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E.P.A. Is Said to Propose Rules Meant to Drive Up Electric Car Sales Tenfold.
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To me this looks like they failed to make electric vehicles attractive to consumers compared to gas ones, so they're giving up on that and instead are going to effectively make gas vehicles illegal to manufacture. It's absolutely insane to me that the EPA can just destroy a major industry like this, and have a massive effect on the lives of every American, and they don't have ask anyone. Congress doesn't vote on it, the president doesn't sign it, it just happens because they said so.
I think that's a trend that's common with environmental regulations. Whether it's CFL bulbs, paper straws, gas stoves or low flow toilets, consumers get stuck with an inferior substitute and the alleged crisis never seems to actually get solved. It's always just a prelude for the next demand. And by doing it through the administrative state elected officials never have to take any flack for it. If congress had to pass a bill outlawing incandescent bulbs and the president had to sign it then voters would have someone to get mad at. But when it's a new DOE regulation that just appears, people don't know who to blame. Nobody ever has to argue for it or stake their career on it.
So I don't think things will change. Just like the CDC can declare themselves dictators of all apartment rentals because of the Covid crisis, the EPA can declare itself king of all energy because of the climate crisis. Year after year, more things will be banned, prices will go up and life will get worse. But most people will either not realize the reason or will have entirely forgotten that things used to be different.
There was a minor media circus about them, but they haven't actually been banned, have they?
Anyway, induction is amazing and I hope both gas and conventional electric stoves get banned.
"I like X, not X should be banned", without elaboration or reasoning, is childrens cartoon villain logic.
I thought the downsides of gas and conventional electric stoves were well-known.
Gas stoves cause indoor air pollution (I believe this is what the aforementioned media circus was about) and require gas, which is a fossil fuel – do I need to explain why fossil fuels are bad? And they require either a network of gas pipelines, which are an additional bit of infrastructure that needs to be built and maintained (and they tend to explode), or distribution in individual tanks, which is very wasteful. Induction just needs the existing electrical grid.
Conventional electric stoves are extremely inefficient, so they waste a lot of energy. And they are horrible to work with, it's basically a human rights violation. If conventional electric stoves are Americans' perceived alternative to gas, then I can understand the overreaction to the mere suggestion that gas stoves might be banned. In fact, in that light, it was probably an underreaction.
I think you do. And if your explanation is "because they'd be out someday" you'd have to do better than that because "someday" is doing a real lot of work here and it's not practical worrying what would happen in 3000 years - in 3000 years the people might be all living in the Matrix anyway.
If they are properly maintained, they don't. If they are maintained by PG&E, then well, that's a whole different business.
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Gas stoves are burning gas to produce heat. This is dramatically more efficient than burning gas to turn a turbine to produce electricity to send over the electric grid before turning into heat. (Even the couple percent of gas lost to leaks is less than the 6% loss on sending electricity over the grid.) It's not like an electric car where power plants are much more efficient than a portable gasoline engine (plus regenerative braking) so electric cars end up being more efficient. Making heat is inherently very efficient because you're not fighting thermodynamics, making electricity isn't. As a result, under the electricity-generation mix currently typical in the U.S., induction stoves cause more CO2 emissions than gas stoves.
https://home.howstuffworks.com/gas-vs-electric-stoves.htm
Now, maybe the higher CO2 emissions to power induction stoves is worthwhile for whatever indoor air quality benefits there are. And maybe power-generation will change so that generating marginal electricity rarely involves spinning up a gas turbine. But remember stoves don't last forever, if this change doesn't happen for a while then the induction stove will emit more CO2 over its lifespan regardless. I get the sense that a lot of people are vaguely anti-gas-stove because they assume it causes more CO2 emissions due to directly burning a fossil fuel, even though this is the opposite of the case.
Regarding the indoor air quality aspect, it would be nice if there was a decent literature review of the issue, like Scott's "Much more than you wanted to know" series. As a matter of common-sense, it seems like gas stoves must be at least marginally worse. But from what I've read this doesn't seem dramatic enough to show up in aggregate health outcomes for more rigorous studies. The main difference is only in terms of nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide, not the particulate matter you might expect. Most particulate matter comes from the food, so it's plausible that consistently using a range hood that vents to the outside is actually much more important than gas vs. induction. But it's hard to synthesize the available information into a general sense of how much of an issue it is.
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