It can be dizzying to follow any policy debate that touches on party politics and culture. On one day, major left-leaning news outlets were reporting on proposals to
ban gas stoves,
and liberal politicians and
commentators
were applauding the move.
The very next day, major news outlets are telling you that it was conservatives who were making an issue about gas stoves. Silly readers, nobody was going to ban them!
THE OBSCURE REGULATOR (AND POLITICAL SCION) WHO SPARKED THE FUROR OVER GAS STOVES
We could bang our heads against the wall parsing biased and misleading coverage.
Pure, uncut gaslighting from the Washington Post here. Just breathtaking stuff. https://t.co/p8tFwzJPZ4 pic.twitter.com/awHEZPgtZa
— Scot Bertram (@ScotBertram) January 12, 2023
But it is probably best for our mental health to minimize the media criticism and go back to the substantial question at hand: Are activists, politicians, and regulators trying to ban gas stoves?
The answer is yes. Yes, of course, they are — and before yesterday, everyone was admitting it!
Disconnecting existing stoves and hauling them off is probably years down the road. For now, liberals are banning new gas hookups in houses and apartments, and they are even trying to ban the sale of new gas stoves. The goal of many activists and politicians is to phase them out completely as part of a broader campaign of “electrification,” which in turn is part of a broader campaign of “decarbonization” and “zero emissions.”
Everyone who has used these words (electrification, decarbonization, and zero emissions) is, by necessity, talking about getting rid of gas stoves because they are talking about getting rid of natural gas usage.
We don’t need to read between the lines because the Democrats have been banning gas stoves for years. Let’s start at the local level and then work our way up to the federal level.
Berkeley, California, banned natural gas hookups in all new homes in 2019. Public radio station KQED
explained
that this was part of California’s effort to “electrify everything” in order to “become carbon neutral.” KQED explained that “to meet its goal of becoming carbon-neutral, California will have to tackle natural gas use in existing buildings, not just new ones,” and it quoted a member of the California Energy Commission saying, “It’s a cultural transition that we have to undergo.”
In Sacramento, California, the proposal wasn’t just about new homes, but about all new appliances. The mayor’s technical advisory committee
advocated
a “move toward requiring that new homes be all-electric and that gas appliances be replaced with electric ones when they reach the end of their useful life.”
Takoma Park, Maryland, also set a goal of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, which basically requires eliminating almost all natural gas hookups. A natural-gas ban on new construction would be pointless there since the NIMBY suburb of Washington doesn’t really have any new construction. Instead, the “2020 Climate Emergency Response Act” was intended to outlaw even existing natural-gas hookups.
In order to justify a total ban on natural gas or gasoline, Takoma Park sustainability manager Gina Mathias explained that voluntarily moving to electric stoves and lawnmowers was not an option. “That’s why we’re in the climate crisis to begin with — voluntary programs,” she said. “If they worked the way that we would hope they would, we wouldn’t be where we are today.”
As CNN reported in 2022: “San Francisco
passed its own ban
in 2020. New York City became the largest U.S. city to pass a version in 2021, with New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D)
vowing to pass
a statewide law that would ban natural gas by 2027.” Just this week, Hochul
proposed
outlawing the sale of gas and oil heating equipment and banning gas hookups in new buildings starting in 2025.
“L.A. is banning most gas appliances in new homes,” read the Los Angeles Times’s
headline
last May. “Get ready for electric stoves.” Mayor Eric Garcetti promised that this was a path towards total elimination of all gas stoves.
The Los Angeles Times reported: “The transition to all-electric homes ‘is going to happen. It’s going to occur,’ Garcetti said in a recent interview. ‘Our forests are burning, the days are hotter, our floods are more extreme. … Do you want to fight the inevitable, or co-author the necessary?’”
Again, total electrification.
“Natural gas bans are kind of low-hanging fruit,” Georgetown University law professor Sheila Foster told CNN.
Washington, D.C., has
banned
natural gas in most new buildings.
Now let’s go to the federal level. Richard Trumka Jr. is a
longtime Democratic operative
and a Biden appointee to the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Trumka directly stated to journalists that the CPSC intends to crack down on gas stoves and that a ban is very much on the table.
In a December virtual news conference with the left-wing group PIRG,
Trumka said
: “We need to be talking about regulating gas stoves, whether that’s drastically improving emissions or banning gas stoves entirely. And I think we ought to keep that possibility of a ban in mind, because it’s a powerful tool in our tool belt and it’s a real possibility here.”
“This is a hidden hazard,” Trumka told Bloomberg
News
this month. “Any option is on the table. Products that can’t be made safe can be banned.”
The agency has backed away from that comment, for obvious reasons, and there is no natural gas ban in the federal regulatory docket. But it is obvious that the Biden administration has a goal of using federal law to eliminate all natural gas stoves. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you.
