Gas stoves save billions of lives around the world but are being banned in the U.S.

Federal agencies plan to impose performance requirements designed to price gas stoves out of the market.

Source: Clean Cooking Alliance. Gas stoves “transform lives by improving health, protecting the climate, empowering women, and helping consumers save time and money.”

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, says on its website that billions of lives could be saved with “clean cooking.” The World Health Organization, WHO, agrees:

One-third of the global population or 2.4 billion people worldwide still remain without access to clean cooking. The use of inefficient, polluting fuels and technologies is a health risk and a major contributor to diseases and deaths, particularly for women and children in low- and middle-income countries. It makes cooking with polluting fuels one of the largest environmental contributors to ill health.

The problem, according to the EPA, WHO, and dozens of other humanitarian organizations, is that billions of people in the world cook their food using “biomass,” meaning wood, dung, and crop residues in crude stoves or open fires. As a result, people in the developing world, primarily women and children, are exposed to smoke with high concentrations of pollutants, including fine particles composed of toxic compounds. This exposure to household smoke contributes to illnesses such as pneumonia and low birth weight in children, lung cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, blindness, and heart disease in adults, especially women.

What are the fuels used for clean cooking? WHO defines fuels and technologies that are clean for health as

solar, electricity, biogas, liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), natural gas, alcohol fuels, as well as certain biomass stoves that meet the emission targets in the WHO Guidelines.

While many of these clean cooking organizations do not openly praise LPG gas stoves, they are the favored cooking fuel worldwide because they are clean burning, small, and light, and the fuel canisters are easily transported.

Ironically, while the world needs gas stoves for clean cooking to help billions of people have healthy lives, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission and the states of California and New York legislatures are working to ban natural gas stoves because, supposedly, they are dangerous to human health.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission, CPSC, came under fire when its Commissioner, Richard L. Trumpka, Jr., said earlier this year that they were considering banning gas stoves. Many members of Congress spoke out against the suggestion that gas stoves might be banned. President Biden said that his administration was not going to ban gas stoves. CPSC clarified that they were not considering banning gas stoves.

Instead of making gas stoves illegal, CPSC adopted a more sinister plan of imposing onerous requirements on gas stoves that will effectively price them out of the market. CPSC published a “Request for Information on Chronic Hazards Associated with Gas Ranges and Proposed Solutions” in the Federal Register on March 7, 2023, asking for public input and has yet to signal its next moves.

In the meantime, the House of Representatives voted 248 to 180 to prevent the CPSC from banning gas stoves and restricting the agencies’ ability to regulate the products. Rumors still abound that CPSC will issue rules that will significantly increase the cost of gas stoves due to high compliance costs, effectively banning gas stoves and other gas appliances, including gas furnaces and water heaters.

The suggestion that gas stoves may be banned at the federal level was a dog whistle that spawned gas stove bans at the state and local levels. Some 70 cities and communities in California and the City of Berkeley, California, passed laws banning natural gas in new construction. A group of restaurant owners sued the City of Berkeley and lost, but in April 2023, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the decision, siding with the restaurant owners who argued the city bypassed federal energy regulations when it approved the ordinance. The case is pending a rehearing by a larger 11-judge panel. The Biden administration submitted an amicus brief backing the city.

New York State Gov. Kathy Hochul signed a New York law that bans natural gas appliances and infrastructure in new buildings. The “All-Electric Building Act” requires almost all newly constructed buildings to be all-electric beginning in 2026 for buildings less than seven stories and in 2029 for taller structures. However, a group of companies and labor unions filed a lawsuit on October 12, 2023:

Plaintiffs include Mulhern Gas Co., the National Association of Home Builders, National Propane Gas Association, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 1049, Plumbers Local Union No. 200, and the AFL-CIO. The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York (Mulhern Gas. Co. V. Rodriguez, No. 1:23-cv-01267.

The plaintiffs argued that New York’s natural gas ban is preempted by federal law and contrary to the public interest, an argument similar to the lawsuit against Berkley, California. The federal law cited as preempting the ban is President Carter’s 1975 law, the Energy Policy and Conservation Act (EPCA). This act established a federal program that created the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the Conservation Program for Consumer Products, and the Corporate Average Fuel Economy regulations.

The plaintiffs are arguing that the EPCA preempts any state or local regulations on energy consumption by appliances because it established national guidelines and standards for appliances’ energy efficiency and, therefore, negates the New York law:

EPCA reflects Congress’s decision that the nation’s energy policy cannot be dictated by state and local governments. Such a patchwork approach would be the antithesis of a national energy policy.

My take: Natural gas is clean and abundant, and the United States has hundreds of years of supply, making it the world’s largest producer. Thousands of products are made from natural gas either as process heat or as a feedstock for which there are no substitutes. These characteristics make natural gas a near-perfect hydrocarbon, which has driven the anti-fossil fuel crowd crazy for decades. They tried and failed to stop the shale revolution with bans on hydraulic fracturing. They tried to stop new natural gas pipelines and succeeded in a few cases, but pipelines continue to be built.

The next iteration of eliminating natural gas by making its use illegal will fail as well. It will fail because natural gas plays a vital role in the world economy that cannot be replaced. Since natural gas has only one carbon atom and four hydrogen atoms, it is a perfect feedstock for hydrogen. New technologies are being developed by NET Power and others to capture CO2 for use or sequestration.

Instead of trying to stop the use of natural gas by making it illegal, those with a vision of a low-carbon economy should embrace natural gas as a pathway to achieve that dream.

Thank you for reading “Thoughts about Energy and Economics.” This is a reader-supported publication, so please “Like” it, share it with friends and colleagues, and become a paid subscriber. Your support is greatly appreciated!