New York to ban natural gas, including stoves, in new buildings • Hacker News Board

Re: New York to ban natural gas, including stoves, in new buildings

#791

Post by animitronix » Sun, Apr 30, 2023, 1:47 PM UTC

iamdamian wrote: post #365

This regulation feels quite frustrating to me, and several comments in this thread illustrate why. This change is being promoted as a critical step in the fight against climate change. (See most news articles over the past two years covering this.) But when you dig into the details, it seems like the regulation may not have much effect on climate change at all. When you point this out to advocates, you'll get an enti…

It's only about personal health from the emissions in your house, anyone that tells you otherwise is a liar. Natural gas has been billed as a cleanen alternative for decades.

Re: New York to ban natural gas, including stoves, in new buildings

#792

Post by animitronix » Sun, Apr 30, 2023, 1:49 PM UTC

williamcotton wrote: post #762

As someone who worked professionally as a line cook in my younger years the benefits of cooking over a flame are primarily in fine and quick control over temperature. Moving the pan, lifting the pan, adjusting the temperature, etc, are key to a good number of dishes. You lose that fine-grained control with the various electric stovetops.

You're incapable of lifting a pan of an electric burner?

Re: New York to ban natural gas, including stoves, in new buildings

#793

Post by saalweachter » Sun, Apr 30, 2023, 1:51 PM UTC

doikor wrote: post #744

nemo44x wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gas alliances are significantly cheaper to run. Also perform better. Gas dryers are awesome compared to electric for example. Plus electric goes out often. Gas doesn’t.

> Plus electric goes out often. This is not something that should happen in urban/sub-urban environment often in a first world country. In rural areas building up the infrastructure to that point can be too expensive but not in built up areas. In the last ~15 years of living in cities/suburbs in Finland I have not had a single power outage that lasted more then 5 minutes. And even those have been super rare. If that…

Also, most rural homes don't have piped gas? You have a big old propane tank instead.

It's not clear to me that this legislation would do anything to stop you from throwing a 250gallon tank on your house to run a generator in upstate NY.

Re: New York to ban natural gas, including stoves, in new buildings

#794

Post by kerkeslager » Sun, Apr 30, 2023, 1:57 PM UTC

iamdamian wrote: post #789

kerkeslager wrote: post #769

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But when you dig into the details, it seems like the regulation may not have much effect on climate change at all. [Citation needed]

The issue is that I’ve been unable to find any convincing data showing that this will have meaningful impact relative to its cost. This thread has a relevant discussion and citations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35758192

So using your "evidence" which is another citationless Hacker News post:

> Agreed that 1% of the United States' 28% of global CO2 emissions is negligible in the grand global scheme.

This is incredibly ignorant of the "death by 1000 cuts" issue of climate change. 1% or 28% of global CO2 emissions, if this statistic is even true, is huge. Very few climate change interventions are this effective.

The more effective climate change interventions include strict supersets of this, like "banning all new fossil fuel construction", which, if implemented in the US, still only gets you a few percentage points on the larger problem, and would get much greater pushback from people who don't care about climate change and will always cite government overreach for any regulation.

What do you think would be a non-negligible difference? Do you even believe in human-caused climate change? I'll be happy to provide more, real citations, but it's hard to tell what level of burden of proof I should be taking on if I don't know what you think I need to prove.

Re: New York to ban natural gas, including stoves, in new buildings

#795

Post by kenned3 » Sun, Apr 30, 2023, 2:00 PM UTC

culturestate wrote: post #688

schrectacular wrote: post #632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lived in China for a decade and never once saw an electric stove.

I lived in mainland China and Hong Kong for nearly a decade and had electric induction stoves in every apartment. Anecdotal evidence is, as ever, weak evidence.

[flagged]

Re: New York to ban natural gas, including stoves, in new buildings

#796

Post by carabiner » Sun, Apr 30, 2023, 2:00 PM UTC

iamdamian wrote: post #365

This regulation feels quite frustrating to me, and several comments in this thread illustrate why. This change is being promoted as a critical step in the fight against climate change. (See most news articles over the past two years covering this.) But when you dig into the details, it seems like the regulation may not have much effect on climate change at all. When you point this out to advocates, you'll get an enti…

1. Numerous regulations dictate safe home building. You can't legally build a home with faulty wiring. We accept these rules as part of a society, unless you are libertarian / sob citizen bent, which it sounds like you are.

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.

Re: New York to ban natural gas, including stoves, in new buildings

#797

Post by carabiner » Sun, Apr 30, 2023, 2:03 PM UTC

tohnjitor wrote: post #790

roflyear wrote: post #787

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So strange what people choose to care about

It's the last straw in a long list of offensive and disrespectful actions the state government has taken.

Americans are fucking nuts. Induction works 10x better than gas.

Re: New York to ban natural gas, including stoves, in new buildings

#798

Post by apnew » Sun, Apr 30, 2023, 2:05 PM UTC

kleiba wrote: post #681

apnew wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also _rent_. I hate food cooked on electric stoves, so when I was looking to rent, anything that dint have gas stove was automatic non-starter for me. This whole argument that “you oppose a forced choice so you must hate poor people” is just a straw-man. Just because you prefer things one way doesn’t mean govt has a business telling me how I should cook my food.

This is such baloney - there's so many way more relevant factors to the taste of food then which power source was used to provide heat. I bet if you did a blind tasting you'd not be able to tell the difference.

I’m gonna take your comment at it’s most charitable interpretation instead of getting hung up on your unnecessary emotional first line. There exists a lot of culinary processes outside of one’s personal bubble.

Please let me know what you’re willing to bet and we’ll take this forward.

Re: New York to ban natural gas, including stoves, in new buildings

#799

Post by jhugo » Sun, Apr 30, 2023, 2:05 PM UTC

freetime2 wrote: post #754

pclmulqdq wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope you don't use that stove to cook, because if you do, you are putting hundreds of times more harmful particulates into the air than the stove puts out alone. This is the same kind of "green"-feeling hypocrisy as the plastic bag bans. After Australia banned plastic bags, they found an increased amount of plastic in their landfills. Why? Because people used to re-use them as trash bags and were now buying much th…

> After Australia banned plastic bags, they found an increased amount of plastic in their landfills. Why? Because people used to re-use them as trash bags and were now buying much thicker dedicated plastic bags for the purpose. Do you have a citation for this?

Not GP, but single-use plastic bags have been banned in Indonesia too, and the shops/restaurants/etc now send you a new, substantially thicker, reusable plastic bag with every single delivery, with no convenient mechanism to reuse them. Classic case of excessive focus on one part of a much larger system.

Re: New York to ban natural gas, including stoves, in new buildings

#800

Post by NovemberWhiskey » Sun, Apr 30, 2023, 2:06 PM UTC

nemo44x wrote: post #512

kibwen wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alternatives to gas are so good these days that there's no way I'd pay to connect any new house to gas.

Gas alliances are significantly cheaper to run. Also perform better. Gas dryers are awesome compared to electric for example. Plus electric goes out often. Gas doesn’t.

I live in NYC, and my UPS has been on battery for a total of 520 seconds since 2020 - that includes its regular self-testing. I don't think it's actually had a real drop-out since installation.