Should You Ditch Your Gas Stove?

If you’ve been spooked by the stories urging you to “kill your gas stove” because it poses “hidden dangers” that are “bad for you and the planet,” you don’t actually need to freak out.

Yes, it’s a more environmentally conscious move to ditch your gas stove when it breaks or when you’re renovating, and to switch to one that runs on electricity (including induction). Ventilation is really important, too. But the provocative headlines have cooked up a scare that we don’t think is warranted, because chucking a gas range that works won’t make much of a positive impact on the environment or most people’s health.

To control climate change, society will need to quit burning natural gas and other fossil fuels over the next few decades. Switching from gas-powered to electric appliances should be a straightforward part of this transition. Electric stoves (and clothes dryers and heaters) are already common and affordable, and they keep getting better.

Switching from gas to a standard electric stove might not even reduce your carbon emissions right away. It all depends on how your local grid generates the electricity that your new stove would use in place of natural gas. Over time, electric cooking will probably be cleaner almost everywhere. But again, cooking simply doesn’t use a lot of energy compared with other household needs, so it doesn’t need to be a top concern.

There are some health risks associated with gas cooking, but unless you already have asthma, the danger likely isn’t unique to using gas. Older gas burners can spew carbon monoxide (CO), which is toxic. But that’s a much smaller concern with modern burner designs, and evidence suggests it’s not a long-term health risk anyway—you recover from CO poisoning once the exposure stops. In unventilated spaces, gas burners often create elevated levels of nitrogen dioxide (NO₂), which is widely recognized as a trigger for asthma attacks and other respiratory illnesses in people with asthma. It’s less clear whether prolonged exposure to the levels of NO₂ created by gas cooking can cause long-term health problems, though there is some association between elevated NO₂ levels in general (usually from outdoor air pollution) and chronic respiratory illness and other health problems.

The bigger picture is that any kind of indoor cooking creates ultrafine particles and volatile organic compounds that are linked to health problems—even if you’re using an electric or induction stovetop. Ventilation is the key here. If your kitchen is ventilated, ideally with a range hood that can exhaust air outside of your home, the risk of respiratory illness from gas cooking plummets. Even opening a window or running an exhaust fan in a nearby bathroom will help. If your kitchen is not ventilated, any kind of cooking can pose long-term health risks, whether you do it on gas or traditional electric or induction heating elements.

Again, it’s a good choice to avoid gas if you’re replacing your stove anyway. (That’s what most of the anti-gas stories with the sensational headlines actually suggest, though a few are more alarmist.) But if you’re looking for personal ways to protect the environment and your health right now, you have much bigger fish to fry. Electrifying your space- and water-heating systems, or your car, will have a massively larger impact, as will ventilating your kitchen.