution. I agree that the reasons why it's having such a big moment are a bit fishy, but just because you hadn't heard of it prior does not mean its not a serious issue. There are a million things that are serious issues that are not well known, and just because they have a sudden influx of interest does not make them bogus. I think the piece we are currently commenting on is a perfect example. Most of us had probably never heard of of Class VI wells before today but MY wrote a piece, most of us probably agree with his take and now we think permitting wells is an important worthwhile issue. All of us should question the gas stove ban advocates and why the head of agency would act as they did but don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Gas stoves are quite bad for health, plain and simple.
Lots of things are quite bad for health, plain and simple: skiing, being overweight, smoking, motorcycles, rock climbing, smoking marijuana, mountain biking, driving, walking to the store, getting out of bed, having a swimming pool.
The question is at what point do we decide to ban certain activities or otherwise use the power of the state to enforce safety at the expense of liberty. Count me on the "You Do You" side of that question.
I can't speak to the gas stove debate specifically, but there's been a ton of research about the effects of particulate air pollution in the last decade showing that it's much worse for you than previously thought. A lot of it is recent and surprising, and it shows up across a wide variety of contexts. Why is Twitter focusing on gas stoves right now? I'm not sure, but I've been seeing some people in development contexts talking about them for years. Although that was mostly about reducing the harm of much worse wood-burning stoves.
Again, this isn't about gas stoves specifically, but Alex Tabarrok (who's a libertarian, so not exactly one who I'd think would be prone to overselling this stuff) has a decent overview of the research on particulates in 2021.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/12/why-the-new-pollution-literature-is-credible.html
Yeah I don’t think this has penetrated mass consciousness yet. Out of sight, out of mind. The list of conditions caused or aggravated by air pollution has grown quite long. David Wallace-Wells wrote powerfully on this https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/08/opinion/environment/air-pollution-deaths-climate-change.html
The discussion has pushed my priors toward taking NOx from gas flames more seriously. Added to CO2 emissions, it seem worthy of phasing out gas for domestic use. I'd want to see much stringer evidence before trying to get people to change exiting gas for electric appliances.
For what it's worth, I have an air quality monitor in my kitchen that monitors particulate pollution. It spikes up much more from cooking something in my electric toaster than boiling water on the gas stove.
Granted, the monitor doesn't measure all pollutants, but given that my stove is only on a few minutes a day, it hardly seems like a concern worth freaking out about. If it matters at all, it would be in places like restaurant kitchens, where the stove is running all day, but I would hope that the stoves in restaurant kitchens have better ventilation than the stoves in home kitchens.
What PH establishment needs to do is give people the information they need to make decisions, not make the decision for them. The CPSC guy said nothing useful.
I agree. Atmospheric pollution by particulates is well know and, as far as I know, well regulated/taxed in developed countries. If not, well, the parameters of the relevant cost benefit equations should be adjusted.
You’ll LOVE induction! It’s fantastic to cook on, much better than gas (I’m ignoring the tiresome discourse).
Great point. Wood burning fires within the home are apparently particularly harmful. That cozy holiday fire comes with some hidden costs apparently!
For those of us with gas ranges today, don’t forget to use your ventilation whenever you turn on the oven or burners, not just when it gets smokey.
I don’t have a public health background, but in the service of getting some numbers in here, here is a lit review which I haven’t personally checked, so I can’t necessarily endorse it, but which was sufficiently reasonable-looking to put me on the induction bandwagon: https://dynomight.net/stoves/
Useful. I'd look at this as discounted value of the reduced life expectancy (not a vey high discount rate) but it looks at the least like it would be worth definitely replacing gas with induction when every you change ranges.
It's the way I'd like to see the information given (bottom line): "If you are a family of two middle age adults and two children, your gas range is costing you $x/year compared to an induction range."
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/on-cooking-with-gas
Not the first to link this here, but I found this write-up last week pretty convincing, from the same priors (though there's a noted problem of lots of research lumping induction together with heat coils). Everybody Knows that combustion is bad...but when one actually goes looking for the badness, the effects are a lot smaller than one would expect. Too many confounds. Gas stoves being anti-correlated with asthma was particularly surprising - obviously there's no mechanism whereby combustion would __reduce__ asthma, but it shows that the effect size is simply not that large vs. other contributors, if it can be swamped like that.
If there is clear consensus that gas is worse for the home consumer as opposed to electric or induction in terms of health and safety, then I see no reason why the state can't encourage people to make the switch by taxing gas more and subsidizing induction a bit. Moreover, it would appear a serious failure of public health that the public was not made aware of the added risks of gas stoves. Seems to me that promoting public health is a common interest for both moral and economic reasons (to put it bluntly - we all end up worse off if we have a higher percentage of people with chronic diseases in our society).Moderate interventions such as the above seem to me very reasonable, without even getting into the debate on the effects on global warming.
Yes...as someone very wedded to gas stoves and cooking a lot with them (I'm Chinese, sorry, it's just not the same even with induction), I'd be perfectly fine with paying higher taxes to carbon capture some of that externality. And in the very unlikely event I'm ever well-off enough to choose between gas or induction-plus-gas*, subsidies would go a long way towards making the greener choice.
(Relatedly, I'd love if there were more advancements made in range hoods so they weren't so damned loud. A large part of me not using them is because I don't want to disturb housemates.)
I do think there's also a neglected second-order consequence of misaligned stove interests. If one's stove sucks, one is less likely to cook at home. This is unfortunate, cause Everybody Knows - in a much, much less ambiguous way, with much larger effect sizes - that processed food is pretty bad, that restaurant food is pretty bad, that convenience commands a steep price premium. Anything which accelerates the trend away from home cooking seems likely to exacerbate poor diets and obesity. Which are doing a great job of harming humanity right now, as opposed to in 2035 or 2050 or whenever...
*No need for gas when boiling pasta or whatever. But I still want the option...especially with the lurking threat of blackouts in CA. Still being able to cook hot food when all other appliances fail is a nontrivial piece of peace-of-mind.
Health is an information problem. One might think that the so clear and important (but ignored) that the state should paternalistically intervene in the decision _for the person's own good_.
CO2 is an incentive problem. Even if you know that your flame adds to the accumulating harm the CO2 emitters are themselves unharmed. The value to the emitter of the emission must be greater than the than the harm _felt_ but may be less than the harm _done_. Here the state has a clear role in adjusting incentives so that the value to the emitter [plus the cost of "adjusting the incentives"] is at least as great as the harm done (but no more).
I agree. A small tax on gas would be OK. Or even just a ban on sale of new gas ranges in the jurisdiction. I'm just suspicious of the way the issue surfaced. Matt is right, the CPSC really screwed up.
You can carry forward that same argument for burning fossil fuels, particularly coal, to generate electricity. That pollution is a public health menace as well, responsible for unholy amounts of cancer and asthma.
When we have other options, its just dumb, frankly.
Sure we should shift away from coal based electricity generation (and eventually gas too). Problem is sometimes the transition is complex eg wind and solar can’t stand on their own. That’s one reason I’m a big supporter of nuclear.
Great post Matt. But you ignored what may be the most promising way to sequester carbon, letting woody plants capture the carbon, harvesting that biomass, and then turning some of it to charcoal via pyrolysis. Charcoal can be added to soils with beneficial results and is likely to retain its carbon for centuries. Unlike other carbon sequestration approaches, this method actually produces some energy. A question is whether this approach could scale to the size needed. Some analyses suggest it could. See Lenton, T., 2010, The potential for land-based biological CO2 removal to lower future atmospheric CO2 concentration, Carbon Management 1, 145–160 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.4155/cmt.10.12 and Lehmann, Johannes, 2007, A Handful of Carbon, Nature, 447, 143-144. https://www.nature.com/articles/447143a
I really want this to work. I think that forestry is one of the only places in the economy with big enough scale and low enough cost to make a dent at a planetary scale.
I’ve always imagined somehow speeding up photosynthesis under artificial conditions to sequester carbon, I wonder if thats feasible  outside of science fiction 
Fascinating!
Great piece.
I’m convinced the capture tech will eventually convert to solid, safe stable forms. Burying so much gas is expensive (and may result in leakage with earthquakes etc).
I love the idea of creating calcium carbonate factories at geothermal hotspots. Or another safe and durably sequestered form of carbon. It can be just piled up, need not be buried deep underground.
Less appreciated than the fossil fuel cycle, concrete production from limestone deposits (calcium carbonate from coral and shellfish) releases some 8% of global carbon emissions, which is estimated to be more than from air travel.
And agree wholeheartedly on the gas stove thing. Beyond the politics of it, which I agree with, this is a freedom and performance issue too. As a foodie and restauranteur, gas is a more functional stovetop cooking fuel than electric. I would not want to try to have our chef and cooks cook use only electric - they’d murder me. People will want choice aka freedom and an open flame offers many cooking advantages. So before we go banning any sort of gas anything, we should probably make sure there are viable alternatives on the market. Or the backlash will indeed be swift and justified
Now I'm imagining captured carbon being sequestered in the form of diamonds, thus paying for itself many times over and also breaking a different malign monopoly responsible for great bloodshed and suffering.
I think it was David Roberts at Vox who pointed out that, as heavy as concrete emissions are, it's unfortunately a really difficult process to decarbonize. In the future I'd hope to see more developments in advanced materials science...the cool things they're doing with wood these days are incredible, for example.
People also, I think, underestimate the symbolic power of an open flame. There's a reason fire shows up so often in religious iconography, meditative practices, seasonal rituals...it's one of those Very Human things, in a way that the technological whiz-bang of magnetic current resistance just isn't. (But imagine a transparent induction cooktop with embedded plasma ball technology. That would be very cool in many of the same ways! Name that stove company Thor or Zeus or something and you've cornered the market.)
Gas vs electric or gas vs induction? I understand that resistant coils suck, but induction appears to be on par with gas on net. The disadvantages to induction (magnetic pots, wok cooking, learning to monitor temp) do not appear to be show stoppers, but I'm not running a restaurant. Perhaps the electric service size needed to power a commercial kitchen is a show stopper in some areas?
I've heard some chefs love induction as another option and can offer great (and much more safe) high heat performance. But as you mention it locks you into certain cookware and many culinary creatives will not want to limit options even a lil. I think that's the biggest reason induction is not more widely embraced in commercial cooking, but I do see it more and more. The visual indicator of the flame is more important than it might sound in a fast moving kitchen too. And the flame itself can sometimes come in handy for scorching etc. Our kitchen uses both gas and electric oven. Some prefer electric ovens esp for baking because it is totally dry and more even/steady but the gas is cheaper to run for sure and some like it better for roasts.
If you're not dying to use your wok, I wouldn't balk for a second at induction for home use for an instant, especially because of the safety.
Those are good questions, and I have personally made the choice for gas at home and induction at a small condo we own. I think I should be allowed to make those choices, based on my circumstances, risk tolerance and desires. I don't think the government -- federal or state -- should be allowed to make that choice for me.
One quick comment- I believe there are two operating EPA permitted Class VI injection wells at the Archer Daniels Midland plant in Decatur, Illinois. So very few, but not quite zero.
The worry for me is that the carbon captured will be generating permits that allow other companies to continue their emissions leading to maybe a net-zero but maybe something worse. There's a lot of fraud and near-fraud out there. I'm thinking here of companies like Pachama but also of ESG investing that seems to be selling carbon credits to emit carbon *now* for future projects that may *someday* remove carbon. A recent example: The Nature Conservancy found that it was selling meaningless carbon credits to companies like Disney, BlackRock etc. which allowed them to claim they'd lowered their emissions. I feel like this whole area needs to be carefully watched to make sure that the amount of carbon being removed from the atmosphere is greater than the amount being emitted by people purchasing their credits. Otherwise, what's the benefit?
I agree with this article, but Matt is too pessimistic about internal combustion engines. There will be a threshold where most gas stations are not viable, and then it becomes a real pain to refuel your car. There will always be some classic car enthusiasts, but as a practical form of transportation, ICE's days are numbered.
So -- what’s your timeline for “days are numbers” here? In the US, current EV new vehicle sale rates put EVs reaching 50% of the 300m vehicles in operation around 2040. I expect ICEs to be running through 2060.
I wonder if the same will happen with natural gas. At some point (fingers crossed!) there will so few houses with gas stoves, central heating and water heaters that maintaining the grid will be uneconomical.
The promised piece! Ever since the Wapo article (*checks notes*) a whole eight days ago, we've been waiting to learn more about these.
“…emissions associated with activities like grilling…”
Why are you grilling on anything other than sustainable hardwood charcoal?
Wood Pellets
For grilling or smoking?
Yes
I don’t see how pellets could get as hot as charcoal.
My grill regularly gets to 450 F.
My Green Mountain pellet grill just went down after 7 years of service. RIP. I'll buy American next time, lol
Gas grills are way more convenient. I genuinely cannot remember the last time I went to a cookout where the host was using charcoal, but I suspect it's approaching 25 years. (I know my parents replaced their charcoal grill with a gas grill in the 1990s.)
I used gas grills for years and then saw the light and switched to a Weber kettle grill.
Agree with the overall thrust of this, but for the California ICE example--if they actually ban all new ICE car sales in 2035, what type of gasoline station network will exist in 2050? The vast majority of cars on the road are not 15 years old, and I'd think a lot of the infrastructure to sell gasoline (which I believe is already low margin but made up for on non-gas services) would cease to exist which would create range issues kind of like with EVs but worse since you would not have the option of refueling at your destination. I'd think there'd be a tipping point where ICE's are not a feasible transportation option.
Companies distribute industrial chemicals and gases all day every day to all kinds of businesses. If gas stations go the way of the dodo, which they will, then if you needed gas for you ‘57 Chevy or early 2000s M3 you’d just order 15 gallons online and have it delivered. It would be a lucrative sideline for someone.
But it would be expensive enough that the traditional purchasers of old used cars would skip to medium aged used electric cars rather than deal with this.
EVs have a non linear deprecation curve because the battery needs to be replaced at some point in the lifecycle. This will keep used EV prices greatly above the tradition ICE used vehicle market.
I’m not saying you couldn’t have a vintage ICE of some sort or find a way to power it. But this would be a novelty, not something you’d use for normal transport.
Hydrogen powered self-driving gasoline distribution truck as a service. You subscribe. Your ICE car has a little gadget that pings the truck when low and coordinates that with your typical parking patterns so that the truck is there when you are about to need to drive.
You can pry my v12 DB9 from my cold, dead hands.
The average (not sure if this mean or median or what) car on US roads is slightly over 12 years old. Even if California does succeed in banning ICE sales in 2035, there will still be millions of ICE cars on their roads in 2050. Gas stations will be accessible for a long time, although the density might decrease.
12 years isn’t a law of nature. It was 8 year avg not that long ago, but increased used car prices and lower car production have increased cost of changing cars and it has ticked up year by year. If the costs and annoyance of keeping your ICE go up and EV goes down, I think you’ll see this number flip for ICEs. But I guess we will see!
Oops. Double posted the same comment. There will be over 100m ICE cars in operation in 2050. No question about it.
The average vehicle age in operation in the US is 12 model years old and continuing to age. The current gas station network will exist as is through 2060. Post that tbd. Don’t forget the major profit driver of a gas station is the convenience store. The gas is thin margin.
Heavy trucks will take a long longer to electrify than ordinary passengers cars. So long as gas stations remain for them, passenger cars still running on gas will be able to use them.
Drivers of ICE cars will not run into any problems finding a gas station for a long, long time.
Heavy trucks run on diesel so how does that help gasoline powered car folks?
I think Eric's point is focused on the gas stations. Most sell diesel.
Without changes to the processes around building transmission lines, not sure we ever get to a good grid. Been trying to build the Grain Belt Express since 2006 or 2008, somewhere in there. Year after year, fight after fight, one county and one landowner at a time. And I don't think any ground has been broken.
I was looking forward to Matt’s take on the Class VI well program but was disappointed in the dearth of actual information and inaccuracies in the post. I think it is great to throw some light on this issue but let’s use some good information! Eg EPA regulates these wells under the Safe Drinking Water Act, it has long regulated injection wells, that’s why this is the sixth class. EPA genuinely seems to be slow on approving state programs. I can’t tell how slow they are on permits without more digging but as of their October 2022 report to Congress they had issued six permits, not zero, though only two were actually constructed. They had permit applications for nine projects pending, some of which involve more than one permit. That report also describes EPA’s efforts to streamline their processes from those used to process the first applications.
Are they on the right track? Should they be doing more? Is the White House not paying enough attention? I don’t know, but hoped for a more informed take here.