New York to ban natural gas, including stoves, in new buildings (opens in new tab)

27 years from now, when we're supposedly going to be "net zero", do we really want to be supporting a bunch of natural gas infrastructure?

Or should we start making that expensive infrastructure not necessary?

1. Most homes built now will be around in 27 years, and still in good shape.

2. Building and maintaining natural gas infrastructure to homes is expensive.

3. Gas heating is easily replaced by heat pumps, even in cold climates. It should be difficult to justify any gas heat installs in new homes. (Though, more support should be provided in terms of power redundancy in very cold climates.)

4. It's just not worth it to support gas infrastructure just for gas stoves.

If you look at the big picture, and the medium to long term is just doesn't make sense to build out gas-dependent housing. And it really doesn't make sense to build out all of that infrastructure just for gas stoves.

Yet nobody seems to talk about real solutions and we’re content to focus on stupidly useless things instead. I find it frustrating. Are we really in a crises? If yes, then fucking act like it and let’s see some ambitious solutions.

In the movies and books you see something threaten the survival of the human race and the whole world comes together and engineers something impossibly amazing to save the world. I think in reality we’d argue about plastic straws, or who pays for it, or gas stoves until the apocalypse kills the species too dumb to save itself.

The full half of new yorkers who rent - almost 20 million people - mostly get whatever theirlandlord picked. So when I read posts like this, decrying government overreach, I wonder if you've ever been poor? Have you ever lived here? Do you know what youre talking about at at all? Because the government has never been my problem. It's always a person a few rungs on the economic ladder above me. A boss, a landlord, making my life just a little worse in order to make theirs a little wealthier.

Plus, many residents don’t own their own property. This helps protect renters.

Climate change is one. Induction stove powered by the latest generation of gas plants are actually more efficient than gas stoves. Of course, they can run off renewable or nuclear energy too.

For health, it is not great, and not all building are equipped with proper ventilation. And yes, it matters to the government, because even the US government will spend money to keep you alive if you are sick, and in the case of gas stoves, it is not just you, it will impact everyone who lives with you, possibly including your children.

And the last one is safety. I don't know the relative fire hazard of electric devices over open flames, but I'd go with the open flame. And sometimes entire buildings blow up because of (sometimes voluntary) gas leaks.

All these may be small effects, but they are real. And electric stoves are good now, especially induction. Gas stoves still have a few advantages, but not as much as they once had. I've even seen clever battery powered stoves, the batteries allowing them to have greater burst power than what the electrical installation can supply, they can even be used as a backup power supply.

Note that I have a gas stove, and I like it very much. But the reason I have it is that we already had gas. If they banned gas for the entire building, I would have no problem switching to something else (induction).

There have been many unintended consequences to what this experience taught me including dehumidifiers, indoor plants, air filters, ventilation schedules, and yes, eliminating natural gas.

NO2, CO2, CO, PM2.5, and VOC would go up to unhealthy levels even with a hood vent and windows open. It would persist for hours even if I opened 5-6 windows, and would permeate the entire house even though I use a Japanese door hanger to keep air in the kitchen isolated. There was simply no choice other than to go electric.

As an aside, i switched from a high end $3k American gas stove to a $80 Japanese induction unit and $500 Toshiba steam/convection oven with automatic recipes and infrared sensors and my control over cooking and cooking speed have both been so much better.

The truth is that when you dig into the details, nothing is going to have much effect on climate change at all.

People alive today with any ability to affect change aren’t bothered enough by climate change to make any meaningful changes.

2. Burning methane in your house is going to cause some pollution. Methane isn't pure, so other stuff is likely getting burned too. I mean, just logically lighting a fire in your house is probably not going to be good for your health in general.

As for "should we regulate this". It depends on perspective. The gas lobby has worked hard and spent a lot of money to trick people like you into to thinking gas stoves can compete with induction ranges. They cannot. Induction ranges are cheaper, more energy efficient, safer, and healthier than gas stoves. Installing a gas stove in 2023 is using an inferior technology either because of ignorance or Nostalgia.

Now, you could argue that it's the right of each citizen to choose to make bad decisions. In this case, however, that bad decision perpetuates an unsustainable energy apparatus. So I would argue the public good outweighs the homeowner's (or more likely, corporate landlord's) ability to make bad decisions.

2. Would you consider spreading awareness a suitable solution to knife crime? No? I wonder why.

When Vancouver banned natural gas hookups in new buildings in 2022 the justification was that they pointed to the fact that 54% of CO2 emissions in the city came from home heating. The next biggest source was transportation, I think 39%ish.

It's a clear reasonable move, as just like when you're trying to improve performance of a computer program, you start with the biggest numbers and see if you can make it smaller.

Presumably other cities in areas that use natural gas for home heating as much as Vancouver are also seeing home heating be a very large percentage of their CO2 emissions.

If we can trivially, simply through some minor regulations cut over time the emissions of every city in NA by 50% that's clearly a massive improvement and well worth doing?

If this is not worth doing in an effort to tackle the climate change problem I do not know what is.

To me this feels like one of the easiest low hanging fruit things we can do there is.

I'd rather people install heat pumps in new construction, and I'd agree that you should discourage use of natural gas for heating, I think there are ways to do that with market incentives, not by bans.

This is the wrong question to be made. You should ask what should be the safety standards you need to adhere to ensure health risks are mitigated.

The reason why this sort of thing must at all times be regulated, without any exception, is that the personal interest of a corporation investing in real estate by selling it off right away are not aligned with the interests of those who actually have to be exposed to the health risks created by said corporation.

To put it more broadly, just because you are ok with your home causing health problems to its occupants, that doesn't grant you the right to subject everyone around you to them, or even whoever will live in that house after you live.

To make it clear, let's consider doors. You might feel you have no use for a wide corridor and you're ok with custom narrow, submarine like doorways. Except that a wheelchair or a stretcher can't go through. Therefore thanks to your shortsighted and ignorant "why should the government tell me how to be safe" point of view, you needlessly screw over your future self and/or everyone that may possibly live there.

Regulation is not a conspiracy. Regulation reflects hard lessons learned with pain and suffering, and ensures that easily avoidable problems can be avoided easily. We learned lessons from fires and mobility constraints, and thus we have regulation ensuring each and every utility in your home is safe. Instead of having to reinvent the wheel each time anyone needs to build something, we only need to check what's the regulation and what are the constraints.

Air quality is starting to be noticed as a major health problem, specially with higher occupation densities, and thus we have safety lessons that need to be learned to avoid these issues. And no clueless naive spur of the moment bootstrappy individual has a clue about them. Hence the need to impose regulation, because these arrogant morons think they know best when they know nothing. I mean, does it make sense to risk our health just because an amateur didn't even wanted to bother doing his homework?

I don't see this policy as having much of an effect against climate change but it is another step in making people aware of climate issues. Congress does not have the ability - right now - to ban cow meat or eating fish, but this would be a much better policy to aim for.

This is a very common argumentation tactic, and it usually exposes that the first argument(s) are just a front for our actual axiomatic belief (which hasn't been disclosed). The core principle is often something that we know is much more controversial.

Yes! This would probably raise the air quality in buildings in general. I've seen studies showing that air quality has a direct correlation to test scores in school buildings. Imagine the benefits across a large city like NYC...

Regulating ventilation is far less effective than simply making ventilation no longer an issue (by disallowing gas stoves in the first place).

If people want the natural gas debate to be about climate change but it’s really about personal health and a city’s right to govern risk in that place, that itself doesn’t change because other people are saying, or blogging, “climate change” for this given thing.

[Citation needed]

[1] https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2021/10/21/leaked-climate-l...

[2] https://medium.com/@CollapseSurvival/overshoot-why-its-alrea...

Are you saying that if we got rid of all gas burning appliances in homes, that would not have much effect on climate change?

2. Gas stoves leak when turned off. These leaks equaled 76% of their total methane gas emissions. These are pollutants that are harmful to humans and the atmosphere. Many fume hoods just recirculate air into the living space.

When you say "dig into the details", do you mean read some libertarian propaganda funded by fossil fuel interests that can barely acknowledge the existence of climate change and hate every single policy ever proposed to deal with it?

We are phasing out fossil fuels.

Some, like airplane fuel are hard to phase out, and we're still going to do it.

Phasing out gas for cooking and heating is a no brainer.

So you’re going to handwave away the justification for the main crux of your argument.

Now it’s less important than saving money and improving the electric grid.

Sooner or later this is going away. If you announce you're not doing new installations, that starts a timer on the existing users. In 2028 everything in use is at least 5 years old. In summer 2035 everything in use is at least 12 years old. Politically that makes it a lot easier to sell an actual prohibition on supply than it will be for places where that's a sudden overnight change from "Sure, you can use gas" to "No, we're ripping that out".

My country has begun gradually getting rid of POTS copper wire telephone provision. You can still have it, for a little while at least, but we know it has limited lifespan, if you're an outfit who somehow didn't spot the signs and were shipping devices that expect a physical copper line to work, you've had your notice, in a couple of years stuff like that will drop dead. When it's gone, with it goes a bunch of expenses that most people don't benefit from at all. And yes, also some relatively modest benefits are gone too, but mostly it's a burden, we have better things to spend resources on. But you need to give people a heads up first, and that's what this legislation seems to do.

There's the fact that you are actually burning fuel, which released noxious fumes into the home [1]. There's mounting evidence that this sort of exposure has pretty negative health implications [2]

Gas is also inherently dangerous, more-so than electricity. There's been more than a few examples of exploded homes/buildings due to gas leaks [3]. All it takes is for someone to accidentally leave a burner on unstarted (or for a kid to do it while playing around the home).

But as for cooking, heat pumps won't work there. What you're more likely to see is either homes coming standard with thick enough lines to power everything or stoves with batteries (think about it, a stove is off 90% of the time, so why not slowly charge a battery during that time for the times when you need to cook fast?)

[1] https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.1c04707

[2] https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxfaqs/tfacts175.pdf

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronan_Point

Regarding heat pumps phasing out gas heat, in NY it isn’t feasible. It gets too cold. In more temperate climates, sure, but in the northern US and further, there will be a need for on-demand heat for a long time to come. The heat pump is being oversold as the answer to everything, but there are use cases it doesn’t account for.

The path forward to carbon neutrality is electrification. Electrify new construction, use steam to heat them, etc. Something which addresses heat will dwarf any of the benefits from coming after people’s stovetops, at a fraction of the lifestyle cost.

It almost feels like this is something designed to turn heads; a political act focused on banning something quite popular, that everyone knows about, for very marginal benefit. It’s almost certainly not to help with “climate change”; if it were, the legislation would target non-negligible emissions sources.

This is exactly what governmental action is meant to put a stop to. We have a case where due to inertia, consumer preferences, market failures w.r.t. externalities, etc. residential gas use would, if left to the market, make up a significant proportion of heating energy.

Maybe "eventually anyway" gas would "fall out of favor", but what needs to happen is for it to no longer be in use (along with 1000 other such changes). The market cannot achieve this for us.

If you use gas and your neighbours use electricity, and there's suddenly a power outage, you can help your neighbors and heat/cook their food too,... or in case of a gas system outage, they can help with yours. If you heat with gas, you don't freeze even with a power outage, and can still buy a cheap electric heater with a gas outage... if you heat with electricity, you can atleast try to find someone with gas heat to let you sleep over and not freeze.

Banning everything except electricity is just calling for a catastrophy.

(yes yes, i know, old heaters will stay, this applies only to new construction, but in 30 years, most old devices will be replaced too)

edit: i don't know why the downvotes... probably not many people from texas here... or anywhere else in the world... or maybe people think that NY is somehow immune to such outages

A man should have the freedom to damage the environment so long as he pay for it, and that money can then be used to undo his damage.

Of course, it's always quite inconsistent how these things are applied based on cultural reasons. I've been in favor for a long time for higher taxes on paper. The production of paper is apparently 1/5 of deforestation and there really is not much justification for it now with alternatives with less of an environmental footprint, but too many people, even those who supposedly stand for the environment, are too emotionally attached to paper for cultural reasons to see this ever pass.

Gas cooking makes sense when the infrastructure costs can be amortized with that of heating. One of these costs is the 2-3% of gas that leaks, and this loss will occur even if you heat your home with heat pumps so long as you're connected to the gas grid. If your only use of gas is cooking, it makes much more sense to simply buy cans of propane.

This is basically how all climate regulations are perceived at the end of the day, and it’s the primary fuel for my most doompilled opinions for sure.

For example, here in Canada, we recently banned a wide range of window blinds including the very popular top-down bottom-up style (a personal favourite). Why? To save the kids of course. One Canadian child a year was killed, on average, over 30 years.[0] So it's a performative win and, let's be honest, who's going to defend our right to buy and install blinds?

[0] https://science.gc.ca/site/science/en/blogs/science-health/k...

No one is banning gas. You can go ahead and buy a gas stove and use it.

What you cannot do is expect buildings to install piping throughout the building, the gas provider to provide infrastructure to supply that building with gas, and get the gas out of a tap.

The vast majority of the world in fact does not have gas coming out of a tap because it’s not profitable. The U.S. has it almost entirely because of regulation thst requires it to be provided, which has now baked in expectation among homeowners that it will be there. This expectation leads to buildings paying extra to supply gas at exorbitant costs so their homes don’t feel less luxury than an equivalent competitor.

https://www.bendbulletin.com/business/eugene-s-natural-gas-b...

The community has since generated enough signatures to put the ban to a public vote that will be voted on in November. Anecdotally, I'd say, most my neighbors are against the ban, judging from the names on the petition that I signed when they dropped through.

Personally, I believe folks should have the liberty to choose the best solution for their energy needs. I do a bit of home brewing, and I can say, without question, gas is superior for heating a large quantity of water quickly and keeping it at temp throughout the process. I even looked into electric brew kettles and >10G vessels require a dedicated 240V circuit.

Taking this all into account, I'm not sure I'll be buying / building within city limits. That or I'll just move to using my own methane composting biogas bladder. I'd love to see the greenies tell me I can't make my own gas in my back yard via composting.

I have a gas range and it doesn't work when the electricity is off. If that's your contingency plan, check that a safety valve doesn't close when power is lost.

Granted, once the propane rationing started, a few of our neighbors lost power for extended periods of time (weeks). The phone company doesn’t maintain internet if the power is out, but there is starlink, and fiber co-ops are starting to spring up.

This is the SF Bay Area, so it’s pretty much a third world country if you measure things by quality of government services. I assume this isn’t typical for most other parts of the country.

There is a legal difference between a state banning it and a city. States have far more powers that cities don't (unless the state delegates that power which they often do)

I tried this and a neighbor called CalFire on me since its illegal when its not a "burn day".

It seems the solutions are to have:

- a 5 gallon propane tank in the garage

- a BBQ in the back yard

- your own batteries

- a generator (also useful for refrigeration)

I have about 20 gallons of gas in my garage that is good for my generator. I use the gas for my motorcycle so they get refreshed regularly.

You can't assume that gas supply works in a power outage. Some modern gas stoves depend on external electricity for active power regulation or flame surveillance, and the compressors along the line require electricity as well to function - which was one of the problems in the Texas power outage IIRC, as the gas peaker plants couldn't get powered on because the gas grid compressors were offline.

Keep a camping stove for emergency scenarios, way more reliable and if you're running out of gas you can always walk to the next open hardware store.

Fortunately, pg&e has enough regulatory capture and marketing to trick regulators into letting them rob taxpayers and trick taxpayers into docility.

The issue lies not with a natural gas ban. The issue lies with having a for-profit monopoly in charge of all energy production and supply.

https://www.eia.gov/consumption/residential/data/2020/state/...

How about a little butane stove? They work great at hotel omelette bars! Or a Coleman stove? It's not that big a deal to cook when the power is out, really.

Unfortunately it's not a replicable model for the rest of the country.

Having a backup method of ensuring my pipes don't freeze and my family is (mostly) comfortable is great. But if you're an electricity purist who hates cheap, available natural gas for some reason, enjoy sitting in the cold while your house destroys itself. Or spend thousands of dollars more on a device that BURNS GAS to run your electric furnace anyway

Regarding power generation, gas is cheap and plentiful and gas power plants are much easier to build than nuclear. Nuclear takes years to get regulatory approval. Anyway, no one’s building nuclear. Germany closed down their last three nuclear plants, for some reason, and California would love to close their last nuclear plant but simply can’t.

If you can cook and keep warm on both gas and electricity, then an outage of one or the other is much less of an issue.

Energy technology is so weirdly unevenly distributed. This debate could have taken place in 1940 - with the exact same arguments.

That sounds pretty fragile to me.

But I agree it is easy to do it yourself with propane with one proviso: propane(like butane) has the somewhat insidious property that it is heavier than air so it flows downhill as it dissipates. If it flows to a spark or fire then a flame will spread from the point of first ignition to the propane source.

So if you decide to build a home with a propane(or butane) tank you might consider locating your home on or near a hilltop (that you also own) so that any propane fumes roll away from your property:

https://propanehq.com/do-propane-fumes-rise-or-fall/

Natural gas is much lighter than air and rises quickly up and out of structures. b/c it dissipates so rapidly it is far, far safer than propane. But it is not as easily compressed as is propane so natgas is usually transported to the user in pipes at low pressure.

https://www.thenakedscientists.com/articles/questions/why-st...

Imagine how little water waste there would be if you had to haul it yourself.

Having that gas hookup saves me a ton of hassle during the winter months when, inevitably, power goes out and I need to keep my place warm for a day or two (or more, though rarely) while I wait for service to be restored. My neighbors appreciate it as well, as they can come get warm in front of my gas fireplace and cook on my gas range.

I have yet to see a downside of having gas as an option, it's only helped ESPECIALLY given the geographic realities of where I live (feet of snow overnight, subzero temps for weeks/months). Ironically the pushbacks against people who are PRO gas proves how insular the anti-gas crowd is, because apparently they can't imagine a reason someone would NEED that as an option

Heat pumps are used all over Scandinavia and well into the arctic circle, including rural areas in the parts of Scandinavia (i.e. the polar circle) that see extreme temperatures far more regularly and for far longer periods than NY. Of course relative to NY, they do have a more reliable power grid and excellent building standards. Triple (not double) glazing is the norm there, for example.

And of course more rural places would also feature wood stoves as a backup. There is mostly no gas network there; especially not in rural areas. Before heat pumps became popular about thirty years ago they would have used that or oil based systems.

For those relatively few people living in places which get even colder than that, there's the option of either ground loop heat pumps, or more pragmatically propane burners for the very few nights of the year that are super-cold.

[1] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/rheem-heat-pump-sur...

Burning gas is inherently more complex to transfer heat, and has more losses as a result.

Lots of houses burn oil in NY. That will still be possible.

There aren't any advantages to gas at all. The gas industry has, however, put many billions into lobbying and marketing to convince you otherwise. And it seems they have succeeded.

For your education https://youtu.be/hX2aZUav-54

Republicans Mocked Over Outraged Claims Government 'Coming for' Gas Stoves https://www.newsweek.com/republicans-mocked-over-outraged-cl...

"... the rightwing immolation at the mere suggestion of a gas stove ban is just one more line on a long list of rightwing lies made for political gain." https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jan/18/how-di...

As usual, "That's not going to happen!" gives way in short order to "It's a good thing that it is going to happen!"

No they didn't.

> MARTÍNEZ: Look, Jeff and Lisa, I don't know what's going to happen with gas stoves.

Also NPR was talking about the Federal government. While the article above is talking about the New York _State_ government.

Fossil fuel use for energy (in the long term) should be centralized, then replaced. Building gas lines to new buildings should therefore be less preferred than running all-electric. Then of course, there is the reason gas stoves got brought up recently, which is concern with interior air quality and its long term impact on families.

The reality is that eventually, gas appliances will probably be restricted/phased out of use in new installations for several reasons. This shouldn't be surprising, sensational or controversial. The fiction is that they will be forcefully removed from existing installations. See electric vehicles, where my Fox-ian father thinks all gas cars will be banned in 2025 or some shit, when in reality new sales won't even be meaningfully restricted for another 12 years.

By the way, I don't know if you actually read or listened to that segment, but it makes clear that there is a real possibility that this could be regulated. Calling it "fake outrage" is not to say "they're making up the possibility that it could be regulated", but "they're blowing this (real) possibility out of proportion, ignoring the reasons it might be a good idea, and instead making up vague and manipulative reasons to object to it".

And where to send the check.

We need to be building zero emissions homes. (Or as close to it as we can.) The heating technology already exists to replace most single family home gas heating. That begs the question: Why invest in gas infrastructure just for a gas stove? That, frankly, seems shortsighted.

This isn't just about individual choices, or even individual homes. This is about transitioning away from government supported infrastructure that brings gas to homes, which is a society-wide issues. 20 years from now, gas pipes to homes should be seen as unnecessary.

I love my induction stove though. But I’ll admit it’s more expensive than a gas stove and you need to make sure all your cookware works with induction. It definitely wasn’t cheap to make the switch.

Natural gas plumbing is not some magical, amazing thing that magically delivers a much-maligned but otherwise perfect product. It’s an explosive gas that’s piped through underground pipes with fancy pressure regulators and hopefully ends up somewhere useful. Those pipes are expensive, the regulators are complex and can leak or fail, sometimes spectacularly, and the final product is not that useful when delivered to houses. (And it’s not practical to make your own combustible gas at home, whereas making your own electricity can be done in several ways.)

If I were developing a new community from scratch, I would not install gas plumbing. The utilities would be fiber, electricity, water, sewage, and possibly district heating of some sort. This has nothing to do with regulations, just practicality.