Until a few decades ago, it was perfectly legal and socially acceptable to smoke a cigarette just about anywhere, from the cinema to a doctor’s waiting room.
I enjoy the following thought experiment: What practices do we accept as commonplace today that will seem as shocking and anachronistic in the future?
One good candidate is the gas hob. I suspect it will become something we tell our grandchildren about to gently shock and amuse them, like I tell my kids that seat belts were optional when I was their age.
Think about it: cooking with a gas hob involves piping a highly flammable fossil fuel into the heart of our homes, and setting it alight, pumping toxic fumes in our living area.
Combustion of any fuel creates air pollution. The smoky particulate matter from burning solid fuels such as peat, coal and wood, is the most well-known. Burning gas, however, produces another pollutant, nitrogen dioxide (NO2). Without adequate ventilation, these pollutants build up in the kitchen.
The health impacts of this indoor pollution are serious. Research from the Universitat Jaume I in Spain estimated that across the EU and UK, the NO2 from gas cooking is associated with 40,000 premature deaths, 77,000 years-of-life-lost, and over one million cases of asthma, more than half among children. For Ireland, the study estimated 33 premature deaths and 7,517 cases of asthma attributable to gas cooking.
Separate research examined what happens when a gas hob is taken out. In July, a team at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, published results of an experiment where they replaced the gas cookers of 85 people with poorly controlled asthma with induction hobs, and measured their symptoms before and afterwards. Indoor NO2 fell by around 70 per cent; asthma control scores improved by 1.1 points (larger than the improvements typically seen from using inhalers), and the share who ended up in an emergency room in the previous four weeks fell from 11.8 per cent to 3.5 per cent. There were also substantially fewer missed days of work and school
The researchers are careful to note that the study was small, with no control group, and a large-scale randomised trial is needed to validate the findings.
Gas cookers in Irish homes breaching air pollution limits
There is a reason their study was small. They had been awarded an $18 million grant by the US Environmental Protection Agency to replace hobs in 1,200 homes, but the grant was cancelled after President Trump took office.
This episode illustrates a problem larger than cookstoves: the culture wars around fossil fuels and politicisation of climate and public health science.
Here in Ireland, the hob is the workhorse of the kitchen. The SEAI’s monthly Behavioural Energy and Travel Tracker survey asks people what they did the previous day. Around 28 per cent cook with a gas hob, with a larger share in rural areas, where LPG (liquefied petroleum gas) is common. Induction hobs have grown steadily, to nearly 25 per cent, but their growth has replaced old electric rings, not gas. Over years where Ireland adopted a hugely ambitious climate and home retrofit programme, the share of gas cooking stayed flat.
Induction is the obvious alternative to gas. It makes the base of the pan itself the heating element, using an electromagnetic field, wasting far less energy than gas or traditional electric hobs, which lose a lot of heat to the air around the pot. Induction is also as fast to heat food as a gas hob.
What about cost? Using the SEAI’s latest published fuel prices, a year of daily hob cooking works out at around €61 on induction, €70 on an old electric ring, €42 on mains gas and €70 on bottled LPG. Electricity from rooftop solar, or a battery charged at night time, is far cheaper. Whatever is keeping gas hobs in Irish kitchens, it is not the running cost.
Induction cooking faces many of the same challenges as other electrification measures – the vulnerability of the electricity network is still raw in our memories after the blackouts from Storm Éowyn.
But the case for moving away from cooking with gas is compelling, on health grounds alone. Despite this, there are no specific supports, policies, targets or regulations aimed at achieving it.
An outright ban is clearly not the way to go, given the experience of entrenchment in the US. Targeted supports, grants and public information, framed as much as a public health issue as a climate one, are likely to land better. This should be part of a coherent plan for the country to get off fossil fuels and to wind down the gas distribution network in an orderly way, rather than a row about how people cook their dinner.
Hannah Daly is professor of sustainable energy at University College Cork