SUMMARY:
Natural gas is actually a low-cost, low pollution fuel. But almost 10% of California population, in over 30 cities, can not have natural gas appliances in new housing. Removing gas from California homes will NOT improve indoor or outdoor air quality enough to be measured. The effect on global warming would be even less.
The people strongly prefer natural gas. Homeowners can save $1,000 to $2,000 a year with a gas furnace, versus electric heat. Gas water heater savings can be $200 a year, versus electric, and dryer and stove savings can each be $100 a year. Rising electricity usage can only increase the already high CA electricity prices.
California requires furnaces, water heaters, and other gas appliances to vent exhaust to outside air. Fake claims that gas appliances cause harmful indoor pollution are based on models and hypothetical cooking scenarios, not actual measurements.
DETAILS:
Residential natural gas causes dangerous indoor and outdoor air pollution, claims a faulty study published in April 2020, by the Fielding School of Public Health at the University of California Los Angeles. The study did NOT find hazardous indoor carbon monoxide (CO) levels that exceeded California or U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) standards. Modern gas stoves are not a carbon monoxide risk.
The UCLA models guessed that a stove and oven used simultaneously for two hours of cooking, would cause indoor NO2 levels to reach 34 parts per billion (ppb). But the EPA says for NO2 levels below 50 ppb, “No health impacts are expected for air quality in this range." The studies cited by the UCLA paper did NOT find that emissions from gas stoves were unhealthy.
The UCLA paper claims that gas appliances generate harmful PM2.5 particle pollution outdoors. PM2.5 particles are smaller than 2.5 microns in diameter (invisible). United States PM2.5 pollution is typically below the EPA national standard of 12 micrograms per cubic meter, down 43% since 2000. Breathing in 12 micrograms of small particles per cubic meter of air would be less than 5 grams of these microscopic particles over an 80-year lifespan. A person who smokes one tobacco cigarette inhales more particles than breathing a year’s worth of particles in the California air.
The EPA’s claim that a tiny dose of PM2.5 particles causes premature death is junk science. No coroner ever attributes a cause of death to small particles. The EPA relies on statistical associations between particle pollution and death. They use the Harvard Six Cities study of 1993 and the American Cancer Society study of 1995.
Other scientists were not able to replicate and verify the results of those two studies. Ignoring that for now, the studies claim death risk increased less than 20% (RR=1.2) -- almost statistically indistinguishable from zero. In comparison, the Doll and Hill study found cigarette smokers had 10 times the rate of lung cancer of non-smokers (RR=10).
Cox (2017) analyzed small particles and death of people 75 years old, or older, from 2007 to 2013. That study found ambient PM2.5 concentrations did NOT predict average mortality rates in the two cities studied -- Boston and Los Angeles.
Eliminating gas appliances from 13 million homes would reduce California outdoor airborne particle pollution by less than 1%. That's too small to be detected by any measurement system. California gas appliances account for a tiny 0.33% of world natural gas use. If all California home appliances were converted from gas to electric, the effect on global greenhouse gas emissions would be much too small to measure.