“That’s 10 million senseless deaths [due to fossil fuels] when we have cleaner fuels available,” Jackson explained to Civil Eats as he prepped for the launch of his new book, Into the Clear Blue Sky: The Path to Restoring Our Atmosphere. “One reason I push the intersection between health and climate is because it reaches people who won’t otherwise pay attention to climate.”

That intersection hits home in about 40 percent of U.S. kitchens, where Americans still cook over flames powered by natural gas. The week of Jackson’s book launch, many of those cooks were probably drenched in sweat, too: July 22 was the hottest day ever recorded on Earth.

In the book, Jackson tells stories of measuring both the staggering greenhouse gas emissions gas stoves produce and the dangerous levels of air pollutants home cooks breathe in as they sauté and roast (even long after the burners are off).

Last year, some of those measurements, published in research studies, contributed to public awareness that quickly spiraled into what multiple media outlets branded “gas stove culture wars.” (Just last week, Senator JD Vance told his supporters Vice President Kamala Harris “wants to take away your gas stoves,” which is entirely false.) But Into the Clear Blue Sky  is a solutions book written by a scientist, and Jackson approaches the phaseout of gas-powered home appliances with the same steady, measured urgency he applies to exploring decarbonizing steel and electrifying vehicles—two other important solutions in his book. Also, early on, he establishes a throughline: that the impacts of the climate crisis are unequally felt, and solutions need to be accessible and applicable to all.

Jackson spoke to Civil Eats about his groundbreaking research, the pushback against policies that could speed electrification, and how writing about climate solutions—gas stove phaseouts and otherwise—has left him angry and afraid, but also hopeful.

You set out to write about climate solutions, and you allotted two chapters to the food system—one on gas stoves, one on beef. Considering all the ways that climate change intersects with the food system, why those two?

For a couple of reasons. In the book, I highlight the opportunities for reducing methane concentrations in the atmosphere as probably our best short-term goal for climate action. And the two largest sources of methane in the world are food: primarily cows and rice paddies, and gas appliances in our homes and buildings.

We did the first studies looking at emissions from water heaters and have spent the last five years studying gas stoves—initially, purely for their greenhouse gas emissions, to see how much methane leaks into the air. We found that the leaks from gas stoves alone in the U.S. were responsible for pollution equivalent to half a million U.S. cars.

But as we were going into hundreds of homes measuring methane, we started measuring indoor air pollutants like NOx [nitrogen oxide] gasses, which triggers asthma, and benzene, which is carcinogenic. That opened a whole new field of study for me, because I realized every time I turned on a burner on a gas stove or started the oven, pollution levels shot up above health benchmarks, even when I had the ventilation hood on in my house.

You wrote that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) doesn’t include methane leakage from gas appliances in their greenhouse gas emissions estimates. Is that still true, or has your research changed things?

It’s still mostly true. They do now include some emissions from gas stoves, but they don’t include the full set of emissions, including leakage. I began measuring methane from appliances in homes and buildings because it was the least-studied part of the gas supply chain, and I wanted to fill a fill a research gap there. Our research has drawn a lot of attention to the issue of gas appliances in our homes.

The largest source of emissions indoors is the furnace, because it burns so much more gas. But the furnace and the water heater are required to vent directly outdoors through a chimney or a pipe. I focus a lot on gas stoves because there’s no vent. Or there’s a hood that most people don’t use—and that surveys show often isn’t effective.

The levels of air pollutants you’ve measured in people’s homes are unbelievably high. In the book, you talk about how the industry knew about the health concerns more than 100 years ago, to the extent that their own experts said gas shouldn’t be used in homes without requiring hoods that vented to the outside, which didn’t happen. How much of this evidence on indoor air pollutants and the health implications is just emerging now and how much is new?

It’s a fascinating question. For example, there’s 50 years of measurements on NOx pollution indoors. There were meta-analyses done in the 1990s showing that stoves increased indoor NOx levels and that the likelihood of asthma and wheezing and different health outcomes increased if you lived in a home with a gas stove. So, that knowledge was well known 30 years before I ever thought about measuring gas stoves.

I think our instruments are better now, and we have a finer-scale resolution. And until we did it, no one had measured benzene emissions indoors from gas stoves. So, we’re still learning about the full set of pollutants that are generated indoors.

And I think we’re learning more now about not just the emission rates but the concentrations that people actually breathe. That’s the tricky part, because what you need to know for predicting health outcomes is how high the levels are—not just in the kitchen but in the bedrooms down the hall where people spend their time and sleep.

That was the biggest surprise of our studies for me—the fact that concentrations of pollutants rose so quickly in bedrooms down the hall and stayed above health benchmarks for hours after the stove was off. When you think about cooking meal after meal, day after day, month after month and these concentrations just recurring all the time in our homes . . . sometimes I think we would never willingly stand over the tailpipe of a car breathing in the exhaust, but we willingly stand over a gas stove and breathe the same pollutants.

Have you done any of this research in restaurants?

We are doing that right now, literally. I have a part of my lab up in Pittsburgh doing measurements. We’ve done some in the Bay Area. We’re doing some in the Midwest, and we’re going to go to Washington, D.C. this summer and do some more.

Generally, [commercial] kitchens have industrial hoods, which are much better. However, they also have many more burners. And they have pilot lights, which are the most inefficient way that we burn. So, I worry about exposures where the concentration is building up at night after the restaurant closes and the hoods are off and these pilot lights are burning. I worry more about small kitchens . . . somewhere where maybe the ventilation is not so good.

We’re really trying to understand the risks in kitchens and, frankly, to do it more positively. We’re trying to work with chefs to promote the benefits of electrification. There’s an increasing number of chefs willing to speak out and say, “Yes, I can cook with electricity and there’s no reason not to switch now.”

In terms of electrification, you talk a lot in the book about how climate solutions need to be accessible to everyone. Switching to induction from gas can be really costly. How do you see the transition becoming possible for people at all income levels?

I do think the cost will come down over time. But I think of climate solutions [as having] two flavors: One is to use less of whatever it is that emits fossil fuels. The other is to decarbonize whatever infrastructure is left. And we can’t really cook less, so that’s not a realistic solution set for our homes.

So, I think we need to favor reach codes that require future construction to be all electric.

Governor [Kathy] Hochul and the Assembly and Senate in New York passed the country’s first state-level bill requiring new homes and buildings be all-electric by 2026. Those bills make sense to me, because every time we plumb a new house or new building with gas infrastructure or fossil fuel infrastructure, we lock in greenhouse gases for decades to come.

I don’t suggest that we need to go into every home and rip people’s stoves off the walls. We need an orderly transition, and the place to do that is when our stoves reach the end of their lifetime, to switch them out. Since I am fortunate and relatively wealthy, I chose to replace my gas stove with an induction stove before the end of its lifetime because I could. But the hundreds of homeowners we sample in Bakersfield and lower-income neighborhoods, they don’t have that option, and even if they can afford it, they rent. So, I worry the most about people in lower-income communities.

There’s also been a lot of pushback. Are you optimistic about these electrification laws moving forward?

The industry is powerful. The reach codes that Berkeley passed have been overturned. There were 100 cities and counties in California that had passed similar reach codes, and most of those are now moot. States like New York have taken a different approach, and I’m optimistic that states that want to act will find a way to incentivize the transition to electric appliances. But there have now been a couple of dozen states that have passed preemption laws to make such codes illegal. Though there’s tremendous pushback, I think induction stoves will win eventually, because they’re a better product. They’re more efficient. A child can’t burn their hand. But [with climate], winning slowly is the same as losing, as Bill McKibben likes to say.

On that note, my editor suggested I ask you about what gives you hope, and I felt myself having an emotional reaction. Like, “I don’t care about hope! I care about what’s possible. Brass tacks. What can be done—or not—to move the needle?” But you use the word hope a lot in the book, so I thought I should ask: Why?

I would say that hope and optimism are muscles that we need to exercise. My first homework assignment in any class is for students to go home and research things in the environment that are better today than they were 50 years ago. That list is long. It’s lifespan and childhood mortality. It’s water and air quality. It’s a decline in global poverty, despite the injustices that remain. Then there’s a long list of targeted regulations that have saved us money and made us healthier.

The phaseout of leaded gasoline has literally made us smarter and made lead levels in our kids’ blood drop 95 percent. There’s the Montreal Protocol that saved billions of cases of skin cancers and cataracts. And there’s my favorite example—the Clean Air Act—that saves 100,000 American lives a year, a bipartisan bill at a 30-fold return on investment.

So, I think by acknowledging past successes we make future successes in climate more likely, because we can see a path to a better future. And I guess I believe strongly that it’s very easy in my world to sink only into the latest statistics of drought and disasters—but it doesn’t seem to motivate people.

So, it’s a sort of hope grounded in facts and history.

Yes, but the undercurrent is there, which is, you know, I’m afraid and angry, because we’ve wasted decades. We’ve sprinted right to 1.5°C—something that people thought was unfathomable 20 years ago—and we seem to be sprinting towards 2°C. So yes, I’m hopeful, but I’m also angry and afraid for all of us.

Given the urgency, do you think that this upcoming election could partially determine whether catastrophic outcomes are locked in?

I’m an environmental scientist, and at this point in my life, there’s only one party that seems to take climate and the environment seriously. It wasn’t always that way. My biggest regret is how politicized and polarized the environment has become. Republican administrations created the EPA and signed the Montreal Protocol. Even Margaret Thatcher, she once said something like, “We have treated the atmosphere like a dust bin.” She of course backtracked later in her career, but she was a chemist and scientist, and she understood.

I regret the fact that we are in a place where a Republican who mentions climate gets defeated in a primary by someone farther to the right. I don’t want to pick parties, but I’m deeply concerned about this election. We can’t afford another administration undoing climate rules. It isn’t just for the climate. It’s killing millions of people around the world and hundreds of thousands of Americans. Let’s be frank about it.

Read More:
The IPCC’s Latest Climate Report Is a Final Alarm for Food Systems, Too
Methane From Agriculture Is a Big Problem. We Explain Why.
Are Dairy Digesters the Renewable Energy Answer or a ‘False Solution’ to Climate Change?

$2 Billion for Farmer Discrimination. On July 31, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack announced that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) had successfully distributed more than $2 billion to 43,000 farmers who had experienced discrimination while attempting to secure USDA loans.

The announcement marked a historic moment in a long saga. Farmers have alleged discrimination in the agency’s loan programs for decades, and multiple lawsuits have been filed over the years by women, Indigenous, and Black farmers who said they were treated differently when applying for loans, driving many out of business.

In 2020, lawmakers set aside $4 billion specifically to compensate Black farmers for race-based discrimination, but the program was thrown out in the wake of lawsuits, many of which were filed by Republican officials who alleged discrimination against white farmers. So when Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act, they authorized a new, race-neutral fund that would compensate any farmer who alleged discrimination based on race, ethnicity, gender, and other factors.

During a press call announcing the news, Vilsack said the agency received 58,000 applications and ultimately approved 43,000. While the agency could not compensate farmers for losses or pain endured, he said, “I think it represents USDA acknowledging and responding to reported discrimination.”

Vilsack could not provide statistics on how many of the individuals who received funding were Black farmers, but said that analysis may become available in the future. He also pointed out that the states with the most farmers awarded funding were Mississippi and Alabama.

In addition to the payments, he said the agency has been working to root out and prevent future discrimination and break down barriers to access within its loan programs with, for example, “new processes that reduce the need for human discretion in loan decision-making.”

Many Democrats in Congress and advocacy organizations released statements applauding the USDA’s progress on the issue. “Today marks an important milestone for USDA and for our collective efforts to hold the Department accountable in addressing a history of acts of discrimination against perpetually marginalized agricultural producers and their communities,” said Michelle Hughes, Co-Executive Director of the National Young Farmers Coalition, in a press release. The coalition was one of the cooperating organizations, along with others like the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, that helped the USDA get the word out to farmers about the application process.

Read More:
How the Long Shadow of Racism at USDA Impacts Black Farmers in Arkansas—and Beyond
Black Farmers in Arkansas Still Seek Justice a Century After the Elaine Massacre
Black Farmers Await Debt Relief as Lawmakers Resolve Racist Lawsuits

Dangerous Drift. According to a report published last week by the Midwestern Prairie Rivers Network (PRN), herbicides sprayed primarily on row crops in Illinois are drifting far from targeted fields, damaging trees and other plant life. Researchers at PRN monitored symptoms of pesticide drift—such as curled leaves—and collected tissue samples from plants over six years. They found symptoms of drift during 677 out of 679 total visits to nearly 300 sites. Of 127 tissue samples taken from trees and other plants, 90 percent contained herbicide residues. Herbicides detected included 2,4-D, atrazine, dicamba, glyphosate, and seven others.

Many of the sites where researchers documented incidents of drift were more than 500 feet from the likely source of exposure, suggesting the chemicals are drifting significant distances. “Our monitoring and tissue sampling program indicates that current legal safeguards/protections and regulatory efforts are inadequate at protecting people and the environment from herbicide drift,” the researchers wrote.

At a press conference for the release of the report, co-author Kim Erndt-Pitcher said the results pointed to the fact that herbicides are playing a significant role in the decline of tree health across the state, and residents and farmers expressed concerns about potential risks to animals and their families’ health.

Patsy Hopper, an organic farmer and landowner south of Urbana, Illinois, said her land long produced a bounty of fruits and vegetables. At one point in time, she remembered harvesting 50 gallons of cherries in a season. “In the past few years, we’ve hardly had a harvest because of pesticide drift. The trees are dying,” she said. “This year, we had enough cherries for one pie.”

Read More:
Beyond Damaging Crops, Dicamba Is Dividing Communities
EPA Weakens Safeguards for Weed Killer Atrazine, Linked to Birth Defects

Farm-State Veep. On August 6, Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris chose Tim Walz as her running mate, catapulting agriculture and other food issues into the 2024 presidential election in a new way.

As a member of the House of Representatives, Walz served on the Agriculture Committee. There, he played a role in three farm bill cycles, sponsoring various proposals focused on expanding on-farm conservation efforts and supporting beginning farmers and ranchers.

As Governor of Minnesota, Walz has advocated for biofuels, a key priority of commodity ag groups, and local advocates for small farms say he fought consolidation to keep more farmers on the land. He also championed and ultimately signed into law a universal school meals program in the state.

Read more:
States Are Fighting to Bring Back Free School Meals
This Farm Bill Really Matters. We Explain Why.