Burning Gas Indoors Causes Harm

Gas Harms our Health

Methane-burning appliances in your house leak when they're off, and produce nitrogen oxide and other dangerous pollutants when they're on. While the governments has no indoor air quality standard, our grassroots testing for nitrogen oxide in gas-burning homes in Maryland has found that at least a third of our homes with gas-burning stoves regularly exceed Environmental Protection Agency outdoor air quality standards in the course of routine cooking.

Gas Fracking Pollutes Our Air and Water

When gas is drilled through fracking, toxic chemicals are mixed with water and pumped into the ground to crack open layers of rock and release gas. When the frack water comes back to the surface it may also carry toxic chemicals and radioactive barium, which contaminate underground water supplies, rivers, streams, and our air. While Maryland has banned fracking in our own state, our burning gas at home drives demand for fracked gas from Pennsylvania and other neighboring states. 

Photo: William Avery Hudson

Gas Damages our Climate

Methane is a climate super-polluter, trapping 84 times more heat per ton than carbon dioxide. And at every point along the way from the drill sites to our homes, #gasleaks. We know this directly because,  just south of us, communities in DC walked their neighborhoods with a methane detector over several months in 2022. Even this informal sampling found 389 leaks across the District in all eight wards, 14 of which were at or over the methane concentration at which an explosion is possible.