After news broke last week that the Biden administration was floating new regulations on indoor air pollution from gas stoves, both sides of the very online culture warriors took their habitual corners. It was an annoying week-long discourse to be sure, but something worse than annoying also happened. Many corporate media news consumers, parents in particular, began taking the alleged threat of a gas stove in their homes seriously as they devoured and shared headlines like WaPo’s “Gas stove pollution causes 12.7% of childhood asthma,” and The New York Times’ “Your Gas Stove May Be Killing You. How Much Should You Worry?”
The influential parenting data expert and self-described “vagina economist,” Emily Oster blasted out her weekly email newsletter with the subject line “Gas Stoves and Asthma,” describing the “panicked emails and DMs” she received from her readers. Local news outlets latched on to the “advice for parents” angle, and parenting blogs asked pediatricians to weigh in.
But as The Washington Free Beacon reported on Monday, the study behind the Consumer Product Safety commissioner’s call to ban gas stoves not only fails to prove a connection between gas stoves and asthma but was funded by a green energy group with ties to the Chinese government.
“The study — which spans just nine paragraphs — was based on a hodgepodge of different data and methodologies spanning various years and countries, ranging from 2019 U.S. Census data to conclusions from a 2018 analysis in Australia,” Free Beacon reporters Collin Anderson and Joseph Simonson found.
In other words, despite corporate media fearmongering, a gas stove is one of the less harmful items to have in your family’s household and is only being presented as dangerous as a means for the government(s) to control your energy usage. In fact, here are 27 things that pose a greater risk to your child’s health and well-being than exposure to a gas stove.
- Smartphones
- A smartphone with TikTok
- Cohabitating partners instead of married parents
- Pitbulls
- Ritalin
- Public school textbooks
- An Xbox
- Lead paint
- Face masks
- Marijuana
- Liquid nicotine, vapes, and e-cigarettes
- Seed oils
- Tide pods
- Unsecured bookcases
- Unsecured handguns
- Loose plastic bags
- Lithium coin batteries
- Heelys
- Fast food
- Contaminated tap water
- “Anti-racist Baby”
- “I am Jazz”
- Puberty blockers
- Hoverboards
- Pornography
- Trampolines
- Ouija boards
If your children or teenagers have access to one or more of these items, a gas stove is the least of your worries.
