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Show Notes
In this episode, climate communications expert Sage Welch gives scientific and social context to the politicized brouhaha around gas stoves.
Text transcript:
David Roberts
Earlier this month, gas stoves exploded into the news. Overnight, everyone had an opinion and Republican Congresspeople were threatening violence if jackbooted government thugs arrived to confiscate their stoves.
A great deal of this gas stove discourse has been lamentably stupid, and some of it has been educational, but on all sides, there's just been a lot of it, so I thought it was worth doing a podcast trying to tease out the facts.
To help with that I contacted the Sage Welch of Sunstone Strategies, a climate communications firm that's been supporting electrification policies since 2018. Welch has spent years tracking the science (which has been accumulating for decades), public opinion, and regulatory action on gas stoves.
Together, we dig into how this controversy arose, the science informing it, how the politics are shaping up, and what it portends for the future of decarbonization.
Alright, here we go. Without any further ado, Sage Welch, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.
Sage Welch
Thank you for having me.
David Roberts
So we're going to do this, we're going to get into stoves. Those of us who have been following decarbonisation and electrification have known about this for a while and probably have been cooking with induction for a while, but Lordy, did it bust into the popular consciousness in the past week or two and just cause a frenzy of nonsense. So, we're going to try to walk through the whole thing here, the background, the science, what's ahead. We're going to try to get it all, God help us. Alright, so, Sage, first of all, why now? What happened? Why is everybody talking about gas stoves now?
Sage Welch
Yeah. So the roots of the past couple weeks debate is the result of three different things that happened in December. So, in December, the Public Interest Research Group held a webinar. The webinar was to launch a report that they had done with the Sierra Club based on a ten state survey of what information, if any, gas stove shoppers were receiving at point of sale from the nation's three largest retailers of stoves about the health risks and how folks can protect themselves, et cetera. And the answer to that was like, not very much information at all.
David Roberts
Yeah, I'm guessing none is approximately none.
Sage Welch
None and a lot of disinformation. Don't worry about ventilation. And many folks just hadn't heard of it. And to be fair, the retailers haven't been able to train their sales associates and staff. This just hasn't been on the radar. But they thought it was important to take a look and just see does anyone even get any inkling of this information when they're shopping? And so Richard Trumka, Jr., who is a consumer product safety commissioner, joined that webinar and he used that time to announce that the CPSC would be opening an RFI, a request for information on gas stove pollution in 2023.
And he used pretty strong language. He said we need to be talking about regulating gas stoves, whether that's drastically improving emissions or banning gas stoves entirely. And this is pretty surprising, even to health and consumer advocates who've been urging CPSC to investigate this in recent years, but also going back 40 years.
David Roberts
Sounds like it was pretty surprising to his own agency and to his bosses. Sounds like it was pretty surprising to everyone.
Sage Welch
The world was not ready for Trumka Jr. to make this statement.
David Roberts
Do you know why? I mean, is he just the kind of guy who gets excited and gets out over his skis? Do you hear any hint of deliberate twelve-dimensional chess here? Or is this just Trumka getting too excited?
Sage Welch
I mean, it was a PERG webinar, so I'm not sure that, like, there was a lot of chess playing going on.
David Roberts
That's a lot of dimensions of chess if you're starting there.
Sage Welch
The sense I get about his position on this, and again at the CPSC level and we'll get to this, this issue is like, not new. But the sense I get is that he just takes his role and the role of the commission quite seriously as far as duty to protect consumers. And this question about whether gas stoves are safe or can be made safe has been hanging around for a while. But when he says banning gas stoves, I think maybe what he is getting at is like, he made these follow up remarks to Bloomberg a month later on products that can't be made safe can be banned. And I think, again, what he's getting at is just like, there is a duty at the commission to ensure safety of products. And as we'll jump into, there is what EPA and many others deem a safe level of NO2 pollution. And jury's still out on whether gas stoves are safe in that regard.
David Roberts
Or can be made safe in that regard.
Sage Welch
And can be made safe, exactly.
David Roberts
Okay, so Trumka says this on the webinar and then it didn't blow up immediately, right?
Sage Welch
It didn't. Some folks actually did cover this. So the Hill Chicago Tribune actually kind of technically broke this story, but it doesn't blow up immediately. And then the following week, I think just somewhat coincidentally, Senator Cory Booker's office released a letter from 18 members of Congress calling on the CPSC to investigate gas stoves, calling out the health harms. And again, not the first time that a congressional body or a subcommittee has made this recommendation. And actually the Senate committee escapes me, but the head of a Senate committee also made this recommendation last August as well. So this is something that's been brewing in Congress in recent months and years. And then that happens and there's a little bit of coverage.
But then in late December, a new study was published in a prominent medical journal from researchers at RMI Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the University of Sydney. And this study found that 12.7% of childhood asthma cases in the US are attributable to gas stove use. And that in some states, like Illinois, New York, California, where there's really high rates of gas cooking, that number is actually much higher. In Illinois and California, it's over 20%. So that study was fairly shocking, although it's based on statistics that have been around for quite a while that find that kids living in homes with gas stoves have a pretty substantial increased risk of developing asthma symptoms.
David Roberts
Right. Maybe we can touch on this again later, but just to be clear, this new asthma study was not a direct...it's just sort of a regression run on existing data from this 2014 study.
Sage Welch
Yeah, this 2013 meta analysis. And actually, they only focused in this study on risk factors that had been established through North American peer-reviewed published data. But it is basically like a math problem. We know that this percentage that living with a gas stove can increase risk of developing asthma symptoms. And, therefore, when we look at the number of kids with asthma living in homes with gas stoves, it's called like a population attributable factor.
David Roberts
Yeah. Right. The point being, it's not new. It's just that information was sitting there in that meta analysis basically has...
Sage Welch
Exactly. It just helped them put a fine point on the number of cases that could be linked.
David Roberts
And so those three happened, and then the Bloomberg story followed up on that.
Sage Welch
Yeah. So Bloomberg reporter Ari Natter was covering that report and then also thought to go ahead and do an interview with Trumka just based on those statements made in the webinar earlier. And so Trumka, in that interview, now utters what I feel like is just kind of this infamous statement that "Gas stoves are a hidden hazard. Any option is on the table, and products that can't be made safe can be banned," which is true. And so the Bloomberg piece publishes on Monday morning, and it just goes viral. Like, within 12 hours, everyone starts covering this potential ban. I think the language of the headline made it feel like this was far more imminent.
David Roberts
Yes, I think he knew what he was doing here. So, just to be clear about what Trumka is talking about—not that the truth of what Trumka was talking about matters at all in this hysteria—but at best, he's talking about launching a process that will investigate things, that will go through rounds of whatever, that may someday result in gas stoves being banned from new construction. That is the worst possible—I mean, if you're scared of this—that's the worst possible outcome here. No one at any point was talking about going into existing homes and ripping out people's stoves. Let's just get that out there.
Sage Welch
No, but the imagery is compelling.
David Roberts
The jackboots.
Sage Welch
Yeah. So for whatever reason, and obviously they'll find anything they can I think, but the right-wing echo chamber just goes, like, totally ballistic trying to paint this picture of a full-blown midnight raids of, like, dark Brandon invading with a crowbar, just like, pipes and all that...
David Roberts
Well, there's no mystery why they do that. They did the same thing with beef around Green New Deal or whatever. They know that this triggers all the right kind of resentment.
Sage Welch
Yes.
David Roberts
Okay, so these three things happen and then Trumka follows up these three things with the big old bandword and then this all explodes. Suddenly everyone's talking about it. This is one of these funny experiences that people have in our world where we've been talking about this forever. It's just fascinating, sociologically fascinating to watch the vast bulk of people who just have never thought about this at all, right. This is the first they're hearing of anything about it at all. So it's interesting to watch people sort of like untutored, spontaneous reactions to this.
Sage Welch
Totally. I mean, this is, I just think, the best thing ever. I'm loving every second of it. A, because we've been working to create awareness about the health harms of gas stoves for a long time. But also, and we can get into this, I think Republicans think they've touched on this major kitchen table issue. But I think this is a really shining and striking moment for the climate movement and becoming relevant is not a bad thing.
David Roberts
Yes, we'll discuss the politics later. I think they're less straightforward than people think. And I think you're right. But first, so this is why it's on everybody's mind now, insofar as we can do so in a reasonable amount of time. Let's talk about the science. Everybody's arguing about the science now. What do we know and how long have we known it? Give us sort of like a capsule history of the science.
Sage Welch
So when you cook with methane gas, you're combusting a fossil fuel, much like you do in your car, but you're doing it in your home, and the pollution that's created goes directly into your kitchen and kind of just like, straight into your face. And ventilation can help disperse some of those pollutants. Ventilation is super important, especially if that ventilation is going outside. Unfortunately, a lot of ventilation circulates straight back to you and/or no one uses it, and/or you may not have a range hood, but we've actually seen ventilation not be super effective at dispersing nitrogen dioxide pollution. And that's the pollutant that we're really concerned about when it comes to the health impacts of cooking and of combusting the gas.
David Roberts
Well—what about I'm going to jump in with naive questions here.
Sage Welch
Sure.
David Roberts
One thing I hear a lot is that one class of pollutants produced by cooking is just from cooking the food, charring the food itself, which is going to be produced by any cooking.
Sage Welch
Totally.
David Roberts
Any type of cooking. So what are the percentages here? If I'm worried about those pollutants? Are those the main ones or is NO2 the main one? Where do they all kind of fall out?
Sage Welch
Okay, so when you cook, that process itself does produce particulate matter like PM2.5, right. There is research that shows that gas cooking produces like 50% more PM2.5. Or homes that are cooking with gas does produce a bit more of that particulate matter. And again, we'll talk more about this, but the gas industry is really seized on this idea that all cooking creates pollution. And it's absolutely true. Even electric stoves. It's a good idea to try and fan some of this particulate matter away from you and out the window.
David Roberts
Yes, ventilation is important in all cooking. Let's just put a stake in that.
Sage Welch
But then the conversation that we're having in regards to asthma and lung irritants, specifically, we really do need to zero in on nitrogen dioxide and NO2, because NO2 exposure is just really bad. This leads to aggravated respiratory symptoms, higher susceptibility lung infections like COVID, increased risk of asthma, as well as, like, IQ and learning deficits, increased risk of cardiovascular effects. I don't think there's anyone that's going to argue that NO2 pollution is not bad. We've regulated NO2 levels outdoors for a very long time. And I actually think that there's steady new research coming out that NO2 is even worse outdoors than we ever thought.
But there's this funky little thing where no one actually gets to regulate indoor air concentrations. But what we know about cooking with gas is that in the time it takes to, like, bake a pie, about an hour, 90% of all homes, specifically when you're cooking with gas, will have an unhealthy level of NO2 pollution, a level that EPA says is not acceptable in outdoor air. And EPA research shows that homes with gas stoves can have up to 400% higher NO2 concentrations than homes with electric stoves.
Because with an electric stove, you're not combusting a fossil fuel. This pollution is very specific to that fossil fuel combustion. And that, when it comes to NO2, kids are just really at risk. And so are seniors, and so are pregnant people. There's a lot of populations who, for whom, NO2 produces very bad outcomes. So there's about 57, just by my team's count, peer reviewed studies that have come out since 1976 that find links between gas cookings and various health harms. And these are all, again, peer reviewed journal published studies. And as we mentioned, that latest asthma study is based on some really important work that came out in 2013, which is a meta analysis. It's like a literature review of more than 40 different research papers looking at the effects of NO2 from gas cooking, and it's linked to asthma.
David Roberts
A lot of what I'm seeing about the science goes back to this 2013-2014 meta analysis and some back even to, like, a study in 1991, I think. I guess my naive question is: why isn't there more recent—especially given the rising sort of profile of this whole issue—why is there not more recent empirical, direct empirical research about this?
Sage Welch
I don't know exactly, but I'm not sure that my answer is I think it's just firmly established. I mean, I think the purpose of that meta analysis was to say the science on this is relatively well-established as far as the gas cooking creates NO2, NO2 creates health hazards. And we'll talk about this, but there was a flurry of research on this in the 70's and 80's by the gas industry, but also by the National Academy of Sciences. There was a 1981 symposium on indoor air pollution in Massachusetts and there was no less than 15 papers introduced at that symposium on pollution from fuel-fired appliances. We actually had this very robust conversation about this in the 70's and 80's, and it just kind of died down.
David Roberts
A couple of other naive questions. One is, like, my gas furnace also has a pilot light, right? Is also combusting a fossil fuel, in some cases people's water heater or whatever. Are all indoor gas appliances producing NO2 or do other appliances handle it better in some way?
Sage Welch
So those other appliances are also producing NO2 and a wide range of pollutants. But the difference is they're vented outdoors naturally. The stove is the only one that's not directly vented outdoors. And I think it's important to bring this up, though, because I don't think it's been underappreciated the role that gas appliances play in smog formation. In California, where I'm based, there's air quality management districts and also the California Air Resources Board. These folks are required to meet federal air quality standards. And what I see them focusing on right now because actually there's some movement on this, we can't actually meet these standards unless we do something at the moment about these vented appliances.
David Roberts
So gas appliances in homes and buildings are a notable contributor to outdoor pollution.
Sage Welch
The gas appliances in the Bay Area contribute more like more NOx, which creates smog, than all of the passenger vehicles in the Bay Area.
David Roberts
No s**t.
Sage Welch
In California, in total, these appliances are responsible for more than four times the NOx pollution than our power plants.
David Roberts
That is wild.
Sage Welch
It's striking! Which, also helps put the stove in perspective because you're just like, yeah, you're burning a fuel that produces pollutants. There's not really any way around it. And that's one of the reasons why the California Air Resources Board, as a part of the state implementation plan, which is their plan for how they're going to continuously meet these federally mandated air quality standards, committed to basically a zero greenhouse gas emissions standard for heaters and hot water heaters by 2030, which effectively is going to end the sale of those products here in California simply because they are key contributors. And the Bay Area is also working on a rule on this, a NOx rule essentially. But fortunately we have technologies like heat pumps and others that don't produce any pollution. But yes, really underappreciated contributors to smog.
David Roberts
Interesting. And second naive question: a lot of the criticisms of the science you're seeing online are saying things like these studies sort of like seal a room in plastic and then run the stove and then of course you find nitrous oxides. But if you ventilate properly, you're fine. Can you get to a safe indoor air level if you are using proper ventilation? What's the story there?
Sage Welch
Well, I think that's the question that CPSC is setting out exactly to determine what is a safe level of NO2 and how can we ensure that cooking products are meeting it or fossil fuel appliances are meeting it. I think ventilation can help and it is, again, it's super important, especially as we're having this conversation. Let's talk about mitigating risk factors while also talking about long-term policy solutions. And I'll probably speak rather imprecisely and we can let people attack us on Twitter for that. But my understanding is that ventilation is not entirely or...I would guess I would use the word like "adequately effective" against specifically that NO2.
My kind of silly understanding of it is that NO2 is like a heavier pollutant and it's harder to disperse. There was a study about whole home ventilation, which is kind of different than super high-powered range hoods, but it's actually kind of considered the gold standard in ventilation as we're learning more about how to produce the healthiest indoor air possible. And that found that that specific method is not effective against NO2. And to be clear as well, you're going to have levels of NO2 in your home because that is the key pollutant that comes from fossil fuel combustion.
So if you're living by a road, which we probably all are, you're going to have some trace and ambient amounts of NO2. But you're not going to have...I mean, the gas stove is a little mini fossil fuel power plant. It is burning it right in your face. So it just changes that concentration dramatically.
David Roberts
And also it's worth pointing out here that what studies we have show that something it's like 20% of people, 30% of people report actually using their hoods, using their ventilation at all, much less on...And one of the reasons they cite they don't want to do it, is it's too loud. And of course, it only works the way it's supposed to work if you crank it up to the right level, right, based on your cooking. So you need it to be kind of loud and kind of running all the time if you want to even approach these sort of top levels of safety.
Sage Welch
Yeah, if we ended this conversation with just ventilation, we'd be doing ourselves like a pretty wild disservice. And yeah, not only do folks not really use it and there are questions about how effective it really is. It's also...my last apartment, we had a gas stove with no range hood whatsoever. I can't even actually remember living in a place, which maybe speaks to Bay Area housing, but that has had ventilation paired with a gas stove. And as a tenant, you're very stuck there.
David Roberts
We discovered when we remodeled our kitchen that our vent, which we never used because it was loud and rattling, just vented up into the attic. Like it didn't go outside at all. So it was just recirculating. And I forget the exact figures on that, too, but something like half of ventilation fans do that. They just recirculate air in the home, which, of course, is doing next to nothing for you. This is sort of my sign post around ventilation. Like, if you approach it scientifically and set it all up exactly right, you might be approaching safe levels of indoor air, but that is just the wild exception.
And as you say, I want to return to this later, but we'll just sort of put a pin in it here. Renters and low-income people are the ones most likely to live in shitty setups with bad stoves and bad ventilation.
Sage Welch
And smaller. And this is the other thing that really matters here, is like the room size matters, the airflow matters. And yes, it's the smaller households where this is just really highly concerning. And it's also...I don't know, these could well be folks who are living in areas that are already really overburdened with pollution at the outdoor level. So the fact that you can't find access to clean air, I mean, I'm a parent. It just breaks my heart. It's not...yeah, it's terrible.
David Roberts
Okay, so this is the science. Is there more to say about there's lots of studies about NOx. Virtually impossible to get a safe level of NOx in your house if you're running a gas stove.
That's well established. And then there's this other—honestly, really creepy—body of evidence that is coming out about what is in the gas that's in our home and when and how we're being exposed to that through leakage. So there's been a series of three studies in the past year. The first one came from Stanford. It came out in January of 2022. And that found that gas stoves are leaking methane. I mean, unsurprisingly, because gas is almost entirely methane around the clock while they are off.
This is the pilot light or just something else?
Sage Welch
No, this is like leakage from the fittings, from the stove itself. I think there's just...like this is a gas that wants to leak and it's going to find a way.
David Roberts
This is an echo of all the recent research about methane pipelines, too, right. The whole methane infrastructure is leaking all over the place.
Sage Welch
And for this reason, and you folks have been making this point, like, gas stoves are a relatively small emissions impact, but they're actually a much more potent climate hazard than we thought. And that's what that research shows us. So that body of research shows that not only are gas stoves leaking a bunch of stuff well off, the methane side of that leakage is contributing to the...it's like the emissions equivalent of 500,000 cars being driven each year, totally separate from the combustion of the fuel. But just that sheer methane leakage is pretty big climate issue. And so that kind of established this point that these are leaking.
And then researchers from Harvard and PSC Healthy Energy started a project measuring and looking at what was in the unburnt gas that was leaking from gas stoves. And they've done this in two places so far. The first study was in Boston, and they found nearly 300 chemical compounds, including 21 pollutants, that are known to be toxic to humans, including benzene to the known carcinogen linked to blood disorders and leukemia. And the Boston study didn't measure concentrations, but just the presence. We're like, "Okay, stoves are leaking, and they're leaking some really harmful stuff." And I just think at the core of this, it's just deeply fascinating that we don't know—and kind of have never really known—all the different components that are in gas.
David Roberts
It's a little wild, right?
Sage Welch
It's totally crazy! It's coming into our homes. And this PSE study that I'm about to mention, the title of the study is, "Home is Where the Pipeline Ends," because it literally is. From sourcing to transportation to distribution lines to your house, gas is picking up all kinds of stuff, and we don't ever really determine what is in that and how it could affect you. So this PSE study did the same thing as the Boston study. They measured what was in the gas that was leaking from kitchens in California, but this time they measured the concentrations and they found that in California, the benzene levels that were leaking were just off the charts, up to seven times California's recommended exposure limit.
But those exposure limits are saying...those exist because the state kind of has to say something. But the World Health Organization, any health authority, is going to tell you there is no safe level of benzene exposure to the toxin that accumulates in your body over time, and it gives you cancer in the long term. So they compared this at the concentration level. The leakage in homes in California was about the same level of the benzene concentration that you'd see if you lived with an indoor smoker. And that's kind of interesting because the most recent RMI asthma study also found that that 12% childhood asthma link level is about the same as secondhand smoke.
David Roberts
Interesting.
Sage Welch
So we have two different places where we're learning that the health impacts are just quite strikingly similar to what it would be if you were living with a smoker indoors.
David Roberts
Although I am extremely old, I did not actually live through the arguments, or at least was not paying attention to the arguments about indoor smoking. But from what I've read about them, they took an oddly similar shape to all these arguments we're having now. This is something I say about air pollution all the time, my Volts listeners are probably sick of hearing it, but just, it's been decades now that more or less every time scientists return to the subject of air pollution and they discover the same thing: "it's worse than we thought, it's worse than we thought, it's worse than we thought."
That's consistent across decades, now, across pollutants. Particulates are this way, NOx, et cetera. So you don't want to sort of say, "Here's what we know today, and this is probably final." It's just, like, intuitively things are probably going to keep going in the direction they've been going. We're probably going to keep finding out they're worse than we thought and worse than we thought.
Sage Welch
Totally.
David Roberts
Okay, so NOx is super bad. The chemicals in gas are super bad. Both are being leaked into the home. We've known about NOx for a long time. We're learning about benzene and these new chemicals more recently. So let's pivot from the science then to the politics of this. So you say we've known these issues about indoor air quality related to stoves have been around for a while. Give us just a little bit of the history. Like when did this first start coming into the sort of consciousness of regulators and how has the gas industry responded over the years?
Sage Welch
Yeah, so this is super fascinating and I think has kind of been missing from the discourse this week. So I'm really excited that we get to talk about it. But the best snapshot I've seen of this historical debate comes from a paper we found. The paper is called the "Impact of Indoor Air Quality on the Gas Industry." It was published in 1984. And let's just take a moment. Not the impact of the gas industry or gas on indoor air quality.
David Roberts
Right!
Sage Welch
Yeah, this paper was commissioned by the gas industry. The purpose was to provide an overview of the indoor air quality issue to gas utility legal representatives.
And they say over and over, the reason that they are commissioning this report and looking at this is due in large part to the fact that the Consumer Product Safety Commission was, at that time, undertaking a rather robust investigation into fuel-fired appliances. And so scientists, federal authorities, and the gas industry were all engaged in a very robust conversation about this. The American Gas Association actually set up something called the Gas Research Institute in 1976. Fun fact: costs that were eventually passed on to ratepayers to establish that institute through some fees that they were paying for pipeline transportation.
And in 2000, that merged with the Institute of Gas Tech, or GTI, and they're still producing research for AGA. AGA and the gas industry kind of set up their own research. But what this paper shows us that in 1974, the science of the health harms was not only well-established, but there was like a lot of discussion about this in media. The gas industry in the paper says the gas industry has been researching this since the 70s due to Congress and public concerns. And as I mentioned there was that 1981 symposium they mentioned this in the paper where there's just like an explosion of papers and scientists really interested.
And this is also around the time where we were really focused on energy conservation, so we were tightening up building envelopes. And I think that's part of the reason why there was also an expressed interest in what might be floating around inside because we were steadily locking people into those pollutants.
David Roberts
Yes, the building ceiling I think you could probably view as like the tail-end of the kind of oil crisis, Jimmy Carter, "Let's preserve oil, let's do energy efficiency," tail-end of the 70's, that movement, which then ran into the 80's and Reagan, which I think our story does as well.
Sage Welch
Yes. And so yeah, in this paper they give you this really fascinating snapshot, particularly of the media interest. So they're noting that there's a lot of articles running in the Wall Street Journal and Reader's Digest and Consumer Reports. They have some quotes from Consumer Reports. I'll read this one from 1982: "Children from gas stove homes have a greater incidence of respiratory illness and impaired lung function than those from homes with electric stoves." And then in 1984 there's this excerpt from a Consumer Reports article that says "The evidence so far suggests that emissions from a gas range do pose a risk. And if you're buying a new range and you can choose between electric and gas, you might want to choose an electric one."
And that is just like verbatim what everything has said this week and some new reporting that we're seeing from Consumer Reports. So it's so interesting to me that we were having this conversation and we just kind of developed collective amnesia. I mean I think that's due in large part, and I'm sure we'll chat about this, to marketing of gas stoves, but for everyone being like this is coming out of the blue, it's being manufactured...like no!
David Roberts
It's only about climate change.
Sage Welch
Right? Yeah, exactly. This is because we have this hidden agenda? I guess, maybe it's a hidden agenda to keep people safe. But no, we have long been...
David Roberts
So what happened in the 80's? All these questions pop up in the early 80's. I remember other things about the politics of the early 80's. Think about all the many things that we started in the 70's that we just kept doing them, we so much better off today. Yes, and it all came to a screeching halt in the 80's.
So during the 1980's, you have both EPA and the CPSC kind of working on this. Congress created this interagency research group on indoor air quality to coordinate research in 1979. And so that included various EPA investigations, and then, as we said, the CPSC was undertaking these investigations and offering reports about fuel-fired appliances. In the spring of 1986, EPA instructed CPSC, they're kind of exchanging dialogue about the fact that they kind of think there's a problem here. So EPA tells CPSC to identify the level of NO2 in homes that is coming from appliances.
Sage Welch
So they're like, "Alright, this is your sort of wheelhouse," which I think this could also well be EPA's wheelhouse, but they say, "You need to now go out and find out what level of NO2 is coming from appliances and whether or not that's safe." And the fact is that that just never happened. And that's exactly what the RFI that Trumka's is referring to is going to do. So again, this isn't some new thing. It's actually just fulfilling this 40-year-old request from EPA. And I should add that this doesn't seem that uncommon on the consumer-product side.
Like, I'm pretty sure asbestos and baby powder and lead paint. There was really well-established science for 50, 60, 70 years before...
David Roberts
Leaded gas, too! 50 years we knew about leaded gas. It's wild to look back now in retrospective how long all these things took.
Sage Welch
Yeah. And honestly, thanks to industry and the fact that no one is really often is working on behalf of the American people, but a lot of people work on behalf of industry.
David Roberts
Well, let's segue then into one of the explanations. This concern was big in the late 70's and early 80's. It was moving forward and then got sort of shut down at the consumer agency, probably because they were not, the administration, was not big fans of regulation at the time, and was big fans of fossil fuels at the time. So one of the reasons that this got put on the backburner, pardon the pun, and stayed there for decades, is that the gas industry worked very hard to keep it on the backburner. So let's talk about that then a little bit.
I think people are...there's a lot of information flying around these days about the gas industry's current sort of propaganda efforts, all its Instagram influencers and whatnot, but they've been at it for a while, so let's talk a little bit about that history.
Sage Welch
Yeah. So even while, you know, the gas industry is doing a lot of research and kind of trying to work with regulators to control the narrative on the pollutants, they're also undertaking really aggressive marketing of gas stoves. But actually this goes back much further. So like nearly 100 years. This has been coming up a lot on the internet, and I'm so happy it's coming out, because I think it's one of those things that illustrates just how conditioned we've been. But this phrase, "cooking with gas," that was a phrase that was developed by an executive from the American Gas Association in the 1930's, and he happened to know some writers for Bob Hope and some other radio show hosts.
And it starts to appear in these scripts and then just gets picked up by other places and really becomes, like, ubiquitous, this phrase and culture by the 1940's. Emily Atkins, in her heated newsletter last week dug up an old AGA newsletter where they're, like, reflecting on this, but pretending that they didn't actually plant it, and it's just a super funny...I thought that was hilarious. The newsletter is like, "Gasmen began to listen as they had never listened before, not knowing whether to be glad, mad, dazed, or dazzled by such widespread free publicity." It's like, they know full well...
David Roberts
How did it happen? What's going on here?
Sage Welch
Totally.
David Roberts
One of the obvious sort of first questions to ask is, you know, people who are familiar with the subject now know that gas stoves represent a relatively small percentage of gas demand, right. It's not a big piece of the gas industry puzzle. So what explains their sort of obsessive focus on it for so long?
Sage Welch
Yeah. So, I mean, I think they recognized really early on that this was the way that they were going to ingratiate themselves to consumers and this was their way to get in the house and stay in the house. This was the only possible appliance that one could have an attachment to, right? It's the only one that's visible. It's the only one that you kind of actively use.
David Roberts
Right. And it's cooking, it's family, it's caring for your family. It's got all that whole web of associations.
Sage Welch
Yeah. And they begin to market it as a status symbol. There's tons of marketing by the 50's and the 60's. It's how you're able to cook better. It's how you make food that tastes better. And they're really just, like, selling at the time to basically women. Like, this is how you be a good wife and a good mother, and this is how you feed your family. And they're especially speaking to kind of like, major coastal urban areas just because that's where gas demand was sort of emerging and that's where they had the funds, essentially to put in the infrastructure. So, as you referenced, gas residential use just really skyrockets, very particularly in major coastal urban areas, so, New York and California. And that's still today where we have the highest rates of gas cooking and gas consumption.
David Roberts
Right. Well, let's just make a note of this because everybody loves to laugh about this on the Internet. Gas stove use is much higher in blue states than in red states. This sort of an inversion of the culture war that we're having. Actual distribution of gas use is almost opposite of that.
Sage Welch
Totally. And so to see, like, the right-wingers pick this up as like this kind of populist kind of issue when it's actually been like, you are much more likely to cook with gas if you are a higher-income person, especially if you're in the Southeast, because you paid a lot to get yourself gas service there. And so there's a huge amount of consumer marketing through these decades. But then there's other ways that utilities specifically and when we talk about the gas industry, there's a web here, but often we're talking about the gas utilities who sell the gas to consumers.
David Roberts
Yeah, and let me just say by way of background, I mean, maybe this is probably obvious to you, but to make sure it's clear to everyone, an electric utility is involved in giving you electricity. It is, at least in theory, neutral toward how to generate that electricity, right. It can accommodate different ways of creating that electricity. A gas utility is very different. It's about the one fuel. And if we use less of the fuel, then the utility shrinks and disappears. Gas is existential for gas utilities in a way that none of these arguments are for electric utilities.
Sage Welch
Totally. And so you see, gas utilities do this kind of interesting thing where they set up, like, culinary centers and test kitchens and they develop relationships with restaurant associations, they sponsor scholarships, and they make gas, this core curricula of culinary schools, which is obviously another very clever way that you are embedding yourself in that culture specifically for chefs and for folks who do cooking as a profession.
David Roberts
Right.
Sage Welch
And as we now know, they begin to really lean into this relationship and rely on that relationship with chefs and restaurant associations to fight electrification. We're seeing this across the board in states where we have policies moving, but yeah, they've really relied on gas to be this wedge between them and their kind of competitor, electricity. And then they started to really double down on this in the past five years or so when they perceived that electrification is going to be a problem. We actually have some emails that came out through discovery between the American Public Gas Association and SoCalGas, and I find this particularly egregious because APGA represents municipal utilities.
So these are like publicly-owned utilities. These are like even more than investor-owned utilities who in my opinion, also should be working for us because they're supposedly providing a public good. But like, APGA and SoCalGas are trading emails about this energy-efficiency proceeding in California and they're like, "Oh, it's coming. Broad scale electrification is on the horizon and it's a huge threat." And APGA actually launched the very first...a lot of folks have been talking about these influencer campaigns. APGA and AGA both had them. But APGA went first with this gas-genius campaign that's like very targeted marketing at Gen X, really trying to sell themselves to a particular generation there.
And then AGA did the same with this "Cooking With Gas" campaign where they're basically paying influencers on Instagram to gush about their gas cooking. And as much as that got called out and has been this kind of just public source of mockery. We're still seeing them do this. Like, Southwest Gas did this just last year with some really honestly hilarious videos of some folks in Las Vegas, like, burning eggs and talking about how "you can only burn eggs effectively with gas."
David Roberts
It's so cringy to us. This is one of those things where, like, how do normal people process these things? I have no idea. It's been so long since I've been a normal person on this subject. It's very cringy to us. Do we know whether it works? Like, do we know, if you're just an average Instagram schmo and you run across one of these things, whether they're effective?
Sage Welch
Well, the one reason I would say that it probably is effective is because it's a message that's echoed not just from an Instagram influencer, but at this point, this has been incredibly successful to manufacture a consumer preference for gas and to truly believe that you can only cook better and that food tastes better. And it's like, I can't not picture those chemicals now when I see the blue flames. So this idea of, like...my partner is like his method for cooking tortillas is like, he chars it directly over the frame. But I'm just like, that is not seems super safe or great right now.
David Roberts
Eggs are better with benzene.
Sage Welch
That is wild.
David Roberts
And we should also just note, as you noted before, but I want to just put an exclamation point on it again. Very frequently gas utilities are using ratepayer funds to do this propaganda! So it's gas customers that are often paying for the sort of lobbying and propaganda that we're seeing.
Sage Welch
Yeah, we unfortunately have to pay our gas company to prevent us from accessing better options and prevent us from having a good faith conversation about this. And this is what makes me actually, like, very angry is, even this week, everyone acts because this is the frame they set like a zero-sum game. We don't get to have an honest, straightforward conversation about the safety of what's in our home, how we can protect ourselves, and just the benefits of doing so. And, yeah, it's frustrating.
David Roberts
Well, I mean, as you say, this is precisely the reason they honed in on stoves so long ago, is, number one, stoves are very emotional to people, very connected to a lot of emotion. And number two, if you're trying to electrify and get rid of gas, most people, I think, don't have a super strong preference about their water heater or their furnace or whatever. So if you can switch those out for electric, but you can't cut off the gas line to the house as long as there's a gas stove, right? So as long as there's that gas stove, there you are preserving the gas hookup in the gas infrastructure. That's what this is about. That's why they're focusing on stoves, even though stoves aren't that big a consumer.
Sage Welch
Totally. They know full well that this conversation really is about that infrastructure, but so long as we can keep people sold on this idea and...one thing I think is a little bit wild, a lot of folks feel strongly about their gas stove. It's becoming a Republican thing, which I totally love. And we can talk about how this is like pushing a target audience away from gas cooking, but when people say, like, "We can't switch or gas is just better," like, a. that's been manufactured. But we also haven't been cooking with gas for all that long.
Like, this is the 50's, 60's, and 70's, we transitioned from like, coal stoves before. There's a chef that we work with, Chris Galarza, and he just makes the point that we can still have culture and tradition. It's not the fuel source. Cooking will remain a wonderful way to unify families. We can learn, we can change. We change to gas.
David Roberts
Food still heats...
Sage Welch
Right!
David Roberts
...and eats! And this is also—I don't know if it's the right time to say this—but for some reason I see these people on Twitter saying confidently, like, "I've used both and gas is so much better." The way that makes me feel is always similar to how I used to feel about the debate about marijuana legalization. Like, you can go out in public and confidently say that "if you smoke pot, you're going to be deranged and wreck your car," or whatever, but I've smoked pot. Like a bunch of people have smoked pot.
You could fool us about things we don't have direct experience with, but...
Sage Welch
Totally.
David Roberts
We've experienced this and we know that's b******t! I've cooked with both gas and induction and the idea that just your average run-of-the mill Joe or Jane in their kitchen is so expert that these fine distinctions of like, "Oh, I've got to get exactly the right char." I'm so sure. Like, I'm so sure you're getting the exact right char.