Daniel sent us this prompt, and it comes from a place that's pretty personal. Someone he knows was involved in a recent gas explosion in Jerusalem. And what he wants to explore is how someone looking at an apartment here can actually figure out if the building is connected to gas before they buy or rent, because the risk isn't just about your own stove. If your neighbor three floors down has gas, their infrastructure runs through your walls, your stairwell, your building envelope. So he's asking what public sources exist, what physical indicators to look for, whether you can call the gas company as a third party, and whether you can trust what a realtor tells you. And then the bigger question, which I think is where this really gets interesting: if we accept that gas in multi-unit buildings creates a risk people didn't choose and can't opt out of, what are the debates around banning it outright, here and elsewhere.
There's a lot to unpack, but let me start with the detection question because it's genuinely harder than people assume. In Israel, there is no centralized public database where you can type in an address and get back "this building is connected to gas." It's not like checking property tax records. The gas market here is fragmented. You've got Supergas, you've got Amisragas, you've got Pazgas, and a handful of smaller distributors. Each one maintains its own customer records, and those are not public.
There's no single number you can call.
No single number, and even if you call one of the big three, they're not obligated to tell a random caller whether a specific address is a customer. Privacy regulations, basically. They'll tell you, look, we can't disclose whether unit four in this building has a contract with us. Now, if you already own the apartment or have a signed lease, you can request information about your own unit. But as a prospective buyer or renter? You're in a gray zone. Some customer service reps will give you a vague answer if you frame it right. "I'm considering buying in this building, can you tell me if the building is connected at all?" Sometimes they'll say yes or no. Sometimes they'll stonewall you.
Which means you're relying on the mood of whoever picks up the phone. That's not a detection strategy, that's a lottery.
And it gets worse. There are buildings in Jerusalem, especially older ones in neighborhoods like Nachlaot or the German Colony, where the gas infrastructure was installed piecemeal over decades. You might have a building where the ground-floor units are connected to gas but the upper floors are all electric, or vice versa. Or a building where the pipes were run externally up the facade and then painted over so they blend in. You'd walk past and never notice.
Which brings us to the physical indicators. What are you actually looking for?
So if you're standing outside a building, the most obvious tell is the gas cylinder cage. In Israel, most residential gas connections are still balloon-based, not piped natural gas from a municipal grid. I should clarify. When we say "gas balloons" here, we're talking about those large white cylindrical tanks, the ones that look like miniature submarines, usually in a metal cage at ground level or on the roof. In Jerusalem, because of the terrain, you often see them on intermediate landings or tucked into stairwell landings on hillside buildings.
The submarine aesthetic.
Very chic, very explosive. So if you see that cage with cylinders in it, the building has gas. But here's the catch. Sometimes the cage is empty because the tanks were removed but the infrastructure remains. Sometimes the cage is hidden behind a storage shed or a row of recycling bins. And in newer buildings, say post two thousand fifteen, you might have a centralized gas system where the tanks are in a dedicated utility room with locked access. You won't see anything from the street.
The absence of a visible cage doesn't mean the absence of gas.
You also want to look at the building exterior for copper or steel piping. Gas pipes in Israel are typically painted yellow or have yellow markings at the joints. But again, older buildings, the paint fades, the pipes get repainted along with the facade, and suddenly your gas line is beige like everything else. I've seen buildings in Talpiot where the only way to spot the gas line is to look for the regulator valve on the exterior wall, which is a small metal disc, usually brass colored, about the size of your palm. That's the giveaway.
You're walking around the building squinting at walls like some kind of infrastructure detective.
Honestly, I'd add another step. Look at the electric meters. If you see a cluster of electric meters but no gas meters anywhere, that's a strong signal the building is all electric. Gas meters in Israel are typically installed near the cylinders or at the point of entry to each unit. They're boxy, usually gray or beige, with a glass dial. If you don't see any, that's meaningful.
Daniel raised the question of whether you can trust what they tell you.
I think the honest answer is that most realtors in Israel don't know the gas status of the buildings they're showing. They know the asking price, the number of rooms, the parking situation, maybe the arnona zone. Gas connection status is not on their standard checklist. And if they don't know, they'll often just say "I think it's electric" because that's the easier answer and they want to close the deal. I'm not saying they're all dishonest. I'm saying they're not incentivized to find out.
There's also the structural issue. If you're a renter, you have even less leverage to demand this information. You're shown the apartment, you have maybe twenty minutes to decide, and the gas question isn't even on your radar because you're thinking about whether the bedroom fits a bed.
That's the asymmetry the prompt is getting at. The person who installs gas makes the choice. Everyone else in the building lives with the consequence. In a condo building, one owner decides to connect their unit to a gas balloon system. They get the permit, they run the pipes through common areas, they install cylinders on the shared roof. The neighbors might not even be notified, depending on the building's bylaws and how aggressively the va'ad bayit enforces things.
The va'ad bayit, for listeners not in Israel, is the building committee. And its power ranges from absolute monarchy to complete fiction depending on the building.
And in a building where the va'ad is weak or nonfunctional, you can have a situation where gas infrastructure proliferates with zero oversight. One unit connects, then another, then another. Each one runs their own piping. You end up with a spaghetti of gas lines in the stairwell, different vintages, different levels of maintenance. Some of those pipes are decades old, never inspected. And the gas companies, I should note, are responsible for the cylinders and the regulators, but the internal piping from the regulator into the unit is the owner's responsibility. That's where a lot of the risk lives.
You've got a patchwork of privately maintained gas lines running through shared spaces, no central record of what exists, and no mechanism for a prospective buyer or renter to find out. That's the detection landscape.
That's the detection landscape. And it's why the second part of the prompt, the question of whether we should just ban gas from multi-unit buildings, is not just an environmental question. It's a safety question, and it's a consent question. If I can't reliably find out whether my building has gas, and I can't opt out if it does, then my exposure is involuntary.
Let's go there. The ban debate. Where is this actually happening?
The most instructive example right now is New York City. In twenty twenty-one, the city council passed Local Law one fifty-four, which effectively bans gas hookups in new buildings. The law kicked in for buildings under seven stories in twenty twenty-four, and for taller buildings it phases in by twenty twenty-seven. New construction, no gas stoves, no gas boilers.
The real estate industry fought it hard. The gas industry fought it harder. There were op-eds about the death of the New York bagel, which is a whole genre of its own. But the city's own analysis estimated that gas combustion in buildings accounts for about forty percent of New York's total greenhouse gas emissions. So from a climate perspective, it's one of the highest-leverage moves a city can make. And then there's the safety angle. The gas explosion in the East Village in twenty fifteen killed two people, leveled three buildings. That was a case of an illegal gas line tap that went undetected.
The illegal tap part feels very Jerusalem.
And New York is not alone. California has been pushing this at the state level. Berkeley was the first U.city to ban gas in new buildings back in twenty nineteen, though that got tied up in court. By twenty twenty-three, more than a hundred U.cities and counties had some form of electrification ordinance. The movement has momentum, but it's also hitting a legal wall in some places. The argument against it usually comes down to consumer choice and cost. Gas is cheaper for heating in a lot of climates, and chefs prefer cooking with it.
The chef argument. I've always found that one a bit precious. Home cooks are not running Michelin-starred kitchens. They're reheating schnitzel.
I think it's partly aesthetic. The blue flame, the responsiveness. But induction cooktops have gotten really good. The technology has improved dramatically in the last five years. Faster heat, more precise control, and no combustion byproducts in your kitchen. There's a growing body of research on indoor air quality and gas stoves. A study from Stanford in twenty twenty-two found that gas stoves leak methane even when they're off, and that the nitrogen dioxide levels from cooking with gas can exceed outdoor EPA limits within minutes.
You're trading the romance of the blue flame for elevated childhood asthma risk.
That's not an exaggeration. A meta analysis published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health in twenty twenty-two estimated that about twelve point seven percent of childhood asthma cases in the U.are attributable to gas stove use. That number has been debated, but even the lower bound estimates are not nothing. And in Israeli apartments, where kitchens are often open plan and ventilation is inconsistent, the exposure is probably higher.
What's the state of the debate here?
Israel is in an interesting position. On the one hand, we have an enormous solar resource. The country gets nearly twice the solar irradiation of Germany. The economic case for electrification is strong. On the other hand, natural gas has been a huge part of Israel's energy story since the Tamar and Leviathan fields came online. Cheap domestic gas reshaped the electricity grid and the political economy. There's a national pride element. We found gas, we're going to use gas.
The "we found gas" premium.
And that trickles down to residential policy. There have been efforts to expand the natural gas distribution network to more neighborhoods, which is a different thing from the balloon based LPG systems, but it's all part of the same ecosystem. The gas companies are powerful. Supergas alone has something like eight hundred thousand residential customers. That's a lot of lobbying heft.
The regulatory framework?
The Ministry of Energy oversees the gas sector broadly, but enforcement of safety standards at the building level falls to local authorities, who are under-resourced. The Standards Institution of Israel has guidelines for gas installations, but there's no mandatory inspection regime for existing residential systems. Once it's in, it's in. Unless something goes wrong.
Which brings us back to the explosion that prompted this whole conversation. What do we know about what happened?
The recent incident in Jerusalem, and I'm going to be careful here because there are still investigations ongoing, involved a gas balloon explosion in an apartment building. A friend of Daniel's was affected, and from what's been reported, it appears to have been a leak from a cylinder or its connection that accumulated gas in an enclosed space until it found an ignition source. That's the classic pattern. Gas is heavier than air, it pools in low spots, and if it reaches the right concentration, a spark from a light switch, a refrigerator compressor kicking on, anything can set it off.
This is the thing people don't internalize. You don't need to be in the room with the leak. The gas travels.
It travels through gaps in the floor, through utility chases, through stairwells. In a multi-unit building, a leak in a ground-floor apartment can fill the basement. Or a leak on the roof, where the cylinders often sit, can seep down through the building. The explosion can happen three floors away from the source. That's what makes the "I don't use gas, so I'm safe" assumption so dangerous. You're safe from your own equipment. You're not safe from your neighbor's equipment.
Which is the core of the shared-interest argument. If I can't opt out of the risk, the decision to bring gas into the building should not be an individual one.
That's where the ban debate gets its moral force. It's not just about paternalism, telling people what they can and can't have in their homes. It's about the fact that in a multi-unit building, your kitchen is not a sovereign territory. It's connected to everyone else's kitchen through shared air, shared walls, shared infrastructure. The libertarian argument for gas choice breaks down when the risk is non-consensual and non-contained.
The libertarian argument also breaks down when the information asymmetry is this bad. Free choice requires knowing what you're choosing. If you can't find out whether a building has gas before you sign a lease, you're not making a choice at all.
And this is where I think policy could move even without a full ban. Mandatory disclosure, for a start. If you're selling or renting a unit, you should be legally required to disclose whether the building has gas, what type, when the last inspection was. That's not radical. We do that for lead paint, for asbestos, for structural defects. Gas is at least as dangerous as any of those.
If you're going to have gas in a multi-unit building, there should be a periodic inspection regime, paid for by the gas supplier or the building, with results filed publicly. If the gas companies want to maintain their customer base, they can pay for the safety infrastructure that justifies it.
There's a model for this in the UK. Landlords are required to have an annual gas safety check by a registered engineer, and they have to provide the certificate to tenants. It's not perfect, enforcement is spotty, but at least there's a standard. Israel has nothing equivalent for existing residential systems. The gas company checks the cylinder and regulator when they deliver a new one, but they don't inspect the internal piping. That's the homeowner's problem, and most homeowners don't think about it until there's a smell.
Or a bang.
Or a bang.
What about the cost argument? If you ban gas, you're forcing people to retrofit. Induction cooktops, electric boilers. That's expensive, and in a country where housing costs are already crushing, adding a mandatory retrofit is politically toxic.
And I think this is where the new-construction versus existing-building distinction matters. A ban on gas in new buildings, like New York's approach, avoids the retrofit problem. You're not taking anything away from anyone. You're just saying the next generation of buildings will be all electric. The cost of building all electric from scratch is actually lower in a lot of cases because you skip the gas piping, the venting, the safety systems. One analysis from the Rocky Mountain Institute found that all electric new construction in several U.cities was cheaper than mixed-fuel construction, sometimes by several thousand dollars per unit.
The builder saves money, the occupant gets lower asthma risk, and the neighbor doesn't inherit a risk they didn't choose. That's a compelling package.
The political challenge is that the gas industry sees new construction bans as an existential threat. If new buildings don't have gas, the customer base shrinks, the distribution network becomes less economical, and eventually the whole thing enters a death spiral. So they fight new-construction bans as hard as they would fight a total ban. And they have deep pockets.
In Israel, the gas companies are major players. They sponsor things, they have relationships with municipalities.
And there's also the cultural dimension. Israeli kitchens have been built around gas for decades. The big Friday afternoon cooking, the schnitzel, the jachnun that sits on the hot plate overnight. People have an emotional attachment to the flame. It's not rational, but it's real, and policy that ignores it will fail.
Though I'd argue the jachnun on a hot plate is already electric. The flame is doing the initial cooking, but the overnight slow hold is all electric. So you're already hybrid.
That's actually a great point. A lot of Israeli cooking is already hybrid. The gas is for the stovetop, the oven is often electric, the hot plate is electric, the Shabbat urn is electric. The all-or-nothing framing doesn't match how people actually cook.
What would a serious Israeli gas safety policy look like, short of an outright ban?
I'd say three things. First, mandatory disclosure at point of sale or rental. You should know, in writing, whether the building has gas and what kind. Second, mandatory periodic inspection of all gas systems in multi-unit buildings, with the results filed with the local authority and available to residents. Third, a phase out of balloon based LPG systems in buildings above a certain density, with a timeline that gives people time to transition. The technology exists. Induction cooktops are available, heat pump water heaters are getting cheaper. The transition is technically feasible. It's the political will that's missing.
The public awareness. Most Israelis don't think about gas safety until there's an explosion in their neighborhood. Then it's all anyone talks about for three days, and then it fades.
The availability heuristic in action. We assess risk based on what's salient, not what's probable. Gas explosions are rare but catastrophic. The day-to-day risk is the indoor air quality, the childhood asthma, the slow accumulation of small exposures. That's harder to build a movement around than a building that blows up.
Though the explosion does concentrate the mind. The prompt came from someone who knows a victim. That changes the calculus.
And I think that's part of why this conversation matters. Policy often gets shaped by the people who show up after a tragedy. The families of victims, the neighbors who felt the blast. They become advocates. They push for changes that the rest of us benefit from but wouldn't have organized around.
The question is whether we can do it before the next explosion.
And there's some momentum internationally that Israel could learn from. The European Union has been tightening regulations on gas in buildings as part of its energy performance directives. The Netherlands has been phasing out gas for heating since twenty eighteen. Australia's state of Victoria banned gas in new homes starting in twenty twenty four. These are not fringe policies. These are mainstream energy transitions happening in developed economies.
Israel positions itself as a tech-forward economy, a start-up nation. You'd think we'd want to be ahead of this curve, not trailing it.
You'd think. But energy policy here is heavily shaped by the gas windfall. When you're sitting on the Leviathan field, the incentive to electrify everything is blunted. Why push for heat pumps when you've got cheap domestic gas to burn?
Because the gas doesn't stay domestic. Most of it is exported. The domestic price benefit is real but it's not permanent, and it doesn't capture the externalities. The healthcare costs from asthma, the property damage from explosions, the carbon emissions. Those aren't on the gas company's balance sheet.
They're not. And that's the classic externality problem. The gas company profits from selling gas. The costs are distributed across the healthcare system, the fire department, the insurance industry, and the families who lose their homes or their loved ones. The price at the meter doesn't reflect the true cost.
If you're a listener in Israel, and you're thinking about buying or renting, what's your practical checklist?
Okay, practical checklist. One, look for the cylinder cage. If you see it, ask where the cylinders are located relative to the unit you're considering. Two, look for gas meters or yellow-marked piping. Three, ask the current occupant or the building va'ad directly. Not the realtor, the va'ad. Four, call the gas companies and ask if the building is connected. You might get stonewalled, but it's worth the five minutes. Five, check the kitchen. If there's a gas cooktop, obviously there's gas. But also look for capped gas lines. Sometimes a unit has been converted to electric but the gas infrastructure is still live.
The capped line is a sneaky one.
It's a trap. The previous owner switches to induction, the realtor says "it's an electric kitchen," and nobody mentions the live gas line behind the wall waiting for someone to bump it or for a renovation to nick it.
If you find gas, what then?
Then you assess. Is it your unit only, or is it building-wide? Where are the cylinders? When was the last inspection? Is there a gas detector in the unit? In Israel, gas detectors are not mandatory in older buildings. A lot of apartments don't have them. If you're moving into a place with gas, install a detector. They're cheap. Fifty shekels could save your life.
If you're on the building committee, what's your responsibility?
If you're on the va'ad, you have a responsibility to know what's in your building. Do an audit. Map every gas connection. Find out when each one was last inspected. If there are cylinders on the roof, make sure they're secured, ventilated, and away from ignition sources. If a resident wants to connect new gas, require a permit, require a licensed installer, require notification of all neighbors. Don't let one person's kitchen renovation become everyone's risk.
That feels like the minimum viable standard. And it's not happening in most buildings.
It's not. Most va'ads are overwhelmed just dealing with the elevator maintenance and the leaky roof. Gas safety is way down the list until it's suddenly the only thing on the list.
The squeaky floorboard problem. You ignore it for years, and then one day it's not a floorboard, it's a crater.
A crater is a floorboard that stopped squeaking.
There's a metaphor in there somewhere.
I think the metaphor is that deferred maintenance is a form of gambling, and with gas, the stakes are much higher than a squeaky floorboard.
Let's zoom out for a second. The prompt ends with a question about the shared interest, about prioritizing collective safety over individual choice. And I think that's the philosophical heart of this. In a dense urban environment, your choices are never just your own. The soundproofing of your floor is my ceiling. The gas line you install runs through my stairwell. The fire you start is my fire.
There's a concept in risk analysis called "risk imposition." It's the idea that some risks are voluntarily assumed, I choose to go rock climbing, and some are imposed on you by others, I live next to a factory that emits benzene. Gas in multi-unit buildings is an imposed risk. You didn't choose it. You might not even know about it. And the person who imposed it might not have thought about it in those terms at all. They just wanted a gas stove.
The asymmetry is baked in. The gas user gets the benefit, the blue flame, the responsiveness. The neighbors get the downside risk. The benefit is private, the risk is shared.
That's exactly the framing that has driven a lot of the electrification movement. It's not just about climate. It's about the mismatch between who decides and who bears the consequences. In a single-family home, you can make a case for personal choice. You're the only one at risk. In a twelve-unit building, you're making a choice for twelve households, most of whom you've never met.
If you're a renter, you're not even making a choice. You're accepting whatever choice the landlord made, probably without disclosure.
The rental market is the worst case. Renters in Israel have very little power. The market is tight, especially in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. You take what you can get. The idea that you'd turn down an apartment because it has gas is a luxury most renters don't have. So they're exposed to a risk they didn't choose, can't afford to avoid, and probably don't know about.
Which brings us back to the ban. If you can't solve the information problem, and you can't solve the consent problem, the only lever left is to remove the hazard.
That's where the international examples are heading. The bans aren't just climate policy. They're an acknowledgment that the information and consent mechanisms have failed. If we can't ensure that every apartment hunter knows what they're walking into, we can at least ensure that what they're walking into doesn't explode.
There's a counterargument, though, that a ban is heavy-handed, that it punishes the responsible gas user for the negligence of the irresponsible one. If I maintain my system, if I get it inspected, why should I lose my gas stove because someone three buildings over did a shoddy install?
It's a fair point. And I think it's why the new-construction approach is more politically viable. You're not taking anything from the responsible user. You're just saying the next generation of buildings will be designed differently. The responsible user keeps their gas stove. Their building is grandfathered in. But over time, as buildings turn over, the gas share shrinks.
The grandfathering approach. Slow, but less likely to provoke a backlash.
It gives the market time to adapt. Induction cooktops get cheaper, heat pump water heaters improve, electricians get trained. The transition happens over a decade or two instead of overnight. The downside, of course, is that the risk persists in the grandfathered buildings. The explosion that prompted this conversation was in an older building. Grandfathering doesn't protect the people living there now.
It's a trade-off. Political feasibility versus speed of risk reduction.
It always is. And I don't have a clean answer. I think the disclosure and inspection piece is urgent and achievable in the near term, regardless of where you land on the ban question. Even if you think gas should remain an option, you should want people to know what they're getting into and you should want the systems to be inspected.
The boring, unglamorous work of regulation. It doesn't make headlines, but it saves lives.
And there's a role here for municipalities. Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, they could require gas disclosure as part of the rental licensing process. They could require periodic inspection of multi-unit buildings. They don't need to wait for the Knesset to act. City-level policy can move faster and be more tailored to local building stock.
Though Israeli municipalities are not exactly known for their regulatory nimbleness.
No, but they're closer to the problem. A city inspector can walk into a building in Kiryat Yovel and see the gas lines. A Knesset committee can't. There's a case for subsidiarity here.
To pull this together for the listener who's trying to navigate this practically. You can't rely on a central database. You can look for physical indicators, cylinders, meters, yellow pipes, regulator valves. You can ask the va'ad. You can call the gas companies and hope for a helpful rep. You should install a detector if you end up somewhere with gas. And if you're in a position to influence building policy, push for disclosure, push for inspection, and maybe push for a conversation about whether your building wants to be gas-connected at all.
On the policy side, Israel is behind the curve compared to what's happening in the U., Europe, and Australia. The tools exist. The safety case is strong. The climate case is strong. What's missing is the political coalition to move it.
Plus the emotional attachment to the flame. Never underestimate the power of a blue flame to short-circuit a cost-benefit analysis.
The heart wants what the heart wants.
The heart wants jachnun.
The heart wants jachnun that won't explode the building.
A modest ask.
A modest ask.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: The brilliant blue pigment used in Byzantine illuminated manuscripts was often derived from lapis lazuli mined in what is now Afghanistan, ground into ultramarine powder, and traded across more than four thousand miles of land and sea routes. By the sixth century, it was worth more than its weight in gold, and Byzantine scribes used it exclusively for the robes of Christ and the Virgin Mary, a color hierarchy so strict that using ultramarine on a lesser figure was considered a theological error.
The Byzantines had a color-coded caste system for their paint.
The theological error part is really doing the heavy lifting there.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop. If you want more episodes, you'll find them at myweirdprompts dot com, and if you've got a prompt of your own, send it our way. For Herman Poppleberry, I'm Corn. Stay safe out there.
