John Gibbons: The 'clean' blue flame on your cooker hob is nothing of the sort

'Natural gas' is a fossil fuel that is a potentially dangerous source of indoor air pollution as well as producing emissions that are damaging to the climate

Researcher, Seth Shonkoff of the University of California at Berkeley, has described gas cookers as “stationary air pollution machines inside people’s homes"

As part of our journey to a lower-carbon household, we replaced our gas boiler with a heat pump some months ago. Along with an electric car, this means our transport and home heating, two of the major fossil fuel users, are now fully electrified.

There is, however, one remaining piece of the puzzle. Our cooker is a combination of electric oven with a gas hob, hence we have yet to fully disconnect from the gas network. So, in common with hundreds of thousands of other Irish households, we continue to cook using gas.