It’s Time To Break Up With Our Gas Stoves | Climate Town

oh boy do i love my guests

oh boy do i love slopping

together a big wet lunch on my gas stove

hashtag cooking with gas

and posted sorry i just had to do a quick instagram

post about just the vague concept of the gas stove a very real thing

the natural gas lobby is quietly

paying influencers to do not to advertise

a specific brand of gas stove or gas utility

just to remind us that we love gas

and if anyone should i don't know try to get us to stop using

gas for any reason then it's a war on dear sweet gas

and we can't let that happen to gas gas has always been there for

us gas was there when our girlfriends broke up with us okay guess it's

only been nice to us i love gas

i love you guys

and if it feels like the natural gas industry paying kids to post pro

gas messages has big let's get out in front of this energy

you nailed it because natural gas like coal and oil

is a fossil fuel and as countless studies and climate scientists

and all the fossil fuel companies

themselves have noted burning fossil fuels releases greenhouse

gases which heat up the planet and cause things like increased

fires and floods and droughts and a whole bunch of climate change etc

that devastate families and ruin lives

now gas utilities don't

like climate change but they really don't like losing even the tiniest bit of

money so they've decided to make one final desperate stand at the gas stove

despite the fact that they know it's worse for their customers

our cities and just the whole planet

hi i'm raleigh williams

unconventionally unattractive and a climate science and policy master's degree

recipient and i'm here to tell you that it might be time for us

to break up with our gas stoves despite what you may have seen on

instagram welcome to climatetown

one thing to know about the natural gas industry

is that it's got a long and proud tradition of absolutely

bat-shit at washington advertisements gas

oh when i discovered electricity

i never meant for people to heat their homes with it

gas advertisements finally answer the question what if we just never said no to

any idea they are all over the place but a few center around some

common themes such as natural gas will make you attractive to your wife again

barry here buddy electricity

both doesn't work and does work but is way too expensive

natural gas is clean

and some variation on the electric utility company hates you and wants you to

shower with this racist depiction of an asian man

don't call public service company but please

brace yourself for my personal

wrapping with gas cooking with gas

cooking with gas we all cook better when we're cooking with gas

gas is so hot it's not on when it's not it's the only way

to were taught cook that song is over four minutes long and despite the fact

that they repeat the hook cooking with gas cooking with gas cooking with gas

cooking with gas 36

times they titled the song

wrapping with gas but that's just because

you know that song was written from the top of a pile of cocaine

and after the five minutes it took to write that song they had already

forgotten what they and that hook

cooking with gas has been an industry standby since the 1930s

when gas pr guy d colgate

pitched it to bob hope's writers

then it became a radio

catchphrase and my god what an old sounding sentence that is that is the

kind of sentence that like

knows everybody at the grocery store and wants to introduce you to the lady

who works in the bread department when you come home to visit who's single

by the way yeah well she's also like 45

by the way i mean

old sounding sentence yeah unsalted

cold barely cooked eggs from four hours ago

now that is hollywood

okay hollywood isn't all about glamorous

20 to 30 egg breakfasts

there's a lot going on in the edit bay behind the scenes

speaking of behind the scenes isn't it weird that natural gas advertisements

are almost all focused on the gas stove

despite the fact that the gas stove represents

just three percent of residential

natural gas sales according to the energy information

administration 26 of natural gas sales come from water heating and an astounding

69 of natural gas sales come from space heating

so why is such a huge fraction of the natural gas marketing budget

aimed at such a small fraction of the gas sales

well it's probably because all the natural gas you use in your home comes

in through the same pipe and if you or the apartment complex you live

in decides to invest in the gas infrastructure

for gas stoves it's a much easier jump to the real gas heating money

makers it's like how costco

sells whole rotisserie chickens for five dollars they're not making their money on the

five dollar chicken they're using the five dollar chicken to get you in the

door and then they make their real money when you impulse buy a drone on

your way out and i kind of lost the thread but i think in

this metaphor a gas furnace

is the drone or a water boiler is the drug

whatever i'm sure this part will be cut in the front and for about

70-ish years the natural gas industry tried to hammer home this concept that gas

was cleaner and cheaper and faster

and electric stoves and heaters were slower and inefficient

and the property of communist

china and for a while they were not entirely

wrong i can't speak to the communist china stuff but calling natural gas the

clean burning alternative to electric

used to be pretty accurate because electricity

used to be mainly powered by coal fire power plants which are directly linked

to asthma cancer and heart and lung disease

you know real day ruiners

and that's where the fact that we live in the 2020s

actually makes a difference i'll pick that up later you see gas isn't actually

cleaner or cheaper or better anymore

there's a lot of ways to define cleaner and gas loses to electric

in like every category

take your personal health for example

a gas stove might look pretty clean but this is a literal open flame

in your kitchen gas stoves can lead to carbon monoxide

levels three to six times higher than electric ranges

gas stoves also produce double the harmful particulate

matter and the elevated nitrogen dioxide

levels associated with gas stoves can affect the mental and respiratory

development of children in 1986

when the epa's clean air scientific

advisory committee found some troubling evidence

that elevated nitrogen dioxide

levels were having some pretty negative impacts on children

the gas industry had this to say well it's three times less in the

east or west so remember those figures when it's time to take a test

and since the clean air act of 1970

doesn't have jurisdiction over private residences

the gas industry wasn't legally obligated

to disclose the dangers of these chemicals

to the people who were you know breathing them in every day and yeah

a lot of the early model electric

sucked it was basically like the dial-up

internet of cooking and ladies

here's a tip for you

when you go shopping for your ranges

take your husbands along

they know real values

but luckily just like the internet

electric cooking has gotten

super goddamn good new electric stove technology

is called induction we're supposed to be in a nike there we go okay

new electric cooking technology

is called induction it's a big upgrade from gas and it uses

get this magnets water

fire air and dirt

magnets how do they work

wow look i know that song came out after 9 11 but it feels

very pre-911 does that make sense

whatever induction magnets work by creating an alternating

magnetic current that heats the metal directly

in the pan instead of the cooktop

which allows it to cook things twice as fast with literally

twice the precision also and this is a bonus

it doesn't cook the absolute

out of everything around it on the grill

hey we got kicked out apparently you're not supposed to lean on other stuff

or film without their permission

i totally understand it and for the record

i do not have an induction burner myself

i rent an apartment from a man i've never met who responds to less

than 25 of my emails i do not have an induction

burner okay i'm not trying to sit here and tell you you're a bad

person if you cook on gas

you're not a bad person

actually i don't know you maybe you are a bad person that is between

you and our lord and savior jesus

christ that is the loudest truck i've ever heard the point is induction

is not some kind of fad like chia pets or television

okay it is here to stay

even professional chefs like michelle roode jr are switching to induction all the sauce

is getting ready for lunch

and what's great about the induction is there's no heat it's lovely it's a

great environment to be working in even commercial

pizza ovens that have to get

way hotter than your oven at home are moving to all electric

now unfortunately we couldn't afford to shoot in one of those pizza places

psych location change baby we got a patreon

page now where people pay like

five bucks a month and the link is in the bio and now we

can go inside of places without getting kicked out after 20 minutes

one of those insides

is lorasi pizza in brooklyn new york where they have

among other things an all-electric

pizza oven that gets

super hot how hot does this oven get

950 degrees that's so

hot but we're gonna cook myself

a little and here's a slice of pizza

and it's fantastic i mean if it wasn't fantastic would i be able to

cram this entire slice in my mouth at once

but i wouldn't but look

i get it maybe you just prefer cooking with gas

all right maybe you're willing to take the risk for the advantage of a

flame fine totally understandable

and it's actually a fairly popular

opinion and we know this because the gas industry knows this because when they

realized they couldn't compete with electricity

in terms of health

or quality they had to find a way to appeal the people's emotional

attachment to their product

so the american public gas association

an industry group representing

over 700 gas utilities

hired the hot shot pr company porter novelli to figure out how to manipulate

people's emotions enough to keep them using gas while porter and novelli did the

research and they found out that people don't give a about whether their water

boiler is gas or electric

and people don't give a about whether their heater is gas or electric

but people do give a about their gas stove and that's the ticket baby

if we can get enough people to keep buying gas we can prolong

the gas transition into electric

until you know what we don't need an end game when we got cocaine

howdy partners this is no ordinary house this is a home on the main

the nashville gas main

who was that gas man

and as much fun as those peruvian

schniff powder fueled ads used to be people see right through that kind of

thing now so the gas industry had to find some new way to re-incept

the idea of we love gas into the minds of people

as soon as possible

and dang it if they didn't use up all their best lines and that

wrapping with gas song cooking

it's cleaner clean the flame consumes the smoking grease you know what i mean

the flame consumes the smoke and grease you know what i'm no i don't

know what you mean are you talking about a grease fire

are you bragging about having a grease fire

whatever porter novelli had a different

influencers but you don't have to take my word for it here's a very

real page from the porter novelli proposal they wrote for the american public gas

association showing their target audiences of hispanic

millennials design enthusiasts promising

families and young city solos

each one is paired to a season and each combination

makes exactly zero sense but hey it wouldn't be much of a gas ad

if it made any sense now would it

and as fast as you could say hispanic

millennials represent the winter

the american public gas association

spent 300 000 on a pr campaign

that got small market influencers

to make posts like this and would you look at that it's all stoves

that thing that makes them just three percent of their money so weird i

noticed something else here they're no longer making the claim that it's cleaner

because it isn't and they no longer claim it's cheaper

because it's not now the big selling point is that natural gas is

faster which is true if you're only counting traditional

electric coils and not the much faster

induction cooktops but the real question is why are they spending

hundreds of thousands of dollars on a campaign that doesn't even mention an actual

brand or a way for people to buy their product

and sure paying influencers

to post about how precisely

they can cook a taco

doesn't seem that bad

what they're actually doing is paying influencers

to trick their into helping the gas company avoid climate legislation

oh yeah it's all about climate change with me that's my whole thing that's

my entire deal i am insufferable

to be around nowadays

okay we get it you're self-deprecating

this guy oh and another edit bay bit

you can't just dump to an edit bay every time you forget to write

a joke ugh this guy

and since i'm not a hack like some people i know let's go ahead

and bring this burden of proof train into the station with a nice gas

industry internal document smoking gun style

this is the 2018

speak up for natural gas advocacy

training workshop document link in the bio sponsored by three of the biggest gas

trade organizations in america

and in this document they detail their plans to ask their employees to spread

pro-gas messages and stories on social media

which in my opinion

is a pretty whack-ass

thing for a boss to ask their employees to do they discuss how local

citizens and advocates might not want natural gas extracted from their home towns or

pipelines built right through their backyards

and how gas employees

promoting gas can sometimes be enough to change the narrative

they go over best practices for storytelling

how to control the narrative

and their big smoking

conclusion in a document

about which pro-gas arguments they should use is right here

emotional arguments can shape the public narrative

even when the facts don't support

them emotional arguments can shape the public narrative

even when the facts

don't support them whoo

now they claim they're learning this tactic from the pro-environmental

movement but they go on to detail a whole bunch of other ways they

can do it and they conclude the document with this

it all boils down to how the natural gas industry chooses to tell its

story so porter novelli takes care of the influencers

and then the gas industry

asks its own employees

to jump on social media

and spread a bunch of pro-gas

disinformation wait i'm sorry that should be

correcting misinformation and speaking of correcting

misinformation hey here's a fun cool climate change fact you can tell your friends

natural gas is as big of a driver of climate change as coal and

i know that might sound weird because common knowledge says coal is much dirtier

burning the natural gas and in a lot of ways it is burning coal

releases all sorts of compounds

that have certain health and environmental

implications but in terms of just climate change causing greenhouse gases

the math is not good for natural gas the u.s energy information administration

says gas emits almost 50 percent less co2

than coal or half of one pizza

but natural gas is primarily

composed of methane which is itself a greenhouse gas with 80

times the potency of carbon dioxide

over a 20-year period

and that's where fugitive

emissions come into play you can think of fugitive emissions like when a chemical

escapes the supply chain before being turned into heat or energy

when a lump of coal falls off a truck on the way to a

power plant it just becomes a rock

or like some lonely kid's best friend in a depressing

kids book who still make those

if they do i feel like my friend cole would do

harry potter numbers but the thing is when natural gas leaks out of one

of the 2 million miles of pipes and gas lines that transport natural gas

around america and gets into the air it becomes an ultra potent greenhouse

gas in the atmosphere

so if we're doing the math it turns out we can afford to lose

about four percent of natural gas through leaks before we're actually heating the planet

more than the coal it was supposed to be displacing

and guess what percent we actually

lose it's like nine

here it is in pizza slices

now i'm not suggesting

we should go back to coal

i'm suggesting we should haul ass towards electrification

via renewables and battery technology

even if we electrified

every building overnight it wouldn't cut natural gas out of the equation natural gas

is still used as like one of the main fuel sources

to generate electricity but the reductions

in emissions and fugitive emissions we would see from not having to pipe fossil

fuels into 70 million buildings in america

would represent an enormous

reduction in our overall emissions

today buildings are generating about 30

of all of america's

emissions via direct combustion of fossil fuels

and fossil fuels in the electricity

and we have all the technology

we need to greatly reduce those emissions already

but that would mean the gas industry couldn't sell gas outside of power plants

and that's going to be a big note from the gas industry dog so

in the past few years cities have begun to realize that climate change

is a big problem

and that fossil fuel powered buildings aren't going to cut it anymore so they

began passing laws to remove gas from new buildings

while a lot of comprehensive

climate policy needs to come from a national

level like putting a price on carbon pollution or adopting a federal clean energy

standard city governments get to write their own building codes which led to 50

cities in california implementing this no new gas buildings policy

pretty quickly but then the craziest

thing happened gas lobby groups went around to states with republican-controlled

legislatures and worked with them to quietly

pass legislation that made gas utilities

exempt from city regulation

they're called preemption laws and they call them that because of the way they

preemptively let gas lobby groups do whatever the they want and they passed them

so quietly that when tucson arizona tried to pass a no new gas buildings

law they discovered they legally

couldn't because state republicans

had just adopted a statewide

gas exemption which you know feels pretty ironic

for a political party whose whole thing is that they're against government overreach

wouldn't you say texas then passed their own preemption law then oklahoma

and now a total of 20 state legislatures

passed preemption laws to protect the precious gas industry from cities who want to

set their own building codes

and so here we are when the gas industry had to choose between destroying

the environment for you and your children or taking a financial hit they picked

the money and they enlisted the help of a few gullible influencers

morally bankrupt politicians and even made their own employees

post on facebook about it and so far it's working for them so if

you're sitting there or standing there or even leaning there and you want to

know how you can get involved there's a couple things you can do

first and most importantly

you can support these building electrification

advocacy groups using the links in the bio you can also call your local

representatives and let them know you are very pro building electrification

or if you live in one of these 20 states

you can call them up and let them know that you think preemption

laws are some serious

if you happen to be in a place in your life where you can

opt out of gas stoves consider getting an induction burner but the real name

of the game here is collective action

get out there join those groups

and make some friends or at the very least just make it a point

to get more educated

about the climate crisis

because when enough informed climate advocates get together

oh boy then we will really be cooking with you

cooking with electric take it away elton

thank you so much for watching i can tell this one is going to

get away from me it's going to be like 22 minutes long or something

psychotic like that and i really appreciate you sticking all the way to the

end i got a patreon

page it's got about like 1300-ish

patrons right now um

it really helps to make these videos you know like being able to go

places and get on trains and buy pizzas and that kind of thing if

you're watching right now and you're like i'm not donating that's totally fine

i'll still make the videos no worries

if you are interested

in helping me out i'm going to do an incentive thing here where uh

if we hit 1600

patrons by the end of the year

of our lord 2021

i will produce like a good version of this with better lyrics that are

factually accurate see it might not be worth it honestly

and i get that and so don't worry about it but if you

want that then join the patreon page

okay thank you so much i'll see you next time i have not

tried marijuana i have never used it at any time