Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by speakfreely 1141 days ago
You can believe climate change is real and an imminent threat and still hold the position that banning gas stoves is a meaningless, misguided policy that will have no effect on climate change. There is no mutual exclusivity.

A typical natural gas stove burner uses around 7,000 to 10,000 BTUs per hour, which translates to about 0.8 to 1.2 pounds of CO2 emissions per hour of use. This doesn't even qualify as a blip on the radar of the global emissions problem. It's completely irrelevant to the problem you claim is prompting your antisocial outbursts.

At some point, you'll have to decide whether it's more about the climate or more about you. Hopefully you'll choose the climate eventually.

2 comments

It really depends how much of the methane in the entire chain is combusted. Uncombusted methane has a short term radiative forcing 100x as much as C02.

And it turns out there are a lot of leaks and incomplete combustion in the overall methane supply chain. Residential hookups are a significant source of slow leaks.

So completely avoiding a hookup in the first place may have a larger climate impact than your napkin math suggests.

giving per person emission numbers isn't meaningful. multiply by a couple billion people and it's a lot more. you're also missing part of the reasoning which is that if you want to also ban gas heating (which produces a lot more CO2) and get rid of the gas pipes, you also want to minimize the number of gas stoves that need to be thrown out.