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I hope you don't use that stove to cook, because if you do, you are putting hundreds of times more harmful particulates into the air than the stove puts out alo

I hope you don't use that stove to cook, because if you do, you are putting hundreds of times more harmful particulates into the air than the stove puts out alone. This is the same kind of "green"-feeling hypocrisy as the plastic bag bans. After Australia banned plastic bags, they found an increased amount of plastic in their landfills. Why? Because people used to re-use them as trash bags and were now buying much thicker dedicated plastic bags for the purpose.

amluto 4y ago
> you are putting hundreds of times more harmful particulates into the air than the stove puts out alone. This is true and entirely misses the point. A gas stove emits NOx. Cooking some foods at high temperature emits particulates. Different cause, different poison. Also, an air filter can easily remove particulates, but getting rid of NOx with anything other than outright replacement of the air is not so easy. edit: NOx is for real, and calling it a “green” issue is disingenuous. As far as I know, NOx emissions from stoves are not a particular threat to neighbors or overall outdoor air quality. But they are substantial when concentrated in a house: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.1c04707 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.1c04707 (Seriously, look at the last graph in the supplementary material. Admittedly it’s an oven, not a stove, but those levels are no joke and the operating time needed to hit them is low. Baking a pie or cooking a big pot of pasta with a gas oven or stove in a kitchen without proper ventilation is quite unhealthy. And those recirculating carbon filter vents won’t help.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  > ADDITION / CORRECTION This article has been corrected. View the notice. The studies on this are questionable at best regarding the health effects, and it is disingenuous to say that the science on this is anywhere near settled - plenty of refutations exist out there. If you're worried, open a window.
  - sonarone 4y ago
    Clicking on the correction shows that correction is just on a single figure, so that's not supporting your argument: > A corrected version of Figure 3 is below, where in Panel A r2 = 0.59 is changed to r2 = 0.58.
    - pclmulqdq 4y ago
      Yeah, I generally follow the idea that if a paper has one revealed error, it probably has a lot more errors that they didn't provide enough evidence to catch, so I didn't read what the correction was. This is a pretty dumb error to get through the writing process. Also, if you want to see some well-cited posts on the tenuous evidence of health effects of NOx, other posts in this comments section have plenty of sources. Even the link to asthma is pretty tenuous, apparently.
      - amluto 4y ago
        On a quick search, NO may not be particularly toxic at the concentrations in question. (And your body produces it!). NO seems like it’s mostly a problem outdoors because of other stuff it reacts with. But NO2 is certainly toxic, and it looks like stoves product about 1/4 as much NO2 as total NOx. (I also recall reading that stoves, with no pot or pan on them, produce minimal CO, but that gas ovens produce lots of CO. Also, residential gas ovens are IMO really quite bad at cooking.)
        pclmulqdq 4y ago
        One extra thing about both NO and NO2 that the narrative on this really discounts (but you touched on) is that they are both fairly reactive, so they tend not to linger in the air. This makes them damaging to whatever environment the end up in, but a lot less likely to build up to toxic levels than stable molecules like CO and CO2. The dose makes the poison, and these ones are hard to get in high dosages. And yeah, the cheap residential gas ovens really suck, and likely put out a lot more of the bad stuff (both CH4 and CO, but also probably the NOx compounds too) than stovetops. Mixed fuel is now the hot thing in ranges: gas burners and electric ovens.
askvictor 4y ago
> I hope you don't use that stove to cook, because if you do, you are putting hundreds of times more harmful particulates into the air than the stove puts out alone. Really depends on how you cook. If you're not frying, this isn't really a problem. > This is the same kind of "green"-feeling hypocrisy as the plastic bag bans. After Australia banned plastic bags, they found an increased amount of plastic in their landfills. But a big part of this was to reduce plastic litter. Plastic in landfill isn't really a problem (oil being dug from the ground being put back into the ground). But putting a (small) price on plastics makes people a little less careless with them.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  > But a big part of this was to reduce plastic litter. Plastic in landfill isn't really a problem (oil being dug from the ground being put back into the ground). But putting a (small) price on plastics makes people a little less careless with them. Motte, meet bailey. There is more plastic polluting the environment in Australia thanks to plastic bag bans, and they have been replaced by paper bags which emit 10x more CO2 per bag (or reusable bags that break even on CO2 after a few hundred to a thousand uses). This should be considered a huge L for the "environmentalists" who pushed it, on all fronts.
  - askvictor 4y ago
    > There is more plastic polluting the environment in Australia thanks to plastic bag bans Do you have a source for this? Specifically, plastic litter (not in landfill)? Preferably attributable to plastic bag bans and not just following a pre-existing trend? > they have been replaced by paper bags which emit 10x more CO2 First up, who is giving you paper bags? I haven't come across one store that has replaced plastic bags with paper. Second, this argument was never about atmospheric CO2.
- john_the_writer 4y ago
  Ha ha.. I know we're supposed to, but I've not changed one bit because of these new bags. A typical shop is now 1$ more expensive with the bags, that's where I stop thinking about it. When I'm out, and my wife calls me to ask me to pick up something at the shop, I don't have my plastic bag with me, so I buy another one. And it ends up in the bin. Now instead of a thin bit of plastic, I've got a bag that's easily 5 times thicker, and took way more to produce. It's performative.
freetime2 4y ago
> After Australia banned plastic bags, they found an increased amount of plastic in their landfills. Why? Because people used to re-use them as trash bags and were now buying much thicker dedicated plastic bags for the purpose. Do you have a citation for this?
- jhugo 4y ago
  Not GP, but single-use plastic bags have been banned in Indonesia too, and the shops/restaurants/etc now send you a new, substantially thicker, reusable plastic bag with every single delivery, with no convenient mechanism to reuse them. Classic case of excessive focus on one part of a much larger system.

amluto 4y ago

> you are putting hundreds of times more harmful particulates into the air than the stove puts out alone. This is true and entirely misses the point. A gas stove emits NOx. Cooking some foods at high temperature emits particulates. Different cause, different poison. Also, an air filter can easily remove particulates, but getting rid of NOx with anything other than outright replacement of the air is not so easy. edit: NOx is for real, and calling it a “green” issue is disingenuous. As far as I know, NOx emissions from stoves are not a particular threat to neighbors or overall outdoor air quality. But they are substantial when concentrated in a house: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.1c04707 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.1c04707 (Seriously, look at the last graph in the supplementary material. Admittedly it’s an oven, not a stove, but those levels are no joke and the operating time needed to hit them is low. Baking a pie or cooking a big pot of pasta with a gas oven or stove in a kitchen without proper ventilation is quite unhealthy. And those recirculating carbon filter vents won’t help.

pclmulqdq 4y ago
> ADDITION / CORRECTION This article has been corrected. View the notice. The studies on this are questionable at best regarding the health effects, and it is disingenuous to say that the science on this is anywhere near settled - plenty of refutations exist out there. If you're worried, open a window.
- sonarone 4y ago
  Clicking on the correction shows that correction is just on a single figure, so that's not supporting your argument: > A corrected version of Figure 3 is below, where in Panel A r2 = 0.59 is changed to r2 = 0.58.
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    Yeah, I generally follow the idea that if a paper has one revealed error, it probably has a lot more errors that they didn't provide enough evidence to catch, so I didn't read what the correction was. This is a pretty dumb error to get through the writing process. Also, if you want to see some well-cited posts on the tenuous evidence of health effects of NOx, other posts in this comments section have plenty of sources. Even the link to asthma is pretty tenuous, apparently.
    - amluto 4y ago
      On a quick search, NO may not be particularly toxic at the concentrations in question. (And your body produces it!). NO seems like it’s mostly a problem outdoors because of other stuff it reacts with. But NO2 is certainly toxic, and it looks like stoves product about 1/4 as much NO2 as total NOx. (I also recall reading that stoves, with no pot or pan on them, produce minimal CO, but that gas ovens produce lots of CO. Also, residential gas ovens are IMO really quite bad at cooking.)
      - pclmulqdq 4y ago
        One extra thing about both NO and NO2 that the narrative on this really discounts (but you touched on) is that they are both fairly reactive, so they tend not to linger in the air. This makes them damaging to whatever environment the end up in, but a lot less likely to build up to toxic levels than stable molecules like CO and CO2. The dose makes the poison, and these ones are hard to get in high dosages. And yeah, the cheap residential gas ovens really suck, and likely put out a lot more of the bad stuff (both CH4 and CO, but also probably the NOx compounds too) than stovetops. Mixed fuel is now the hot thing in ranges: gas burners and electric ovens.

askvictor 4y ago

> I hope you don't use that stove to cook, because if you do, you are putting hundreds of times more harmful particulates into the air than the stove puts out alone. Really depends on how you cook. If you're not frying, this isn't really a problem. > This is the same kind of "green"-feeling hypocrisy as the plastic bag bans. After Australia banned plastic bags, they found an increased amount of plastic in their landfills. But a big part of this was to reduce plastic litter. Plastic in landfill isn't really a problem (oil being dug from the ground being put back into the ground). But putting a (small) price on plastics makes people a little less careless with them.

pclmulqdq 4y ago
> But a big part of this was to reduce plastic litter. Plastic in landfill isn't really a problem (oil being dug from the ground being put back into the ground). But putting a (small) price on plastics makes people a little less careless with them. Motte, meet bailey. There is more plastic polluting the environment in Australia thanks to plastic bag bans, and they have been replaced by paper bags which emit 10x more CO2 per bag (or reusable bags that break even on CO2 after a few hundred to a thousand uses). This should be considered a huge L for the "environmentalists" who pushed it, on all fronts.
- askvictor 4y ago
  > There is more plastic polluting the environment in Australia thanks to plastic bag bans Do you have a source for this? Specifically, plastic litter (not in landfill)? Preferably attributable to plastic bag bans and not just following a pre-existing trend? > they have been replaced by paper bags which emit 10x more CO2 First up, who is giving you paper bags? I haven't come across one store that has replaced plastic bags with paper. Second, this argument was never about atmospheric CO2.
john_the_writer 4y ago
Ha ha.. I know we're supposed to, but I've not changed one bit because of these new bags. A typical shop is now 1$ more expensive with the bags, that's where I stop thinking about it. When I'm out, and my wife calls me to ask me to pick up something at the shop, I don't have my plastic bag with me, so I buy another one. And it ends up in the bin. Now instead of a thin bit of plastic, I've got a bag that's easily 5 times thicker, and took way more to produce. It's performative.

freetime2 4y ago

> After Australia banned plastic bags, they found an increased amount of plastic in their landfills. Why? Because people used to re-use them as trash bags and were now buying much thicker dedicated plastic bags for the purpose. Do you have a citation for this?

jhugo 4y ago
Not GP, but single-use plastic bags have been banned in Indonesia too, and the shops/restaurants/etc now send you a new, substantially thicker, reusable plastic bag with every single delivery, with no convenient mechanism to reuse them. Classic case of excessive focus on one part of a much larger system.