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This needs an asterisk after it. My gas stove doesn't measurably raise PM2.5 levels ... until we make something like fajitas, and then the smoky sizzle which gets past filters sends PM2.5 through the roof.
It would be funny if this was a confounder to any studies: people who really want to sear meat get gas stoves, searing puts a ton of PM in the air, and yet they'd be breathing the same PM after a switch to high-powered electric.
Before we look for subtle confounders, though, I'd first like to see some reassurance that we aren't really ignoring obvious confounders too.
Do we really want people cooking in their own homes at all? Even aside from the emissions and particulates, food cooked too much is carcinogenic and food cooked too little can cause food borne illness. Both of these are large scale health care problems. People also tend to use too much salt and not enough vegetables when cooking for themselves. And of course the kitchen is one of the most likely places for potentially lethal residential fires to take place, and the countless food prep accidents involving lacerations from knives and appliances. Ordinary stove tops can get hot enough to melt copper! This is incredibly dangerous as burns from hot oil or sugar can cause severe tissue damage and disfigurement.
It might be okay for a properly trained, licensed chef to cook their own foods, and I'm not saying people shouldn't be able to make a peanut butter sandwich or cheese and crackers, but the average person really is very likely to end up harming themselves in some way from long term diseases to death and dismemberment. Wouldn't it be a much safer, more efficient society if we left cooking to the experts and eliminated home kitchens?
A modest proposal.
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And don't get me started on the chef knifes - they are long and sharp and let me tell you - if you can cut a meat with them, you will also be able to cut a human. Think what a maniac will be able to do if they get their hands on one.
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This is my understanding as well; most of the emissions come from what you're cooking rather than the heat source. I've definitely smoked up my apartment a time or two searing steaks on an electric stove.
The gas stove emissions in queation are NOx, not particulates
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These "studies" that just query a dataset or two and then pull out some correlations from it are really making me want to burn down the libraries. Any monkey with an installation of python or R can do that.
Why not create a lab environment that emulates various home kitchen configurations all the way down to air circulation and ventilation rate? Then actually test various scenarios with various kinds of stoves. And arrive at a mechanistic argument? They can use the second dataset of PM2.5 levels joined with asthma rates to push the party line anyways.
Because that's hard, and ideological hacks (defined here as "the sorts of people who go into writing a 'paper' firmly knowing what result they want out of it, usually because of unrelated political or ideological reasons, and will not stop until they get that result.") are lazy.
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