Cheap Seats 2024 By Rich Trzupek

Cooking With Gas - 02/21

By Rich Trzupek
  The thing about spending a career in the environmental field is that every time you think you’ve heard the stupidest proposal ever the green machine manages to come out with something even more idiotic than their last idea. Having pretty much banned the burning of coal throughout the country it seems they’re now determined on banning the burning of anything.
  Call it fire phobia or fear of combustion or whatever you like. This obsession about releasing energy through thermal oxidation, that’s fire if you’re keeping score, is getting completely absurd. Now we have blue states waging war on gas-fired residential ovens.
  When I first heard about this trend I assumed the story originated from someplace like the Onion or the Babylon Bee. But that was hoping for too much. We have a substantial portion of our society who are convinced that getting rid of stoves that burn natural gas will save the planet.
  The argument, such as it is, goes something like this: Lots of people have gas-fired stoves. Gas-fired stoves emit carbon dioxide. So, if we stop using gas-fired stoves we will reduce emissions of carbon dioxide by lots.
  What’s that? You want numbers? I’ll get your numbers. According to seconds of research I did on the interwebs, about 47.1 million households use gas fired stoves. Those stoves consume about 18,000 Btu per hour of natural gas when they are operating. Let’s assume that the average stove gets used for two hours per day. That strikes me as a high estimate, but one should try to be conservative when going through the exercise.
  When you do the math household gas-fired ranges account for about 35 million tons per year of carbon dioxide emissions. Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? It’s not. That’s about how much carbon dioxide China emitted yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that, etcetera.
  I calculate that natural gas-fired stoves account for about 0.5 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. According to the EPA total greenhouse gas emissions from US sources are running about 5.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year. Incidentally that number is down 17 percent from US greenhouse gas emissions in 2005.
  Going back to the PRC in 2005 they emitted about 7.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. That grew by about 80 percent since then and they’re now emitting about 13 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. In other words the amount of extra carbon dioxide they put into the air since 2005 exceeds all of the emissions from the United States these days.
  Now I’m no Greta Thunberg (thank the Lord) but if I were so extremely worried about the effects of greenhouse gases, I think it would be way more effective to bitch at President Xi than to try to shame some couple out of using their Kenmore gas range.
  In a practical sense, if everyone currently using gas stoves traded them in for electrics, I doubt if the net effect would be any reduction in greenhouse gas emissions anyway. A whole lot of our electricity still comes from burning things, only now it’s a lot more natural gas that we’re burning in lieu of coal.
  If we burn natural gas at the power plant to generate electricity that we use in to run a stove the laws of thermodynamics tell us that we will burn more natural gas that way than if we just burned it in the damned stove to begin with. I would bet that the scenario I described would actually end up raising overall greenhouse gas emissions in the United States.
  It would not be surprising to find that this silly idea originated in the home of most silly ideas: the People’s Republic of California. This is the state whose flawed forest management practices lead to wildfires of hellish dimensions and who doesn’t count hydroelectric power as renewable. Although I suppose given how poorly they manage their water perhaps they shouldn’t. Perhaps Leo DiCaprio we’ll use his private jet to fly in electrics for everybody. Gotta save that planet!
  Email: richtrzupek@gmail.com