It starts out pretty reasonable. OK, gas stoves generate more air pollutants. Good to know, so we can take steps to avoid it
Then it mentions something I wasn't familiar with: the "all-electric" movement to ban gas appliances, which had its first victory in the People's Republic of Berkeley, banning gas hookups in new developments.
The Vox article suggests that opposition to this has been astroturfing propaganda, which, it's plausible it has been so far, given that—as the NYTimes article it linked notes (archive)—it's caught those of us who aren't on the bleeding edge of lefty causes completely off-guard. But that doesn't mean only greedy gas companies have a reason to oppose electrification.
Indeed, the Vox article goes to great pains to ignore all the reasons people prefer gas stoves before concluding with this gem:
Vox wrote:Everyone should ensure that the area where they cook is well-ventilated, especially in these cooped-up days of coronavirus lockdown, with children at home all day. But for the individual homeowner, as for society at large, managing harmful pollution eventually starts to seem a little silly when equally effective, affordable, and pollution-free alternatives are available. It’s time to start making new buildings all-electric and switching out all those existing gas appliances, including gas stoves, for electric alternatives.
So seriously, go vox yourself, David Roberts! As far as I know, there are no cases in which an electric appliance is as affordable as the equivalent gas appliance, and generally they're not equally effective or pollution-free either.
1. Electric stoves take much longer to heat up and do not heat as evenly with gas stoves. They are an absolute nightmare to cook with. Since Vox doesn't have a comments section, I searched reddit and found this thread, where basically everyone is saying the same damn thing, except one or two people who claim induction stoves are just as good. Color me skeptical.
2. I didn't know gas dryers were a thing before I came to Texas, but oh my god, they are so much faster than electric driers. I didn't realize you could dry a load of laundry in under an hour before using a gas dryer; some of my loads took barely half an hour. Now that I'm back in an all-electric apartment complex, with a dryer that takes an hour and a half and still sometimes needs another round, oh how I miss that gas dryer!
3. When you burn fossil fuels for electricity, you generate waste heat, which makes it extremely wasteful to then use that electricity to generate heat, at least when burning those same fossil fuels where the heat is needed is also an option. The Vox article notes that US power is no longer all coal. That's true, but if your electricity is mostly generated by natural gas, it's still more environmentally friendly to burn that gas directly for heat than to convert it to electricity first.
4. Point #3 also makes electric water heating, and electric central heating in cool climates, much more expensive than the gas (or heating oil alternatives). Which makes this another case of virtue-signaling rich liberal environmentalists screwing over the poor for questionably effective environmental gains.
5. Can I just note that this is why I support a carbon tax? Even in the event that we moved to mostly non-fossil-fuel sources (and that ain't happening unless lefty pols have a change of heart on nuclear), I would happily pay three times as much to use a gas stove over electric. But, alas, liberal crusaders like regulations even more than they like taxes, and combining a tax admitting global warming is real is basically a conservative nightmare.
Jesus, if it weren't for Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, and all of the other voting-rights-hating, budget-ballooning, Gilead-cosplaying cop fetishists who make up the party at this point, this fucking "all-electric" movement might be enough to turn me Republican.