The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) is considering banning gas stoves supposedly because they pose health risks, but the move may be driven more by the Biden administration’s antipathy toward fossil fuels.
Bloomberg reports:
Natural gas stoves, which are used in about 40% of homes in the U.S., emit air pollutants such as nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide and fine particulate matter at levels the Environmental Protection Agency and World Health Organization have said are unsafe and linked to respiratory illness, cardiovascular problems, cancer and other health conditions, according to reports by groups such as the Institute for Policy Integrity and the American Chemical Society. Consumer Reports in October urged consumers planning to buy a new range to consider going electric after tests conducted by the group found high levels of nitrogen oxide gases from gas stoves.
“This is a hidden hazard,” CPSC Commissioner Richard Trumka, Jr. told the news service. “Any option is on the table. Products that can’t be made safe can be banned.” (Trumka is one of three commissioners appointed by President Joe Biden; the remaining commissioner, Peter Feldman, was appointed by former President Donald Trump.)
Another allegedly hidden hazard of gas stoves is increased asthma among children. A December study in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health found that “12.7% of current childhood asthma nationwide is attributed to gas stove use, which is similar to the childhood asthma burden attributed to secondhand smoke exposure.”
Left-wing lawmakers have also gotten into the act. A group of congressional Democrats led by New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, plus fellow traveler Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), sent a letter to CPSC Chairman Alexander Hoehn-Saric last month, urging the agency to “take action to address” the health risks of gas stoves, the “cumulative burden” of which falls on “Black, Latino, and low-income households.”
Notably, however, they also wrote that “methane leaks from gas stoves inside U.S. homes were recently found to contribute the equivalent climate impacts as about 500,000 gasoline-powered cars.”
Indeed, it appears that much of the impetus for banning, or at least tightly regulating, gas stoves is the unscientific belief in catastrophic, anthropogenic “climate change.” Democrat-run cities across the country have already started prohibiting gas appliances in homes. “Parallel efforts by state and local policymakers are targeting the use of natural gas in buildings more broadly, in a push to reduce climate-warming emissions (such as from methane) that exacerbate climate change,” penned Bloomberg. “Nearly 100 cities and counties have adopted policies that require or encourage a move away from fossil fuel-powered buildings.” Biden’s misnamed Inflation Reduction Act even includes subsidies for the purchase of new electric appliances and the conversion of home appliance hookups from gas to electric.
“If the CPSC really wanted to do something about public health, it would ban cigarettes, or automobiles, long before it moved on to address stoves,” Republican energy lobbyist Mike McKenna told Bloomberg. “It’s transparently political.”
Constitutionally speaking, the federal government has no authority to ban products. But even if it did, there are better ways of dealing with the hazards of gas stoves than prohibitions or regulations.
The Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers (AHAM), for example, suggests that improved ventilation, such as the use of a range hood’s fan, could significantly reduce the amount of air pollution gas — or electric — stoves create.
“A ban on gas cooking appliances would remove an affordable and preferred technology used in more than 40% of home[s] across the country,” AHAM Vice President Jill Notini told CNN. “A ban of gas cooking would fail to address the overall concern of indoor air quality while cooking, because all forms of cooking, regardless of heat source, generate air pollutants, especially at high temperatures.”
While Trumka intimated that the CPSC could move as soon as this year to ban or regulate gas stoves, the agency told CNN that it “has not proposed any regulatory action on gas stoves at this time, and any regulatory action would ‘involve a lengthy process.’”
According to Booker’s letter, the CPSC first “expressed concerns over gas stove emissions in 1985.” With any luck, it will take the commission another 38 years to finally decide what to do about them.
