SF may soon ban natural gas in homes and businesses undergoing major renovations

The overton window is skewed? Do you think people 20 years ago would be more likely to agree or disagree with this policy, compared to people today? What about 40 years ago? What about 60 years ago? 80 years? If anything, the window has moved so far in the direction of your ideology that this is the first point in history where such a policy would have any chance of being implemented.

I’m guessing you’ve never been to SF? The quality of housing in SF is really poor, with most affordable homes being decades behind in renovations and upkeep. This requirement adds unnecessary costs in an already overheated market.

The very big issue in San Francisco is the severe lack of affordable housing. When renovations become significantly more expensive, those costs inevitably get passed on to renters: making the crisis even worse.

If regulations like these are necessary, they should be applied in areas without a housing affordability crisis. But somehow, it’s always the high-cost cities that get hit with even more burdens.

To be fair in houses it's relatively easy to run a gas cooker on bottles of propane, mains gas isn't necessary for this.

Sometimes the Overton window is in the right place.

Just add it to the pile of detrimental policies that California has created over the past few decades.

It’s really not. We built an all-electric ADU for my parents, then ended up living in it while renovating our house. As someone who cooks pretty much all meals, the induction range is better in almost every way than the fancy gas range that came with our house, so we’re replacing it with an induction cooktop in the renovation.

I use both for complex cooking. I find myself using induction 90% of the time. It heats faster, it heats more consistently and it's much easier to clean. The only time I find gas useful is when doing things that require a lot of moving the pan work(sauteeing food in the air, flambée, and similar). Induction hobs with a temperature sensor are absolutely amazing to use for exact temperature cook. Also it is a lot safer with toddlers and children around.

I haven't found it to be rough on pans, but I only use thick stainless steel pans with aluminium/copper core.

PS: yes, gas is enjoyable as it gives you this primal heat feeling:)

It's not much better. It's slightly better at specific things and worse at most things. I've had plenty of gas hobs. I think I'd prefer normal electric over them just for being easier to clean and not having to deal or worry about gas. You learn to deal with the shortcomings of electric. Induction is great though. When we remodeled our kitchen we went from electric, gas for 3 months, induction. Life has improved.

The only thing I don't like about induction are those cooktops where they put the controls as touch buttons on the surface. I'm glad we rented a place in the past with that to learn how stupid it is so as to get one with proper knobs that don't you can't accidentally get hot.

China has a bunch of induction hobs that are wok shaped designed for high heat precise heat control wok cooking. I think they want to replace propane eventually as the primary stir fry cooking energy, which matches their moves to replace ICEs with EVs.

I would say that using a high-pollution method of cooking when cleaner options are easily available, simply because it's more enjoyable, is aggressive and uncalled for.

"Yes, this is bad for kids with asthma who have the misfortune of living in my neighborhood, but it's great for quesadillas! So you have to look at both sides."

Gas cooking doesn't really have good temperature control though. Using a temperature probe, I can set my stock pot to 98°C on the induction cooktop and it'll stay exactly there for hours with no worrying about the burner set too high or low for the stock to gently simmer.

There's also no worrying about combustion gases in the house.

What’re you doing to move the pan all the time? If you’re working with a wok and doing a lot of fast paced work you’d find in a restaurant, I’d understand because induction wok surfaces are hard to come by in the US.

But I don’t get it otherwise. I’m rarely moving the pan so much that induction wouldn’t be usable.

FWIW, most high-end restaurants rely on induction these days. (Sometimes, though not always, exclusively.)

Yes, liberal used to be about increasing freedom, now it seems to be more about bans and penalties for non-conformers

+1 - there are just so many Asian recipes that can not be done anywhere near as easily on induction stovetops (high heat from direct flame for flatbreads, etc).

Plus a whole bunch of cookware doesn't work with induction (clay pots, non ferromagnetic bases, etc). I do wonder if any of these "environmental" estimates factor in the environmental cost of replacing a bunch of cookware just to satisfy induction requirements.

You can. https://www.siemens-home.bsh-group.com/uk/en/mkt-product/coo...

Induction is not rough on pans, it just has a massively higher range of power output. The higher end options should only be used for boiling water. Usually a 6-7 out of 9 on induction is equivalent to full flame gas.

High power electric stove tops are better than induction. I can cook as well with these as with natural gas. Induction sucks.

Natural gas emits particles we would rather not breath in…

And that's why dozens of homes go boom every year. My dumbass aunt nearly blew up her 100+ year old house because of 60+ year old under-maintained gas lines that caused a minor fire.

Those plants likely have a higher efficiency than a gas powered stove, so may be worth it regardless?

Given that (the better) EVs are cheaper to operate, cheaper to maintain, accelerate faster than ICEVs, and don't create as much net pollution, these should be the preferred option rather than using the sky as a sewer. The problem right now is most of America is fixated upon ancient and harmful technologies and isn't do enough to incentivize buying EVs. And it's actually limiting consumer choice by slapping giant tariffs on international EV options that are surpassing the capabilities of domestic ones. EVs should be (re)incentivized such that they are significantly cheaper to buy than ICEVs.

> This is an excellent way to solve the housing crisis in San Francisco: sarcasm fully intended.

At least for new dwellings, building without gas piping is _cheaper_ than building with it. It's very cheap to run additional 240V/60A lines from the load center to the kitchen and laundry/utility room.

Depending on the renovation, it can be even cheaper to go all-electric, for example, if the kitchen/laundry/heating is being moved.

However, renovations don't have much effect either way on the housing affordability crisis in San Francisco, because renovations don't generally increase housing capacity. Most renovations in SF are done for the purpose of converting existing lower end homes into higher end homes.

> The ones hit hardest are usually younger generations

Reminds me of prop 13. If you challenge grandma having a $3M house paying peanuts for property taxes you are a monster.

If you defend young people that are ready to start a family, "they can kick rocks and move to Bumfuck, Middle-Of-Nowhere, no one is entitled to live in the Bay Area".

I won't go that far, but it's a distraction from larger problems, and it makes housing more expensive. These are the same cities charging $0.10 for paper bags at grocery stores because marginal environmental benefit?

How exactly is forcing owners to actually improve their house supposed to make the housing problem worse?

You think it’s going to put house outside of the market at their current price? It’s an insignificant dent in the profit margin.

This doesn’t have much to do with the cost of building housing. If it did, the south east where natural gas is non existent through out much of it wouldn’t have such cheap housing. Yes, they have propane (king of the hill style), but this wouldn’t get rid of propane cooking outside either.

Heat pumps are very efficient form of heating. The nice part is that you can use them to cool the home too.

> As I understand it, it gets cool enough in SF to require heating a lot of the time.

Definitely not "a lot of the time". The coldest it gets is maybe 40°F on a particularly chilly winter night - with a well-insulated house you hardly even need central heat.

While SF has microclimates, the weather goes from barely cold to barely warm. It doesn't really need heating or A/C very much. The thing though is that PG&E's (traditionally) lower costs for natural gas than electricity incentivize(d) the consumption and use of gas water heaters, clothes dryers, and stoves. If the city-county of SF or state wanted to address this as a policy level, they could slap a tax on natural gas. The thing though is they should help people afford the change to electric and on-going higher costs of electricity because people on fixed incomes cannot afford any changes.

Isn't gas also 4 times cheaper than electricity in San Francisco? Raising the power bill 4x might be worth considering.

A lot of places have centrally pumped steam, believe it or not! It's pretty neat, although difficult to control depending on the system install date. (Many places are quite old)

"A direct-vent natural gas-fired water heater is probably the simplest, most reliable appliance you could own. It requires no electricity." I won't address the legality issue, but: First, I'm not sure about the no electricity; if the heater has a pilot light, then I suppose no, but otherwise it requires electricity at least for the igniter.

Second, you're missing another reason for getting a heat pump water heater. We just last week replaced our 13 year old (and therefore on its end of life) gas heater with a heat pump water heater. It requires no gas :). One reason for doing that is that using electricity to run a small heat pump is far cheaper where we live than gas. (We have solar panels, which makes it still cheaper--in fact, free.)

The only things remaining in our house that use gas are the stove and a gas log fireplace. We've used the latter twice during the 13 years we've lived in the house. If we replace the stove (which we'll need to do some day, it's almost 25 years old) with an electric one, then I'd be easily persuaded to turn off the gas fireplace, and end the delivery charge on gas.

As an electric appliance owner, I'll take that chance.

I’m not sure where you live, but in my case, I wasn’t even able to get home insurance without an automatic gas shutoff valve. Our policy also required an automatic shutoff for water. So in that sense, earthquake safety is already being addressed through insurance requirements.

Ultimately, mandates like this just make housing even more expensive. Which, frankly, seems to be the real goal. God forbid home prices actually decline or even stop rising.

There are induction heated woks in more civilized countries. But again, in the US you're fucked with the third-worldian 120Volts.