So aside from the trite references to contestant slips (everyone needs to add a distraction from their main point, right?) there are a number of points in this article that we should address.
How much gas-cutting is enough?
Of course the sheer quantity of gas being burned daily is a climate-frying disaster. But industry chews through the majority of that. Energy generating with gas generators is a load-balancing technique that's still used worldwide. And when I say "Industry" back there, think the huge industries that churn out potato chips and similar.
Home uses of gas would come somewhere after that. And I haven't gotten to the topic of "cooking" yet. We use gas to heat homes, heat water, those are still large-scale uses of gas in domestic settings. The gas cookers and ovens in homes are down the list a bit, but not far.
Time For The Activism
Taking all homes off gas for energy would be a significant saving, but it's only making more room for corporations to argue that they NEED to use gas still, they NEED to keep polluting and IT'S ONLY A LITTLE BITTY TEENY WEENY bit now that all those scurrilous criminal domestic users have come to their senses...
Don't let them get away with that. We're being sold how much more convenient, how much more economical our changeover to electric will be, so don't let them raise the price of chips and pretzels because suddenly it's "less economical now..." I can't stress this enough. Don't let's let us always be the fall guys for both situations. Bring the fight to the corporations, the government.
For changing to all-electric households, fight for a Government "ecological rebate" on our electric bills - we did what you asked, now do your bit for us! Industry hasn't changed to all-electric? Charge THEM an "ecological damage tax" and use that to fund our rebate!
Now Let's Find The Balance
The major harm that comes from our reliance on gas in the home are carbon monoxide (CO) and CO2, and particulates emitted. These are the things that should drive our decision. As we've seen, being the climate villains for not switching is a pretty weak claim, and as usual it's just a corporate ploy to offload their responsibilities onto us.
I have COPD/emphysema. I also totally LOVED cooking with gas. (And remember that the slogan "Now you're cooking with gas!!" was a corporate bit of propaganda designed to sell fossil fuel in the first place so don't give the bastards a single inch!.) But I suspect that had I not been cooking with gas for 50 years, I might still have all my respiratory capacity...
So base your decision on that. It's a far more human reason than to do it because some effing corporation has skimped o forward planning shift to electric. Tine for my 'stolen slogan' --
KEEP THE BASTARDS HONEST!
The situation this slogan was created for was different and now somewhat dated, but the spirit of it never gets old.
Here's a CO balance: CO vs COnvenience. Yes gas is convenient but - is it? I have two induction cooktops and an air fryer and an electric stove now. I've used electric blenders and mixers and slow cooker and rice cookers and steamers for decades over hand beaters, wooden spoons, and more pots and pans using up space on the stove.
And actually, the electric appliances are more convenient. Aside from the stove, everything else has timers that turn them off. I can set a timer, then get distracted by a delivery or emergency and not come back to a burned-down house. You won't get away with this on a gas stove...
My one major reason for not using electrical appliances in the past was electricity costs relative to other costs back then, and most homes not being wired for more than one appliance in the kitchen because everyone was "cooking with gas..."
Now here's another piece: Restaurants are being hit hard on a variety of fronts.
Before we go further I can say this - it's sad that we're going back to individual kitchens (gas or electric) where one stove cooks meals for two, maybe four people a day, from a situation where one stove cooks meals for several hundred people a day, along with the economies of scale which that signifies. But also, people are more wary of social interaction since COVID and restaurants are being fleeced by larger corporations as surely as we are so prices go up and people start looking at their budget balance sheets.
The restaurant lifestyle is ingrained in many cultures and in some cases, for millennia. As I said in the sidebar above, economies of scale. Why have a kitchen at all? It increases the size and cost of the home manyfold. Having middle class having our own kitchens has been a fairly recent development, designed mainly to sell kitchen goods and - fuels. Of course, the costs relative to income of cooking at home and buying from a street stall vendor have also balanced out, but we're seeing a worsening of the swing now because the restaurants that replaced the street vendors are closing.
Here's the CO balance of this: If more people went out for meals, that means homes could become smaller, without bulky fridges or cookers or appliances, or even two separate rooms (a kitchen and a dining room) for something we only do for a few hours a week in many cases.
In a typical two-bedroom house, that's almost one third of the floor space, but - once fitted with whitegoods and appliances - will probably be a significant portion of the costs.
Plus the individual wastage of food, the energy cost, and the reduced socialisation.
Oh Yeah - About Gas Again
CIRCLING BACK.... I seem to have gone everywhere with this, don't I? Almost all of these developing issues and (im)balances I wrote of come down to the greed of three distinct groups: Food corporations such as the currently out-of-control supermarkets inflating food prices; energy companies inflating energy prices; And Landlords and Real Estate inflating land, housing, and rental prices. Conspiracy New World Order theorists would say they just constitute parts of ONE group, but I can just as easily see an "Oh look - THEY'RE price-gouging and none of the grown-ups are punishing them! We need to keep up or soon they'll have all the marbles!" pure avarice at work here.
We need for restaurants to be rewarded by rebates for upgrading their cooking facilities - but also their anti-pandemic measures, such as effective ventilation and air filtering and UV sanitising so that people can feel secure eating there.
What can I say? 300 years ago the cost of a barrow and some kind of cooking facility was a major part of the expense of running street food stall, giving up 90% of your home was part of the expense of running an inn. Then equipping a leased building was your major expense, well, that and staffing it.
Making food for a large patronage has always been expensive, but making good, healthy, food in an atmosphere of conviviality and respect was usually the way a restaurateur made a fortune at it. (Or making really dodgy food and a lot of hype , then beating a retreat before your patrons roasted you, was also a way, but didn't last as long or make as much profit...) We either need to jump straight ahead to "food replicator" scenario as in Star Trek and living in isolation, or get to the stage where eating out is once again safe and desirable.
One other thing we need to do is to maybe start local appliance libraries and maybe community kitchens if we wanted to have the best of both worlds.
But just throwing out gas cookers and hot water systems and furnaces isn't the whole answer... Get Activated! Get involved! And get out there!
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