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jpwinner gaming We’re Getting an Induction Range. Is It All Right to Sell Our Old Gas One?
My husband and I have decided to purchase a new induction range, to reduce both our fossil-fuel impact and our exposure to toxins. We currently have a beautiful 1940s-era Wedgewood gas range. Would it be unethical to sell or donate our Wedgewood to another user? I am concerned that we would be extending the continued personal risk and environmental impact of our gas range. My husband believes the next user will have decided to obtain a gas range, so the emissions and risk from ours would be displacing those of another, with no net impact. Can you assist us in sorting out the ethical choice? — Name Withheld
From the Ethicist:
You mention two considerations: environmental impact and personal risk. Let’s start with the first. It seems a safe assumption that if you sell your Wedgewood you will, as your husband says, be selling to someone who’s in the market for a gas range. Your husband might also note that, because most of our electricity still comes from burning fossil fuels, the relative fossil-fuel consumption of different types of ranges will be affected by how your local electricity is generated. Induction ranges are impressively energy- efficient, but the power plants that juice them are typically far less so.
On the other hand, there’s reason to hope that renewables will account for a growing share of our electricity. Bear in mind too that a vintage gas range could have a different emissions profile from a contemporary one. New gas ranges have to meet certain efficiency standards. Old ones typically have a pilot light that’s on all the time. They might be leakier too — and when it comes to the greenhouse effect, methane is far worse than CO₂. A 2022 study found that natural-gas stoves release something like 1 percent of the fuel they use as unburned methane, mainly when they’re off.
Yet it’s hard to estimate the effects of a single uncoordinated act. Conceivably, the best outcome for the planet would actually come from your selling the Wedgewood and then using the proceeds to buy a solar-panel-and-battery system for your home. Or from directing the proceeds toward promoting regulations that would prohibit the use of ranges with a certain emissions profile, or that phase out the use of gas for cooking altogether.
The climate crisis is a tragedy of the commons. So you might think you should take this range out of circulation to ensure that you are not implicated in it. Immanuel Kant might have your back: He thought the right thing to do was to follow a rule that you could, as he put it, will as a universal law. (That law might be: “Avoid participating in the creation of a tragedy.”) On the other hand, standard consequentialists, like the utilitarian John Stuart Mill, thought you should care only about the morally relevant consequences of your acts. They might side with your husband — or, weighing the contribution you could be making to positive social norms, they might not.
What resolves things is the health issue you mention. In recent years, concerns have been raised about the nitrogen oxides and other pollutants that gas ranges produce as a result of combustion; some research links cooking with gas to asthma in children. The uncombusted gas that these ranges can leak may also have health consequences. Selling a person something that you know has a serious chance of harming them is wrong. It’s less wrong if you tell them about the risk. (For one thing, using a proper ventilation and exhaust system can mitigate the problem.) Even then, however, if your old range results in harm to its buyers or their children, you’ll have some moral responsibility for it.
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