Fine, we're doing gas stoves

In this episode, climate communications expert Sage Welch gives scientific and social context to the politicized brouhaha around gas stoves.

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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.

Sage Welch

You get takeout!

David Roberts

Yeah.

Sage Welch

You're eating 50% of your meals from the burrito shop. As am I! It's fine! We could admit this, but it definitely became the "smartest person in the room" response to the debate. But what I don't like about that or what I would hope folks would understand is, like, you're...I mean, it's just like with cars and massive cars, you've been taught to believe that. That has been manufactured. All consumer preferences.

David Roberts

People really do not like to hear that their own consumer preferences have been shaped by socialization and by nefarious forces. They really, really don't like to hear that. But it's just true. All of us were born into this. We're shaped, we're socialized, we're given messages, and then we grow up and suddenly we have this passionate idea that gas stoves are better. I just wish people would just take a step back and think a little bit, like, really? Did you was that purely through your experience of cooking on gas that you came to this weirdly, passionate feeling about an appliance. Just consider.

What I, again love, about this week is you have these right-wing representation—walking representations—of toxic masculinity now, being like, this appliance is the thing that they care so much about, right? I mean, yeah, God, guns, gas stove, but keep it up. They should continue on this.

Let's talk about this. Let's talk about this. So we've got these health concerns that go way, way back and are fairly well established. We've got this long history of the gas industry propagandizing around gas stoves, making these relationships with chefs and culinary centers really working the idea that high-end, your sort of more sophisticated consumer, of course, will only cook with gas. And so you get this sort of high-end sheen. Your thesis, I mean, I think a lot of people looking at this sort of intuitively would think, "Oh, no, this is another culture war. It's another backlash. This is another environmentalists are shooting themselves in the foot by going after things people love and they're only harming their own long-term goals." And all the usual lecturing of the left is in full flower out there on Twitter. But your thesis is that the political valence of this, the political consequences of this, are going to redound in favor of environmentalists. So tell us why.

Sage Welch

Yeah, so there's a couple of key reasons. One is just simply like awareness raising. There has literally been close to 10,000 media stories in the past two weeks about gas flows and asthma. Like, bring it on, keep it up. This has been a phenomenal moment for induction cooking, which the issue with induction in the US, not in Europe or other markets, has just been sheer awareness. It's like 3%, I think, of the market. And unfortunately, to date, manufacturers haven't really pushed this technology super hard. And so there hasn't been a lot of advertising of it.

David Roberts

Yeah, let's just say because this has been also coming out in findings recently, too, and this was in the New York Times story they did. The problem here is not passionate defenders versus passionate haters of stoves. The vast, vast, vast majority of Americans specifically don't know what any of this is about and might not even be aware that induction is a thing that exists.

Sage Welch

Totally. So, yes, when everyone is worried about this, and rightfully, we all understand, they're talking about those old school coil-heated stoves that really take a long time to heat up, and they weren't super powerful and do suck. I think new electric models are kind of fine, but induction is not fine. It's totally awesome.

David Roberts

It rules.

Sage Welch

It really is. But just quickly, on that kind of awareness raising, I think it may not even seem like it today or in two weeks, but my personal experience on this issue and again, I'm a renter and have pretty much all our places have had gas stoves, is that I learned about this about five years ago. I was like, wow, that's interesting, but I'm obviously in no position to change my stove. And then every time I clicked on the pilot light and I saw the flame, I just started to get a little bit worried. And then I started to realize that my five year old is fully eye level with that or like, the baby is crawling towards the stove and it's like alarm bells started to be raised and it's just that sheer little bit of doubt that finally I was like, well, "I'm tired of being stressed about this." So we just bought a Duxtop single burner cooktop, and we cook all of our food for a family of four on a little induction cooktop. And that's the other thing that I think has been missing, in there's been incredible coverage of induction. It's finally kind of coming into the public consciousness, and folks are noting it can be a little bit pricier, and I think there's a lot of cost competitive ranges. But it is true if you're getting like a full blown oven, but you don't need to do that. You can spend under $100 and you can use that and your toaster oven and your instapot and your air fryer.

I think if you look around your kitchen, you'll probably find you have a lot of electric appliances that can cover all of your kitchen needs. And yeah, maybe this isn't the absolute five-alarm fire from a health perspective, it's certainly worth a look, but there's really easy solutions where we just don't even have to think about whether or not we're getting exposed to NO2.

David Roberts

Yes, this is something I have kind of wanted to say about the whole debate. I might as well say it here, but it's like, if there were super, super compelling reasons to keep gas in your home, then maybe they would offset these health concerns. Because, like you say, there are other bigger health risks out there in America for people to worry about. This is sort of like an exacerbating factor on the edge, but there just aren't. If there's any concern at all, induction is just better, so why not do it? The idea that there are countervailing considerations here is just kind of silly to me. Like, we're talking about a product where literally a better, cleaner, more convenient product is available.

Sage Welch

Totally.

David Roberts

So, it's like you don't need that much evidence to prefer the latter.

Sage Welch

Yeah, top to bottom. And this isn't just true on the cooking side. This is true for heating. Heat pumps are just a better technology. You're going to get cooling access that you didn't have before. You're getting rid of super inefficient electric-resistance heating and inefficient cooling. And we're going to help solve a lot of our grid demand issues every single—and this is one reason I've been a little frustrated—because I think the climate movement in general, we get super scared when a fight happens. We're like, "Oh, my god, I'm on the spot." But this is the most incredible opening we've ever had. We have no reason to be ashamed of pushing electric technologies because they are literally better at every single level. And it's okay to fight for people's health. It's okay to fight for things that are good.

David Roberts

Yes. And I particularly love the like, "Oh, you only care about this because of climate change. I'm like, well, even if that were true, it's kind of a big deal." It's true. I am concerned about it. You got me.

Sage Welch

Totally. Don't let them push you into this idea that the hot seat is a bad place to be.

David Roberts

Right.

Sage Welch

Use it. This is awesome.

David Roberts

And it seems to be shifting. So let's get back to politics a little bit. You think by the sort of MAGA crowd claiming this as a cultural symbol alongside their guns and their rolling coal and whatever else...burgers? Or whatever else they've picked as sort of their cultural touchstones, you think that's good for the politics?

Sage Welch

I think this is near-fatal for gas utilities, this discussion. So I think that this becoming a culture war, and again, I think gas cooking being identified as a right-wing virtue pushes a really important group of people to no longer or to think twice about identifying with gas cooking as a key part of their identity.

David Roberts

Yes. Which, as we've noted, is mostly like most of the gas stoves are in blue states.

Sage Welch

Exactly. Yeah. New York, California, Illinois, these states make up 25% of gas demand in the US, and they have the highest rates of gas cooking. Nine of the eleven highest gas consumption states are either blue or purple. And electrification is happening in blue states. So, as a lot of folks maybe know, about 20 states pretty much across the Southeast are preempted. So Republicans have run bill with support from their allies in the American Gas Association and otherwise to prevent them from doing any kind of a broad scale, like, local level electrification ordinance. But in blue states where we need support for this, people are now being told that cooking with gas, which has always been the biggest hang up, right? This previous attachment to gas cooking, even for climate-leaning folks, has been this lingering reason to not support electrification or to feel a little worried about it.

David Roberts

Because it still has that sheen of like, sophistication and high end.

Sage Welch

Totally.

David Roberts

So now we have MAGA people telling them... nope!

Sage Welch

Yeah, I personally don't want to be identified with those folks. And I think a lot of the left-leaning folks don't. And these are the exact folks that we actually needed. And honestly, in my view, this is a total act of goddess. We never, ever could have unwinded that 100 years of marketing to position it like this if this week hadn't happened. This is incredible. There's a Yale study where they asked folks what words come to mind in association with natural gas. They use the word "natural." And the words that came up for folks was "energy, clean, fuel and cooking."

And after this week I think it's going to be like: "asthma, harmful, health...

David Roberts

MAGA.

Sage Welch

...Republican," right? And also I just think the frenzy on it makes that identification feel a little ridiculous and that the folks who really are going to identify this are folks that unfortunately—I care deeply about them. I wish they could also have access to a pollution-free home—but that's a population we were never ever going to reach on this issue. So there's broad swaths of the people in this country that I think are normal and seeing these other folks taping themselves to gas stoves and making protection of a kitchen appliance the biggest thing in their world, that's objectively funny and it's silly and honestly, ultimately it's weak.

And it's showing us that a deep identification with just one cooking technology is a little bit silly, especially if you're going to ignore a huge body of science that says that cooking technology could well be hurting your health.

David Roberts

It's funny, just that angle sort of hadn't occurred to me that it's specifically now MAGA people telling the blue owners of most of the stoves that ownership of those stoves is now a MAGA right-wing thing. It is, exquisitely, sort of a counter to their own interests. Kind of beautiful that way.

Sage Welch

Worst possible messengers. God, I would love to see group chats on this from some other sides because I wonder...because how this went down to Bloomberg started covering it, couple of the right-wingers came out, and then it was like the next day you have Joe Manchin and it really blew up. And part of me wonders if the sending out of the talking points to get the right-wing machine in gear was coming from the more established like Koch brothers things. But I just wonder...and maybe the American Gas Association and others threw up a call for help, but I think probably pretty quickly realized that this was not going to turn out well, again, in the electrification states where the gas utilities are almost entirely dependent on selling their gas.

And it might be a while before we see how this all plays out, but I just firmly believe that, again, this has been one of the most incredible turning points that we could ever have even dreamed up, or manifested, to help educate folks about the health harms of gas cooking, but also to undo this conditioning, which has barely been a barrier for us.

David Roberts

Yes, it's beautiful. So the politics seems like the most predictable political effect of this is going to be in blue states where gas bands are being discussed are on the table now, or are a possibility. This is now going to sort of reframe those gas bands as a way to stick your thumb in the eye of the MAGA movement which is absolutely the best way you could sell those in those states.

Sage Welch

Yeah. And also a way to protect your family and get access to funding and everything else that we need to get access to folks. I mean, I think one of the things that also could be going on and folks just get...I think climate folks in general get afraid to be vocal, but I think that this is just a really important time to again bring up that this is like not a zero-sum game, that the electrification movement gas bans or gas ordinances or all the work that we're doing to try and bring folks into healthier, better housing. That doesn't just have the super straightforward winners or losers.

And I think one of the reasons why we're afraid of harnessing this narrative is like, we're very conscious of organized labor membership or people who don't have the means to electrify. But I think this is just exactly that opportunity to get out there right now and fight for those who have gas in their homes to get that out, get them access to induction cooktops, let's expand IRA funding. Let's use state budget to help supplement the cost here. And I think workers who really do care about climate change, this is our chance to tell folks that this is electrification is huge for skilled labor. There are so many opportunities.

David Roberts

I keep reading and hearing stories about how we're short on those workers, those basic trade workers, specifically electricians, which we're going to need a bazillion of in coming years.

Sage Welch

Yes, this is a chance to revitalize vocational education in this country and beef up unions. Like we need electricians across the board. Also for the plumbers and the pipefitters. And this is what bothers me is that the tops, the leadership and the utilities, are going around telling everyone that, "Yeah, this means your job, your job is over, you're done if we pursue these electrification measures." When, really, we have thermal energy networks coming up as a solution in states across the country, plumbers and pipefitters are going to continue to work on pipes. We're just going to pipe, like, clean energy and use heat pumps.

David Roberts

Hot water!

Sage Welch

Yeah, it's electrification. It's labor-lead electrification. And even for the gas linemen and folks, who I would say probably know better than anyone exactly how dangerous gas is, and we didn't even touch on the fact that when you electrify, you're getting rid of explosions and so much beyond just the health. But these workers, if we all agreed tomorrow that we're going to retire the gas system and move to 100% electrification for homes, that's 20 to 30 years of work in which that expertise...

David Roberts

I know!

Sage Welch

...is so central!

David Roberts

Of all things that would do, threatening jobs is just absolutely on the bottom of the list. If there's one thing we know about what that would take, it's a lot of work.

Sage Welch

So much work and an opportunity for solid family-sustaining, long-term work, and the education pipelines. There's a really innovative approach that's being proposed in New York right now to very specifically go to communities where there hasn't been traditionally opportunities and where it's overburdened—y'know there's pollution burdens—and get folks into those pipelines right now. And we can have this like an honest, real conversation about electrification is really important. I think this is an opportunity to have it, so long as we can push the fossil fuel folks out of the way who are preventing us from speaking about what's really at stake here, but also the sheer amount of opportunity that we're presented with.

David Roberts

Right. And I think this gets at the politics too. The gas industry would love for this entire discussion to be focused on one asthma study. So the discussion is not just about the one study. It's not just about the history of studies. It's not just about the other risk. It's about all the risks of gas infrastructure. And it's about the way that gas stoves are the sort of cork in the bottle, you know what I mean? Like, once you get them out of the way, the rest of electrification becomes easier. Even though they themselves are a relatively small part of demand for gas, they're a very big symbolic and sort of political flag in the ground for the gas industry.

So they matter, broadly, for labor, for politics, for health, and for decarbonization. Even though they are a small source of greenhouse gases in and of themselves, they are part of the larger picture of decarbonization. So, I just think we need to keep pulling the lens back.

Sage Welch

Absolutely. And honestly, they've been accusing us of banning gas stoves for four years, so we don't really have that much to lose in this moment. Also, this was never: a. no one's banning gas stoves, but this came from a regulator. This didn't come from climate folks. So it's a super fascinating moment. But, yes, let's harness this. There's like, so much education that can be happening, and it's okay to fight for what's right, even if it's uncomfortable. We still lack, like, climate pundits who can get into the country.

David Roberts

I know! Well, it's all these sort of establishment, like the disease of the left or the Democratic Party in the United States is this posture of cringing presurrender and terror. This whole idea that the power and the momentum is on the side of reactionary forces, and I just don't think that's true. And just confidence, right? Just confidence is what the whole friggin' left, the whole Democratic Party and the whole climate movement needs more of, like, "Yes, you caught us. We're trying to make things safer and stop climate change. Busted."

Two more quick aspects of this before I let you go that I want to get into. One is just the environmental justice angle, sort of like one thing that reactionaries will say, "This is going to hurt poor people worse because they can't afford these fancy, expensive induction stoves, and so they're going to be hurt worse by this." But another way to look at it is by locking in gas stoves, we focus all our attention on sort of this upscale suburban woman consumer but it's going to be poor people who can't get away from gas stoves, right? I mean that's how it always ends up. The poor people who work at the restaurants, the poor people who are renting...insofar as we let guests hang around, it's not suburban mom who's going to be the modal consumer, it's going to be people who can't get away from it. So how do you think about the justice, environmental justice and sort of economic justice aspects of all this?

Sage Welch

Yeah, we are about to see in the next month or two this wave of gas heating bills hit folks across the country. Like the price of methane gas has been up every year. It's like doubling. But this winter has been crazy for this. And I think it's like not fully understood that you have this spot price of gas, methane gas that is passed on by utilities who pushed for pipeline replacements and all this other infrastructure that is also added to your bill, but then claims no responsibility when that price goes through the roof and you're hit with hundreds and hundreds of dollars.

And a lot of the moratoriums that we had on utility bills shut off have expired and I think we're about to see a really horrible crisis. So when folks say that gas is the cheaper option, well, right now it absolutely is not, and it's certainly not when you look at the concept of as you're speaking to stranded assets. The fact that a lot of folks are going to be left on a gas system that steadily needs a huge amount of investment only just to keep it safe, supposedly, let alone when utilities get their way and pilot all these ludicrous like hydrogen for heating projects and make us pay for renewable natural gas and stuff. So we have a total crisis on our hands on energy affordability across the board, but that's being driven—on both sides—from the fact that we're exporting all of our natural gas and that prices are going through the roof and that's driving up both the price of electricity and the price of gas-heating bills.

And this is one area where there's folks who are really doing interesting, like push the envelope, work on energy-burden stuff. But we absolutely need to be more vocal and also just like near-term focus on these bills and making sure that power does not get shut off. But yes, beyond that, I think we're starting to see this. So California had, we had close to a billion and it got cut back a little bit and extended over years. So Governor Newsom really would like to see our funding reinstated, but close to a billion in california from last year's state budget to do low-income whole home retrofits.

So this is, go to homes, get them heat pumps. And super important point here on heat pump efficiency is that in most places that's going to produce great kind of energy savings while offering access to cooling. All across the I-5 corridor, Portland, Oregon can hit 116 degrees for five days at a time. We need cooling yesterday. And actually in Portland, there's another really innovative program, this Portland Clean Energy Fund, that's distributing 15,000 heat pumps to homes in need. I saw some super sick legislation get introduced in DC to do these kind of low-income retrofits. But right now, I think if we could just all focus—and this is the goal, the kind of government funded and incentivized electrification needs to be laser-focused on helping lower-income folks. And folks without the means to electrify do that.

That's a policy problem with a policy solution. There's a lot of money changing hands floating around in the world and we can absolutely make this happen. And in the process of doing so, we're going to lock in better affordability, but we're also going to clean up the air, get access to cooling, and solve a lot of major kind of urgent crises that are coming with extreme heat. And then we also need to have a discussion on the infrastructure side. Like climate change is posing a very serious problem to all of our energy systems.

And right now we pay for and we maintain two really complicated energy systems, gas and electricity. We don't have a choice to live without electricity, like that's not happening. So we need to take all of our time and energy and shore up and safeguard transmission, build more transmission, build more renewables. And there's an economies of scale here. We need to focus on systematic, organized, neighborhood-level retirement of the gas system, work with those communities to electrify. And bit by bit we have this really promising future of retiring that gas system and just focusing on what we need to create community resilience, which is like distributed clean energy neighborhood resource centers where, you know you can go for air conditioning or anything else.

And there's so many solutions. Again, which if we could just focus our attention there and we weren't fighting on so many fronts, we would be much better off.

David Roberts

Sage, you're singing my song here. You're singing the Volts. This is like the Volts theme song you're singing. And this is what I would say to people, too. The arguments about this tend to be so narrow, like the cost of this stove versus that stove in January 2023, you know what I mean? Or like the number of electrical brownouts and blackouts versus gas outages and all these sort of narrow comparisons. But I just wish people would like step back long-term on some timescale and on some geographical scale. We have to electrify completely. We have to more or less get rid of as much gas as we can get rid of.

And that's going to be, ultimately, safer for people, better for their health, more reliable and cheaper in the long-term. So it's not a matter of whether to do this stuff. It's just a matter of planning how to do it right. And as you say, if we didn't have to maintain two concurrent infrastructures, we could make the one that we need and love and need long term a lot better and safer and more reliable.

Sage Welch

Totally.

David Roberts

I just repeated everything you said, but that's my theme song, so I got to sing it.

Sage Welch

It's an exciting proposition and I'm not sure that the kind of end goal of electrification was ever really made clear. But there's just so much about it that's going to be so helpful. I mean, we're going to have extremely responsive energy demand between vehicle-to-grid integration. They're building heat pumps with batteries in them. There's so much innovative technology and what folks are worried about is their own personal resilience. And we can invest in that. There's a lot of solutions. But yes, if we could just shove aside everyone who's trying to force us into that zero-sum game thinking and these really bad faith conversations, then I think that...if we can kind of speak to what we are giving people, which is a s**t ton when it comes to electric technologies, they're going to be on our side.

David Roberts

Well, this is my final question. The last thing I want to ask you about: the environmental movement is often accused of only being against things and constantly saying, "no, no, no" and constantly wanting to take things away from you. And that is very much how the people currently yelling at environmentalists are trying to frame this whole thing. So I know that the anti-gas sort of movement, the science organization, it's all underway and that's great. But what about the pro-induction? Like, what about the selling of the alternative? I wish that it seems to me that that's a big missing piece of what's happening right now.

It'd be a lot easier to have these discussions if average American consumers understood better, that what they're being encouraged to get is better. It's just better. So when I hear about giant propaganda campaigns to preserve fossil fuels or—I talked to Michael Thomas on the pod a few weeks ago about the sort of right-wing funding that's going into all these anti-renewable energy groups and these NIMBY groups—I always come back to the same question, which is, there are millions, billions of dollars sloshing around on the left, sloshing around the big "green groups." Where is the pro-electric appliances, generally, but just pro-induction stove propaganda campaign? Who on our side is funding...? All you need to do is you don't even need to lie to anyone. Just tell them...

Sage Welch

Just show that.

David Roberts

....the truth about induction stoves. Is anyone doing that?

Sage Welch

Yeah, I think folks are doing this. So there's two tracks here. One is that I think we did just open this incredible door for the actual manufacturer. So if you are a stove manufacturer this week and you make both gas and electric models but the New York Times just called your product a kitchen pariah and The Atlantic said it was doomed and House Beautiful said the era of gas stoves is over.

David Roberts

And let's mention this too, Wirecutter the Geek, which all geeks worship, has revised and now no longer says that it makes sense to hold on to your gas stove if you have one. They've revised and are basically saying replace this as soon as you can.

Sage Welch

As soon as you feel like it's feasible. That's huge, right? This trusted consumer resource. If I was on these advertising teams, I would very quickly be reapportioning my budgets to the potential growth industry. I think your question is really interesting. I think that the job of the climate movement on this very specific topic is to sort of push the policy that shows the market exactly where the growth industry is. And I think we're starting to do that, so heat pump sales are through the roof, and, my hope, is that this week will lead to induction.

David Roberts

I wonder.

Sage Welch

We just showed them this is how you market it. It's clean air, it's pollution-free, it's worry-free technology for your kitchen. And we have local news folks, actually. I saw two clips that I just thought were adorable of going around to appliance showrooms this week being like, "Are you getting a lot of questions about gas stoves?" And all the appliance people are like, "Yeah, and we're super psyched because we've been sitting on these induction stoves that we're finally getting to tell people about." But my hope is that we're going to see a huge influx in advertising dollars just because also, right now, close to a quarter of the population in this country is living somewhere where an electrification policy is moving.

And if you make these technologies and a lot of the OEMs make both, you should really start to invest in the product that has a future, rather than the product that simply doesn't. I think it's a little awkward to have climate folks necessarily selling technology because I actually worry that would turn folks off. What I want to see is the cool, sleek folks who know how to advertise stuff to put money into this so that we can show them. And I think the role of climate people honestly should be continuing to push the policies that are going to push the market.

And I think the OEMs are starting to come around on this. And I also think the technology is improving so dramatically that I guess my hope is that we're about to see a massive influx. But speaking to your other question, or part of your question about why, which I've heard you bring up before, like, why does the climate movement or the folks who hold the big money, which tends to be the big greens and or the funders, not put more money into paid advertising? I think part of it has to do with a metrics issue and part of it just has to do with being wholeheartedly focused on our narrow view of hitting policymakers and that policy line.

And I do see some general advertising TV spots starting to push back and I think that we should actually be far more aggressive in going after our enemies with those advertising dollars in general. One thing that worries me is like popular opinion or public opinion, like on climate change, for example, doesn't necessarily translate to policy action. So I think funding for paid-on really targeted kind of state-level advertising is a really good idea basically, for lack of a better word, to take down opponents and make very clear who is standing in the way of what I think most people want. I don't think our goal is to shift public opinion on climate so much anymore, is show exactly who is standing in the way of that and overcome that barrier. Because unfortunately just the politics of our country mean that even if something is wildly popular with folks, it doesn't translate into them getting access to that through policy.

David Roberts

Right. Yeah, I get all that. My instinct is that it just wouldn't take that much money. It wouldn't take that much money to do what I want is, sure the stove industry is going to advertise their stoves and the car industry is going to advertise their EVs, but I always think about this commercial for the Nissan Leaf. I don't know if I'm the only person who remembers this commercial. It's one of my favorite commercial in the friggin' world. But it shows these people waking up in the morning and they go crank up like a fossil fuel powered coffee maker, which starts sort of spewing smoke in their home and then they go crank up their microwave.

The point being like, "Wouldn't it be ridiculous if your home appliances were powered by fossil fuels and were spewing pollution into your home? Wouldn't that be crazy? You wouldn't want that. Why wouldn't you want electric and clean?" And this to me is sort of like it's the gestalt of electrification that no commercial entity is going to advertise that, but somebody needs to be talking about how look, you got an induction stove with a battery in it. You got your car with a battery in it, you got your whole-home sort of software that's coordinating these things so you can make it through a blackout and so there's no emissions.

Just to sort of like a better world as possible kind of gestalt. I just feel like that is something we know about. You and I and people like us can envision. But that vision I think, is very not well-known. Products are unsafe. It's a very familiar story to American people, but this sort of, like, this electric utopia that lies ahead of us in coming decades, I don't think any of them know about that.

Sage Welch

Absolutely. And yeah, maybe only because I just don't necessarily want to see the in-house comms teams at the big greens produce those advertisements.

David Roberts

Just give money to someone who knows how to do it.

Sage Welch

Exactly. Let's bring in...and there's efforts underway. There's the Clean Creative Projects that are working to get PR agencies more engaged with climate and saying no to fossil fuel projects and things like that. But, I totally agree. That kind of combo. I would like to see our points and their messaging and advertising expertise and also in part their advertising dollars. Because even if we peeled off money from...I agree there's billions floating around here, but I think it's usually a drop in the bucket compared to what major companies put into their sort of core advertising push to sell products.

But if we can create that alignment and, again, I think the policy is showing them that at least if you want to salvage it. And just what I would like to make clear is, just don't spend your time trying to salvage the bad stuff. But yes, let's show everyone how amazing the good stuff is going to be.

David Roberts

Yes, a lot fewer people will want to fight these rearguard battles if they can see a positive vision ahead, not only for the world, but for their stove company or whatever.

Sage Welch

Absolutely. And so all those big OEMs and others with major...that pay a lot of lip service to climate, like, yeah, maybe it's time to start embedding that in the advertising and in the messaging that's going out from your companies.

David Roberts

Well, Sage, I really cannot thank you enough. The stove thing is sudden and sprawling, is both sudden and sprawling. So it was very helpful to walk through it like this and maybe we can do it again in a year and see how induction stove sales are going. I mean, this is such a fast-moving...and as you say, a huge, huge opportunity for the good guys here, the people trying to solve climate change, the people trying to improve public health, the people working for environmental justice. A huge opportunity. So thanks for emphasizing that, too. Thank you for all your time.

Sage Welch

Oh, thank you, yeah. Best week ever. Happy to do it.

David Roberts

Awesome. Alright, thanks. Bye.

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