Gas stove battles heat up with new laws across the country

New fronts in the growing war over stoves are being opened at every level of government.

On one side, pro-fossil-fuel politicians are trying to ensure that the market for gas stoves stays alive and well.

Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., on Feb. 2 introduced the Gas Stove Protection and Freedom Act to prevent the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) from banning gas stoves.

In statements accompanying the bill’s introduction, the senators struck a brave pose in defense of liberty. “Make no mistake, radical environmentalists want to stop Americans from using natural gas,” Cruz said. “The federal government has no business telling American families how to cook their dinner,” Manchin said.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a likely GOP presidential candidate at the forefront of the culture wars, proposed on Feb. 1 to create a permanent sales tax exemption for gas stoves. The effort is largely symbolic, since only 8% of Florida households use gas for cooking, and most homes in the warm-weather state aren’t even hooked up to gas lines.

But DeSantis explained that he is taking a moral stance. “We’re not even a state ... Florida wasn’t even connected, we’ve got mostly electric,” he said in an address laying out his budget. “It’s just the principle.”

On the other side of the issue, liberal legislators are looking at ways of moving their constituents toward electric stoves.

On Monday the college town of Eugene, Ore., became the first city in that state to ban gas stove hookups in new buildings. The measure applies only to residential buildings of three stories or fewer. The City Council passed the law by a 5-3 margin, with environmental justice advocates arguing that it would help disadvantaged communities in which exposure to air pollution is most severe.

“Communities of color in Eugene are more likely to breathe hazardous air in our neighborhoods. Our homes should be places of refuge, not one more source of pollution for overburdened lungs,” Jerrel Brown, an environmental and climate justice organizer with the local chapter of the NAACP, said in a statement.

Back in the nation’s capital, a majority of Washington, D.C., Council members last Friday proposed using public funds to pay the full cost to replace gas stoves and boilers with electric appliances in households making less than $80,000 a year. The bill would also create a permitting fee for the installation of new oil- or gas-burning appliances when renovating.

Efforts to phase out gas appliances such as stoves and furnaces are not new. Removing fossil fuels from homes is an essential component of reaching net-zero emissions, which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says must happen by midcentury to avert catastrophic climate change. In recent years, cities such as New York, Los Angeles and Seattle have banned gas hookups in new buildings. As part of her extensive climate agenda, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, has proposed to extend that ban statewide in her last two State of the State addresses.

In the last few years, some efforts to fight back on behalf of the gas industry have also begun. The Virginia General Assembly’s Republican-majority House passed a bill last year to block local governments from limiting consumer access to natural-gas-powered appliances.

The recent escalation in the stove war was kicked off in January, when a study calculating that gas stoves are responsible for 650,000 U.S. childhood asthma cases was published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.

That led Richard Trumka Jr., a CPSC commissioner, to tell Bloomberg News that the agency might consider regulations to protect consumers from gas stoves, including an outright ban on selling them. The comments triggered intense blowback from conservatives and Republicans such as Texas Rep. Ronny Jackson, who tweeted, “I’ll NEVER give up my gas stove. If the maniacs in the White House come for my stove, they can pry it from my cold dead hands. COME AND TAKE IT!!”

Subsequently, CPSC Chairman Alexander Hoehn-Saric unequivocally stated that the agency has no intention of banning gas stoves, but that evidently hasn’t quieted the furor on the right.

The more plausible possibility is that the CPSC will develop regulations to reduce air pollution from gas stoves, such as requirements that new stoves come with vents, as a group of 20 Democratic senators and House members urged in a letter to the commission in December.

On the left, meanwhile, the newly heightened awareness of the public health harm from gas stoves is leading more localities to consider new policies to mitigate those effects.

One of the sponsors of a proposed bill, D.C. Council member Charles Allen, who holds a master’s degree in public health, told the Washington Post that his main impetus for the legislation is to improve indoor air quality, especially in lower-income communities.

Although some professional chefs are apoplectic at the prospect of having to cook on an electric stove, the attention to gas stoves led Alice Waters, legendary founder of the Berkeley, Calif., restaurant Chez Panisse, to decide to convert her kitchen to electric. (While only 38% of American homes use gas stoves, 76% of U.S. restaurants use natural gas, according to the National Restaurant Association.)

“We can’t make a freedom argument about climate,” Waters told Yahoo News on Jan. 19. “It’s not a choice for some people to continue to pollute the planet.”

While chefs and politicians are taking sides on gas stoves, there is no data yet to suggest any shift in consumer choices. Yahoo News called several Home Depots in Chicago — Illinois has one of the highest shares of gas stoves in the country — and the employees who responded said they had seen no recent change in the split of stove sales between electric and gas.