Gas Stoves
A recent study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health has found that about 12.7% of childhood asthma cases in the US can be attributed to gas stoves—a figure that goes even higher in regions where gas stoves are more common (it's 18.8% in New York, 20.1% in California, and 21.2% in Illinois).
Though generally cleaner than burning coal or other fossil fuels, natural gas, when burned, releases numerous pollutants into the air alongside the also harmful (though for different reasons) CO2.
These pollutants, including but not limited to carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, formaldehyde, and particulate matter (microscopic bits of matter than can cause all sorts of respiratory issues), contribute to overall air pollution, which can be harmful outdoors but is even worse indoors, where pollutant-diluting air circulation is less likely to be present at proper levels.
This study was based on an earlier, 2013 meta-analysis of research into the connection between gas stoves and childhood asthma, and it correlated those findings with the proportion of gas stoves in various regions across the US.
This study has been met with alarm and skepticism, in part because of a hugely successful ad campaign from the 1930s, "Now you're cooking with gas," that was funded by the natural gas industry to encourage more homeowners to use natural gas in their homes, rather than just electrical hookups.
That campaign was reinforced by subsequent marketing pushes that have paid chefs to promote the ostensible benefits of cooking with gas compared to using electrical cooking surfaces, and these efforts have been paired with lobbying efforts that have made it cheap and easy to build gas-powered homes compared to electric-only new-builds.
This is interesting in part because of how successful these campaigns have been, even though there have been signs that gas isn’t entirely safe for indoor use for decades.
But it's also interesting as an example of how our perception of what's safe and normal can change so radically over time.
Until recently, we used radioactive materials in consumer goods and pharmaceuticals, blood-let, played with and ingested mercury, put microbeads in everything, gleefully puffed on nicotine-laden tobacco products (with our doctor’s blessing), and chugged heroin-based cough syrups.
It takes a while for things like asbestos to be revealed as dangerous, cancer-causing threats, in part because they’re presented and marketed as high-quality, inexpensive insulation materials we should demand in our homes.
The time-gap between marketing-encouraged adoption and the divulgence of risk can be vast enough that the average person locks a harmful thing into their mental model of the world as a useful, desirable, positive element before any inkling of risk is presented to them.
New research can change these perceptual paradigms, but only if it’s well reported-upon, the information is communicated comprehensibly and widely, and the force of facts is able to overcome the often significant counterweight of marketing dollars and normalcy bias—the former of which can instill doubt into an otherwise clear conversation, the latter of which can cause us to rebel against anything that requires we change our mental model of the world.