Gas stove bans are one more step toward eliminating all natural gas use

Once natural gas use is severely restricted, it can be argued that gas pipelines are no longer needed, and neither is gas drilling.

Earlier this year, there was widespread outrage at the news that the Biden administration was planning to ban gas stoves. The anger was so intense that the Biden administration announced they were not planning to take anyone’s gas stoves.

Not long after that, the head of the Consumer Produce Safety Commission admitted that they were looking into the safety of gas stoves. That started an avalanche of headlines and stories claiming that gas stoves are dangerous.

One of the first “studies” cited early on as evidence of the dangers posed by gas stoves was a 2020 study by researchers at UCLA. As noted by Steve Everley in National Review early this year, that study claimed to link gas stoves to asthma, but the study was faulty because they used a model that assumed no ventilation.

Similarly, researchers at Stanford University published a study claiming the “climate and health impacts of natural gas stoves are greater than previously thought.” Like the UCLA report that preceded it, the analysis was based on an environment without ventilation: The authors created an airtight portion of the room with clear plastic sheets that were sealed along the ceiling, walls, and floor:

We used a kitchen chamber approach to take measurements with a measured kitchen volume, sealed using a plastic partition.

As Steve Everley noted:

It should go without saying that an “airtight” kitchen encased in plastic sheets is not representative of any real-world kitchen.

What these “studies” did accomplish was showing how to create bogus studies about the health effects of natural gas stoves. Many media outlets followed up with their own studies.

A recent example was the New York Times, which conducted its own study. The NYT article, titled “Testing New York Apartments: “How Dirty Is That Gas Stove, Really?” begins with a story about the “team of scientists from Stanford hauling 300 pounds of equipment to the 18th-floor apartment to show that they were real professional researchers. The apartment owner was a “mother of three adult children” who said “a new stove had just been installed, but she still can’t stand the smell” of the gas from it. She volunteered to participate in the NYT study through a local climate group. Mrs. Johnson said that she and her children have asthma and other health problems, so she was eager to know what their stove did to the air they breathed.

Many paragraphs later, after the article describes how the researchers set up “tubes and analyzers at roughly nose height,” they took background readings” and then fired up the gas stove, and their equipment quickly detected the change:

They observed a rise in concentrations of nitrogen dioxide—which among other negative health effects, can irritate the respiratory system, aggravate symptoms of respiratory diseases and contribute to asthma.

The NYT article then mentions in passing:

…the kitchen doorway (was) sealed off and the window (was) closed too. Mrs. Johnson’s kitchen also lacks a stove hood, which could help with ventilation (emphasis added).

Residential building codes in the state of New York require gas stoves to have vent hoods with exhaust fans that vent to the outside:

This chapter shall govern the ventilation of spaces within a building intended to be occupied. Mechanical exhaust systems, including exhaust systems serving clothes dryers and cooking appliances; hazardous exhaust systems; dust, stock and refuse conveyor systems; subslab soil exhaust systems; smoke control systems; energy recovery ventilation systems and other systems specified in Section 502 shall comply with Chapter 5 (ventilation rules).

The NYT article goes on to detail similar findings in other New York City apartments, and in every one of them, the NYT mentions in passing that the stoves were not vented to the outside as required by state law as in these examples:

This stove came with a hood but feel this, Mr. Kashtan said, his hand in a stream of hot air that was blowing out from the hood’s edge instead of venting outdoors. That meant the hood “doesn’t make much difference” to the bad air, he said. 

In all, the team conducted daylong testing at eight New York City apartments, including a Brooklyn home where the researchers puzzled over a New York peculiarity: windows sealed with plastic. That was for insulation, said Nina Domingo, who lives in the ground-floor unit with two housemates. But it also meant poor ventilation, which was alarming, given that the kitchen also lacked a hood that vented to the outside. 

When the “researchers” learned that no vent hoods were installed, they should have stopped their testing. Any results of tests are not valid because the stove they are testing is illegally installed. But of course, they didn’t because the exercise aimed to show how dangerous gas stoves are.

So the entire “study” is bogus. The NYT article was a lie from start to finish. Still, it accomplished its goal: publish the article, knowing that it would be mentioned repeatedly as proof of how dangerous gas stoves are, while the admissions that the air tests were bogus would not be repeated.

What is behind all of the recent fuss over gas stoves? This story is much bigger than just gas stoves. Banning gas stoves is just the first step toward banning all uses of natural gas. Once accomplished, the subsequent attacks will be on the natural gas infrastructure. The argument will be that since natural gas is dangerous and illegal in many states, natural gas pipelines are unnecessary and should be phased out.

As David Blackmon noted, the cat was let out of the bag on June 5, 2023,  when Bloomberg quoted Michael Hernandez, the New York policy director of “Rewiring America,” admitting in a hearing that the HEAT Act (Home Energy Affordability Act) in New York lays the groundwork for eliminating natural gas:

If there’s a ban on fossil fuels in new construction, then it makes sense to also say, let’s stop building our gas infrastructure.

So there it is. The plan is to ban gas stoves, followed by banning gas furnaces and gas water heaters. A very important part of this plan is to make natural gas used in power generation prohibitively expensive by requiring that the CO2 emitted be captured and sequestered, known as carbon capture and sequestration or CCS. CCS is part of the EPA's proposed regulations, “Greenhouse Gas Standards for Fossil Fuel-fired Plants.” I discussed these proposed rules in my recent article titled “EPA proposed new rules to limit carbon emissions from coal and gas-fired power plants.”

The anti-fossil fuel forces have always wanted to eliminate natural gas and have tried everything from attacking drilling, fracking, and pipelines. Banning gas stoves is just one more step toward their ultimate goal of banning the use of natural gas altogether. Once natural gas use is severely restricted, it can be argued that gas pipelines are no longer needed, and neither is gas drilling.