The fight over gas stoves

For years on her popular cooking show, The French Chef, Julia Child used a crude, makeshift kitchen that she and her husband would haul to the set for each filming. When she returned to the screen for a new, 13-episode series later in her career, she had one condition: She needed a kitchen that was her own to film in, one “that we could just walk into and work in and leave.”

Child got her wish — thanks to a generous sponsorship from the American Gas Association (AGA), a powerful lobby for gas utilities, which paid for a new kitchen, complete with a four-burner commercial range and a gas oven rotisserie.

Republicans have eagerly jumped to the gas stove’s defense ever since it entered the culture war fray. But there’s one major miscalculation: The natural gas industry needs blue states much more than it needs red ones.

The clearest sign yet that the natural gas industry is losing ground among its most valuable customer base is in New York. On Wednesday, Gov. Kathy Hochul signed the first budget to include a statewide ban on gas in new buildings. The law requires new buildings shorter than seven stories to have all-electric heating and cooking by 2026, and taller buildings to meet the requirements by 2029. There are some notable exemptions for the commercial sector, including restaurants, laundromats, and hospitals. The law builds on a similar New York City gas ban, passed in 2021.

The next chapter of the gas stove debate is here.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission is now officially open for comments on how it should grapple with evidence that gas stoves pollute indoor air. The Department of Energy has proposed rules that would raise the bar for new stoves sold, which would not ban gas stoves but require they meet higher efficiency standards. States and cities are doing even more: Illinois is considering legislation requiring a warning label on gas stoves; Eugene, Oregon, recently joined the list of 105 cities beginning to phase out gas in new construction in the country to begin to phase out gas in new construction; and New York’s governor has prioritized legislation to phase out fossil fuel heating by 2030.

At first glance, a local news station in San Diego seemed to be airing a soft news piece helping viewers achieve their new year’s resolutions. The host for San Diego Living, a CBS8 program that sometimes airs sponsored content, said their next guest, a celebrity TV star, would deliver fun facts about healthy living and showcase some recipes.

Then, they dove in. The next four minutes were indistinguishable from an ad, paid for by the propane industry. The show’s host made a brief disclosure at the beginning, but after that, viewers would have had to read the tiny fine print on screen that the chef Dean Sheremet was there on behalf of the Propane Education & Research Council (PERC). By the time it aired in February, Sheremet had already taken to multiple local programs touting the benefits of cooking with gas and propane.

Forty years ago, the federal government seemed to be on the brink of regulating the gas stove. Everything was on the table, from an outright ban to a modification of the Clean Air Act to address indoor air pollution. Congress held indoor air quality hearings in 1983, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) were both investigating the effects of gas appliances.

Backed into a corner, the industry that profits from selling consumers natural gas for their heating and cooking sprang into action. Itfiled comments to agencies disputing the science. It funded its own studies and hired consultants to assess the threats it would face from further regulation.

For years, I’ve been interested in air pollution — and you should be too.

I’ve covered research finding that dust storms in the Sahara lead to 22 percent higher child mortality and evidence that students do worse in school when exposed to poor air quality. My colleagues have written that indoor air pollution leads to 4 million deaths a year, mostly in Africa and Asia, and that rollbacks in US air quality regulations can contribute to the premature deaths of thousands of Americans.

The debate over the future of the gas stove has been going on for years, long before last week, when it turned into a full-fledged culture war.

Public health officials, researchers, and doctors have long been taking note of the abundant research linking pollution from the gas stove to respiratory problems, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission announced in December it was taking a look at the health risks to determine what regulations would be appropriate for the gas stove.

When the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) announced in mid-December it would consider its first-ever health regulations on gas stoves, it was the start of what will be a very long journey to any kind of restrictions — one that will consider public comment, including from the gas industry, in determining the approach. The debate blew up this week, though, when Bloomberg reported the agency was considering a ban.

The agency could pick one of many routes: new performance standards for range hoods to ensure they are filtering out emissions, a requirement that stoves be sold with a ducted hood to vent outside, or, most drastically, a ban on their import and manufacture. “Any option is on the table,” one of the CPSC’s commissioners, Richard Trumka Jr., told Bloomberg.

Millions of Americans are still reliant on gas combustion for their furnaces, water heaters, clothes dryers, fireplaces, stoves, and ovens, not realizing the pollution they create both indoors and outdoors because of it.

“Many of us are basically running mini fossil fuel plants,” said Leah Stokes, a political scientist at the University of California Santa Barbara and senior adviser to the climate advocacy group Evergreen Action.

Locals in the town of Fredonia, New York, noticed in the early 19th centuryhow gas would sometimes bubble up in a creek and catch fire when lit. This wasn’t much more than a curiosity until 1821, when a businessman captured and sold it for fuel to Fredonia shops. This “inflammable air,” as one newspaper called it, was cheap to transport relative to the other lighting fuels of the day — whale oil for candles and gas produced from coal. From the start, “nature’s gas,” as it was nicknamed, was celebrated as the healthy and virtually inexhaustible miracle fuel of the future.

A big part of the early appeal was how much cleaner gas seemed than coal. In the 19th century, people could see and smell the particulate matter, sulfur, and nitrogen leaving a trail of smoggy air in cities. By comparison, natural gas is almost entirely made up of methane, a colorless, odorless gas that produces far fewer of these pollutants when burned.

When we fire up a gas stove, we’re releasing a powerful climate pollutant into kitchens and beyond. But a new study found that this isn’t just happening when the stove is on. Even when turned off, a typical gas stove will send methane up to the atmosphere.

The new peer-reviewed study, published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, helps answer a particular question that’s been nagging scientists for years. The puzzle has been accounting for all the sources of methane as concentrations in the atmosphere have risen to record levels. They know the natural gas industry, and specifically leaks from its pipelines, is the biggest contributor (natural gas is mostly methane). Other well-documented sources are livestock and landfills.

On Wednesday, New York became the largest city in the country to agree to phase out fossil fuels in all new building construction after the city council passed a bill that bans those buildings from hooking up to gas. The “breakthrough moment,” according to council member Alicka Ampry-Samuel, spells the beginning of the end to gas-powered appliances used by default in construction.

Carbon emissions from buildings are a major driver of climate change, and the main culprits are boilers and water heaters, and to a lesser degree, gas stoves. In the US, 13 percent of greenhouse gasses come from commercial and residential buildings powered by fossil fuels. New York City’s buildings account for a much larger share of its emissions, more than transportation or any other category.

The American stovetop is increasingly a battleground in a war over the fate of the 70 million buildings powered by natural gas.

On one side of the stove wars is the natural gas utility industry, which has tried to thwart cities considering phasing out gas in buildings. One of its PR strategies has been to hire influencers to tout what they love about cooking with gas to generate public opposition to city efforts.

Editor’s note, January 11, 2023: In December 2022, the US Consumer Product Safety Commission announced it would consider health regulations on gas stoves. Vox’s coverage of that announcement, and of the potential public health risks of gas stoves, can be found here. The story that follows was originally published in May 2020.

In 2001, a major study of human activity patterns found that people in the US spend roughly 90 percent of their time indoors. It is safe to say that, in the age of Covid-19, that number is even higher. (Here in the Roberts household, it feels like we’ve hit 105 percent.)

Indoor air pollution gets surprisingly little attention for such a lethal public health problem. It kills more people each year than HIV/AIDS and malaria combined, but few countries treat it as a crisis on the same level.

The basic story: About 3 billion people around the world — mostly in Africa and Asia, and mostly very poor — don't have access to modern energy and still cook and heat their homes by burning coal, charcoal, dung, wood, or plant residue indoors. These homes often have poor ventilation, and the smoke can cause a horrible array of respiratory diseases, including lung cancer.