Last month, new research showing that 12 percent of childhood asthma can be linked to gas stoves took over the news cycle. Suddenly, gas stoves were a hot topic on nightly news programs across America.
The study ignited backlash from conservative pundits, especially after a commissioner from the US Consumer Product Safety Commission said stricter regulation of gas stoves was on the table.
But there’s nothing new about the connection between gas stoves and health. The latest findings build off decades of public health research, which most people have never heard of – in part due to a powerful marketing effort by the gas industry.
This week, we dive beyond the outrage cycle and into the data. Guest Brady Seals talks about what 50 years of research tells us about the impact of gas stoves, and how the latest findings will influence the policy push to get gas out of buildings.
Full Transcript:
Stephen Lacey
I imagine the last few weeks have been pretty crazy for you.
Brady Seals
They have! The last few weeks have been a wild ride and a lot of people are really hearing about the health and climate impacts for the first time.
Stephen Lacey
That’s RMI researcher Brady Seals. And a few weeks ago, she co authored a study on gas stoves that you’ve likely heard about by now,
TV Host
In a shocking statistic, a reporter’s tweet went viral linking childhood asthma cases to gas stoves, but is your stove to blame? Ron Jones verifies.
Stephen Lacey
The study exploded outside of the tight circles of public health researchers and people who care about electrification. Suddenly, the link between gas stoves and asthma was on news channels across America
TV Host
Can 12.7% of childhood asthma cases be tied to that common appliance? A peer reviewed study published last month found that 12.7% number, and they use data from the American Housing Survey estimating that gas stoves are used in more than a third of all US homes.
Stephen Lacey
And naturally, the topic was put through the wash, rinse repeat cycle of conservative punditry, with Tucker Carlson leading the outrage.
TV Host
Now, gas stoves have been the staple of American kitchens for more than a century. You may have one in your home, you may have grown up with one. But apparently nobody knew this until like a week ago. These stoves are a hidden hazard that we must eliminate. Well, unfortunately for The Washington Post newsroom and the Biden administration and most of all, the Chinese government not everyone in America was immediately on board with the idea of getting rid of your gas stoves because they’re a hidden hazard.
Brady Seals
I have gotten some hate mail. I’ve also gotten a lot of hate tweets and hate messages in my Twitter. One thing, I don’t know if the other Brady Seals is getting most of my hate mail because when I took my husband’s name, I found out that there’s actually country singer named Brady Seals. And so Brady Seals, at Brady Seals on Twitter, if you are getting that hate mail, I’m sorry, I hope you don’t love your gas stove.
Stephen Lacey
Part of the shock and outrage came after a regulator at the US Consumer Product Safety Commission said stricter regulation of gas stoves was on the table in reaction to the research. But the really surprising thing was missed on cable television; it was that these findings aren’t actually new. They build off decades of public health research, which most people have never even heard of.
Brady Seals
There’s actually over 57 studies going back to the 70s. So 50 years. There’ve been two meta analyses on gas cooking and childhood health: one in 1992, and another one in 2013. And nothing has really changed. That was the shocking thing. You know, you think that stoves might get better, emissions might get better, but each study and each decade of science has really confirmed what the decade before found, which is that there are these links between health. And so when I talk to these experts in the field from I mean top universities, top really well-respected researchers all over then I just started thinking how are there no standards for gas stove? It’s like they have a free pass to pollute, and that they have since they’ve been in our homes, which is, you know, over 100 years.
Stephen Lacey
I guess the the question that our audience is probably naturally asking is the same that you asked which is why. Why don’t we know about this? Why was this research just sitting there?
Brady Seals
Overall, there has been a really robust marketing effort by the gas industry.
Stephen Lacey
The gas industry is paid experts to testify at regulatory hearings, paid influencers to promote the use of gas stoves over electric ones, even made corny music videos hammering the message home.
Brady Seals
There has been a really genius marketing campaign by the gas industry to help us fall in love with our gas stoves, and help us think it’s a superior product. And “now you’re cooking with gas” is the saying that we all use.
Stephen Lacey
We are in familiar territory. The gas industry’s marketing effort has been used by other industries to cover up harmful effects of their products, from the health impacts of tobacco use to the climate impacts of fossil fuels. But eventually people catch on and perception shifts, sometimes quickly.
Brady Seals
I had some some of the air quality and health experts calling me and saying “I can’t believe this. I’ve worked on this for decades. And finally you know my sister in law is calling me because she saw something on the Today Show” or I think that the gas stoves has sort of become this wedge issue. But it’s also a really exciting opportunity because it’s also gas stoves are called a gateway into other appliances.
Stephen Lacey
This week: beyond the outrage cycle and into the data. What does 50 years of research tell us about the impact of gas stoves? And how might the latest findings influence the policy push to get gas out of buildings? So tell me about the origins of your focus on gas stove specifically, like how did this question about indoor air quality and human health and gas stove start to come up for you?
Brady Seals
So RMI is focused on the energy transition: How do we get rid of fossil fuels and start using renewables across any sector that uses energy, which is a lot. So I happen to be in our buildings program and we were looking at things like heat pumps and furnaces and how do we how do we really move off of fossil fuels. But an interesting thing started happening. We started talking to public health experts and air quality experts who said, you know, the gas stove has this outsized health impact. There’ve been years of studies was very little action on how gas stoves are linked to poor health. And the more we talk to researchers, the more we talk to health and air quality experts, we realized that there was this huge trove of research, but it hadn’t really been condensed and put out there into the public realm.
Stephen Lacey
So specifically, what are the findings that you released in this latest report?
Brady Seals
There are these things called meta analyses. So these look at all the studies that have come before them and they summarize the data of all these individual studies. And so the last meta analysis we have from 2013, they looked at the 41 studies that came before and they said, based on all these results, we conclude that children living in a home with a gas stove have a 42% increased risk of having asthma. So the latest study is very straightforward. We partnered with two epidemiologists, and we used a common tool in which we looked at this relative risk, this 42% and we said, Okay, let’s apply this to US census data. And we know how many homes with children cook with gas in the US, it’s about 43%. And so we just applied this increased risk, and it shows the strength of the relationship. And we found that 12.7% of childhood asthma could be attributed to gas stove use. But in some states, it was much higher, because for example, in Illinois, 80% of households with children cook with gas. And so in that state, it was about 21%, similar in California and New York. So this is very much a state specific piece. And the the difference in the numbers is totally related to how many households with children cook with gas.
Stephen Lacey
Now some people might hear at 12.7% and say, Okay, that seems like a lot. But what do I compare that to? And you compare it to secondhand smoke exposure? So that would be like the number of kids at risk of asthma due to secondhand smoke exposure. Is that right?
Brady Seals
Exactly. This was the surprising thing, and this was the “putting into context” that we were looking for. So the population attributable fraction, which is what we calculated, has been done for lots of different exposures and outcomes. So when we looked at, Okay, who else is calculated this PAF – population attributable fraction – for other factors, we found that for childhood asthma it was very similar to exposure to secondhand smoke.
Stephen Lacey
So let’s talk about the pollutants that get released by gas stoves. So they emit NO2, benzene, PM 2.5. Walk me through each of these and how much is emitted and why they’re hazardous to human health.
Brady Seals
Yes, gas stoves emit a mixture of pollutants while they’re on but more research is increasingly showing that they can actually be releasing pollutants even while they’re off. Leaking pollutants like the benzene you mentioned, alongside methane leaks. So a couple pollutants of concern. Nitrogen dioxide is invisible gas. It’s a known respiratory irritant, and this is the pollutant that the EPA says exposure in the short term causes asthma attacks, exasperates asthma attacks. Then there’s fine particulate matter PM 2.5, which refers to the size – so these are particles which some cooking and even if you are burning your toast in a toaster will release PM 2.5. So some of this is unavoidable because of the cooking process. But we’ve seen from studies that gas flames themselves produce two times the amount of particulate matter. And these are harmful because they can penetrate deep into the lungs. They’re so tiny, and they can actually even get into the bloodstream. So PM 2.5 is a health-harming pollutant. Then there’s carbon monoxide. Many of us hear about carbon monoxide when it comes to terrible disasters and tragedies, because it can be deadly in high doses. And all of these are happening because of incomplete combustion of burning the fossil fuel inside the home. Some homes have higher carbon monoxide levels than than others. So those are the few that I would mention, because we have the most data on them. There are also formaldehyde, which seems to be more of a problem with simmering, but there’s less studies. And then some of the new research which is looking at, they actually found there’s about 200 different chemicals that are present in gas. Twenty-one of those are air toxins, like benzene, which is a known carcinogen with no safe exposure limit. And so we know that gas stoves leak about one percent of the methane even while they’re off. So the question is, are they also leaking and releasing other pollutants even while we’re not cooking?
Stephen Lacey
So the EPA doesn’t regulate indoor air quality and some of these gas stoves can produce NO2 levels that would be illegal outdoor. So why doesn’t EPA actually regulate indoor air quality?
Brady Seals
Isn’t this wild? This to me is the biggest black hole. We spend 90% of our time indoors. And if you go to the EPA website, they say our indoor spaces can be two to five and as high as a hundred times more polluted than outdoors. The outdoor one-hour standard for nitrogen dioxide is 100 parts per billion. We know from studies that baking a cake, for example, in a gas oven will give you a reading of 230 parts per billion. And some recent researchers have found that in just a couple minutes of turning the stove on less than five minutes, they’re reaching levels of 100 parts per billion. And I will say that the World Health Organization in 2021, they revised their air quality guidelines for indoor and outdoor spaces. And for nitrogen dioxide, they found that a safe 24-hour exposure level is 13 parts per billion. So clearly the gas stove is a source in our home. And it can be a primary source of some of this pollution. So I really do think that with this attention on indoor air from COVID, from lots of other reasons, it’s time for EPA to revisit setting indoor air quality guidelines.
Stephen Lacey
So one of the things that confuses me about this debate, when Tucker Carlson gets on TV and says they’re coming to take your stoves, you better hang on to your gas stove. So when you actually look at household data, the most common type of stove is an electric stove. And it’s primarily in the middle of the country. So the actual adoption of electric stoves doesn’t correlate to the culture war that people are trying to whip up on cable news.
Brady Seals
Absolutely. This is so fascinating. Much of the south and especially the southeast is already electrified. And we see that across the country, one in four homes is already all electric. And I’ve seen this too. And in our study, we looked at Florida, for example, and we found that only 9% of households with children in Florida cook with gas. And so I think we’re seeing a lot of that messaging coming from Florida, but it doesn’t necessarily correlate with the lived experience of many Floridians, for example, who most of them have electric stoves. And this is so fascinating, because, in some cases where there are gas stoves that fall where there was gas lighting. And so we see in New York, California, Illinois, really high levels of households cooking with gas. So in Illinois, we found 80% of households with children cook with gas, in California was 74%. So these really are often the blue states where we have the highest penetration of gas use.
Stephen Lacey
So shortly after you published this paper Richard Trumka, a commissioner at the Consumer Product Safety Commission said that any option was on the table when it came to regulating gas stoves. He was asked about this in an interview with Bloomberg and he said that anything is possible at this point, I have kids, you know, I’m concerned about this, we would even consider a ban. And that, of course ignited this wave of backlash and vitriol on cable news and in congressional politics. Tell me about those comments and what they did to ignite this debate.
Brady Seals
Well, technically, gas stoves are a consumer product. So it falls under the Consumer Product Safety Commission, or CPSC, to do something about them. And there actually are documentations, going back into the mid 80s, that the CPSC and the Environmental Protection Agency or EPA, were worried about the health impacts of gas stoves, and we’re raising the alarm bells about some of these studies about nitrogen dioxide yet nothing happened at all. So gas stoves, some of the things that the CPSC could do is put warning labels on gas stoves, they could launch educational campaigns, a lot of people don’t know about this. They could set, and this is something that I feel like is very basic, mandatory performance standards. We should be knowing that the emission levels, pollution levels from these stoves, they should be meeting a health-based standard.
Stephen Lacey
And of course this comes during a major local regulatory push to maybe ban new gas connections in new construction, to regulate only zero-carbon energy on a new construction. And I think this momentum is picking up in cities around the country. So what are the implications for this research on future regulations of gas and buildings? Do you expect this to push that momentum forward?
Brady Seals
I’m really glad you brought this up. Already, we’re living in a moment where almost 100 cities and communities have passed all-electric required or all-electric preferred bills. And we estimate that 31 million people are living in communities where this kind of new construction policies are on the books. But there’s one thing that happens often, which is that gas stoves are exempted. So you could still build a home, a building, with a gas stove, although you wouldn’t be able to put in a gas furnace or water heater. And the issue with that is that we’ll still be putting in costly climate damaging pipelines to feed just the gas stove, which is a much smaller energy user than some of the other ones. And so for me, I think that, and I hope that this research can get folded into the bigger piece of gas stoves have an outsized health impact, because they’re the appliance in our home that’s not universally required to be vented outdoors. And there’s a real health rationale to make sure that stoves are included. So I think this research and this moment are going to make it harder to exempt or forget about the gas stove.
Stephen Lacey
So as many of our listeners will remember from our electrician shortage episode, I’ve been working for the last year and change to electrify my house. I bought an old bed and breakfast that needed to be renovated and we rewired the house, we put in heat pumps, we’ve dramatically slashed our gas heating, put in an electric dryer. And now we’re looking to renovate the kitchen and put in an electric cooktop and electric stove, and electric water heater. But before we do any of that additional work, we need a main service upgrade. And so we’re talking about a much bigger investment before we actually swap out those appliances. And so we’re sitting here with gas in our kitchen still. And I have a three year old daughter. And you know, she likes to come into the kitchen when I’m cooking. And so this research is really worrisome. And so when if someone like me is out there who’s still cooking with gas, who understands these risks, how do I mitigate those risks?
Brady Seals
This is a great question and there are things that you can do starting today. So you can reduce your exposure, mitigate the risk, in a couple of ways. One, if you have a range hood, which some of us don’t, but if you do, you can use it every time you cook, and actually cooking on the back burners is where it’s most effective. So that’s the first place if you don’t have any kind of ventilation over your stove, you can open a window. Researchers from Yale told me even opening up a window for five minutes can help disperse some of those pollutants. Then the next step is to displace some of your gas cooking. So I have a friend with the gas stove and and a little baby and they’ve actually displaced 80% of their cooking from the gas stove by using a toaster oven, Instant Pot, and electric kettle. So it’s not the perfect solution, but it’s something you can definitely do to try to turn on your gas stove less. And then the next one where you can really displace a good amount of cooking is to buy an induction stove plug-in; a one or two burner. I’ve seen some creative pieces where people will put sheet pans or butcher blocks over their gas stove, plug in their induction stove at the top. And now with the inflation Reduction Act, people can get up to $840 to get a new electric stove. So hopefully that can help as well but I think the risk is really real. And I feel for parents and caregivers who are hearing about this for the first time, but know there are these couple of stages of things that you can do to help reduce your risk until you can eliminate it by removing the source.
Stephen Lacey
Yeah, so when this blew up, it was framed as a culture war. Do you think the science got lost as it the debate unfolded in the press?
Brady Seals
I do feel like the science got lost a little bit because there was one huge misunderstanding, which was that no one was ever going to come for anybody’s gas stove. Anything that would happen from the CPSC would relate to new stoves, new regulations, new protections on new stoves. So I think this fear that people were going to come into your house or Joe Biden was going to come into your house and take the gas stove was just totally blown out of proportion. People were taping themselves to their gas stoves on Twitter and leaving all their their burners firing, which is what we’re trying to help educate people about the pollutants that are emitted when gas stoves are released. And so I fear that that was lost a little bit. But what gives me a lot of hope is that I don’t think that’s the majority of people.
Stephen Lacey
Brady Seals is a manager for carbon free buildings at RMI. Brady, thank you so much.
Brady Seals
Thanks for having me, this was fun.
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