Gas Stove Ban Could Hurt Coastal Liberals Most

Conservatives expressed outrage earlier this week after federal regulators suggested a potential future ban on new gas cooking stoves, prompting an outpouring of memes equating the effort to gun buybacks and other, liberty-restricting initiatives Republicans claim are being pushed by federal bureaucrats to hurt average Americans.

The reality, however, is that a potential ban on gas stoves would most likely have the most pronounced impact on wealthy, coastal liberals.

On Wednesday, the Consumer Product Safety Commission was forced to issue a statement seemingly backing away from a previous proposal to regulate indoor air pollution from gas stoves following Monday comments to Bloomberg News by Commissioner Richard Trumka stating he was not ruling out a ban on the appliances.

"This is a hidden hazard," Trumka said. "Any option is on the table. Products that can't be made safe can be banned."

The agency was not, nor was it ever, planning a ban, it clarified in a statement Wednesday. Even then, any regulations it enacted would only affect new appliances, rather than existing ones, rendering any talking points about the government "seizing" people's gas ranges moot. But the flames of discontent were already lit among a number of conservatives, who described the proposal—introduced amid claims by the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health that gas stove emissions were bad for people's health—as an attack on middle America.

"This is going to be a huge burden for lower-and-middle class folks," Texas Republican Congressman Ronny Jackson—one of the fiercest opponents of a potential ban—told Fox News Wednesday night. "There's like 187 million people in the country that have these gas stoves in their homes. It's 40 percent of the population."

While an accurate figure, that assessment represents only a partial view of reality.

Data from the Energy Information Administration show that while 38 percent of U.S. households use natural gas for cooking, most of those users are located in traditionally blue states like California (70 percent), New Jersey (69 percent), Illinois, and New York, whose Democratic governor is currently considering a ban on natural gas hookups in all new construction.

Of that number, gas stove ownership is also a matter of wealth: According to data compiled by Matt Bruenig, a liberal researcher and founder of the People's Policy Project who has long posted about the merits of alternatives to gas stove ownership, high-wealth households make up a substantially higher proportion of gas stove ownership than low-wealth households—though some surveys have shown gas stoves are cheaper more efficient to operate.

In the rest of the country, gas stove ownership is relatively minimal. According to the EIA, electric stove ownership surpasses 70 percent of households in the vast majority of U.S. states, reaching highs of 90 percent in North Carolina and 89 percent in Tennessee.

The reason, industry figures say, is not a political one—though polling shows the public's fixation on gas stoves has fallen in recent years, according to Morning Consult; it's about how cities developed, with natural gas infrastructure largely dominating older, higher-density communities in the Northeast and the urban centers of the Upper Midwest.

"It's higher income, more urban," Sam D'Amico, the founder of San Francisco-based induction stove startup Impulse Labs and a former product designer at Facebook, told Newsweek of the current demographic of gas cooktop users. "Basically, where there was gas lighting in cities, there was already enough density for that to get filled out which then, got extended to residential."

And the U.S. government is already pushing policies to drive that percentage higher.

While D'Amico says he planned to pursue his product line regardless of the winner of the 2020 presidential election, President Joe Biden recently signed legislation within the Inflation Reduction Act introducing substantial tax credits for homes looking to convert to induction cooktops, which D'Amico claims are more effective than gas with only a fraction of the environmental impact.

Those tax credits, he said, can not only help hasten adaptation of induction cooktops—they can introduce consumers to what he claims is a superior product.

"You think about the politics angle, but we designed this product, and this framing for a world where there weren't the IRA incentives," he said. "The IRA has had a tailwind for us, it's going to allow people to upgrade their products to better products. But our plan is very much like Tesla, and that's to make the pitch in isolation. What Tesla did very successfully is that they're just a better car, and then we don't have to litigate over the environmental aspects of it. I think we need to win on mindshare that way."

Recent history, however, has shown some pushback from industry in places that have tried to push electrification. In 2020, efforts by the Seattle City Council to ban gas cooktops in new construction in the city were met with a wall of pushback from industry groups, who lobbied a coalition of pipefitters, local realtors and developers to kill the proposed ban out of fear it could hurt local jobs and jack up utility prices.

A similar effort was seen in Southern California in 2021, according to Mother Jones, where similar proposals were met with fierce pushback stoked by industry groups who sought to incite a moral panic over the effort. Since 2019, no fewer than seven predominantly gas-producing states have enacted laws banning local prohibitions on new gas hookups with some—like Texas Governor Greg Abbott—taking active stances against bans on new natural gas hookups for home heating and cooking appliances well before Trumka's comments were ever uttered.

"These challenges and these limitations that we're seeing, they're not just out on the Left Coast," Abbott said in 2021 on Twitter. "Even the city of Austin has considered limiting your ability to tap into natural gas for heating your home or for heating your stove. By signing this bill, we will ensure the Texans are going to have a choice to clean burning natural gas to power their homes."

Abbott ultimately signed a prohibition on natural gas bans into law in May 2021.