Freewheel Burning

Holiday season means family gatherings around food and high activity in the kitchen. Like many who have remodeled their kitchens, upgrading appliances is a key budget item. The range is a kitchen star. Our upgraded range was a key component of our kitchen remodel in 2010. 30,000 BTU of oven cooking prowess for Thanksgiving glory.

As Bill McKibben writes in his March 2022 article In a World on Fire, Stop Burning Things: “Fire let us cook food, and cooked food delivers far more energy than raw; our brains grew even as our guts, with less processing work to do, shrank. Fire kept us warm, and human enterprise expanded to regions that were otherwise too cold. And, as we gathered around fires, we bonded in ways that set us on the path to forming societies. No wonder Darwin wrote that fire was “the greatest discovery ever made by man, excepting language.”

Image: Electric and Induction ranges

But the pandemic reminded us of general indoor air quality and pollution from cooking. Three billion people cook over fire daily, and will at least until sufficient electricity reaches them. In 2020, fossil-fuel pollution killed three times as many people as COVID-19 did.

Source: “Mobilizing for a zero carbon America: jobs, jobs, jobs, and more jobs”, Saul Griffith, Sam Calisch, July 2020

If induction cooktops are so great, then why does hardly anyone use them? (Handling and recycling old ranges, user experience, new cookware needed, price and availability). If the natural gas range replacement market is so big, what is impeding its progress? (One million electricians needed in general for electrification). I am not convinced yet of the induction cooktop user experience, but I am becoming more sensitive over time to the smell of natural gas burning. Freewheel burning will need to come to an end sooner than later.