California Legislators Vote To Slap a Giant Warning Label on All Gas Stoves

A bill prohibiting the sale of gas stoves that don’t prominently display a label awaits the signature of California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D). California is famous for its overzealous labeling laws, but this proposed label is particularly unhelpful.

“WARNING,” it reads. “Gas stoves can release nitrogen dioxide, benzene, carbon monoxide, formaldehyde, and other harmful pollutants into the air, which can be toxic to people and pets. Stove emissions, especially from gas stoves, are associated with increased respiratory disease. Young children, people with asthma, and people with heart or lung disease are especially vulnerable to the toxic effects of combustion pollutants. To help reduce the risk of breathing harmful gases, allow ventilation in the area and turn on a vent hood when gas-powered stoves and ranges are in use.”

Legislators spelling “gases” the British-English way is dismissible (though odd); their attempt to bend consumer preferences to serve their overcautious health and environmental agenda demands attention.

Assembly Bill 2513, proposed by Assemblymember Gail Pellerin (D–Santa Clara), was more specific and qualified in its assertions when introduced in February. The original bill referenced the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s standards for outdoor air quality; qualified causal claims about causing respiratory illness with a “may”; and mentioned “harmful” only once and “toxic” not at all, whereas the enrolled bill deploys both alarming adjectives twice.

Despite the histrionics of the bill, 38 percent of U.S. homes use natural gas. NPR attributes Americans’ affinity for gas stoves to a “decades-old ‘cooking with gas’ campaign.” The gas stove industry undoubtedly spends money on advertising—as every industry does. But it seems like a stretch to claim, as NPR does, that “tobacco-style tactics” are responsible for the persistence of gas stoves. Home chefs “despise electric stoves [because] they take more time to initially heat up and are slower to respond when heat is ratcheted up or down,” Reason’s Liz Wolfe explains.

The entity that is making a concerted effort to change consumer preferences isn’t primarily gas-stove manufacturers; it’s California’s state government. Pellerin’s official website states that the “initiative aims to increase consumer awareness of the environmental and health impacts of gas stoves.” The invocation of the environmental impacts of gas stoves gives the lie to claim that the bill is solely about public health.

The absence of quantitative information from the warning label also suggests that it exists more to dissuade than to inform. The warning label can’t help consumers “make the decision that’s right for their family,” as NPR quotes Pellerin, if there’s no corresponding effort to educate consumers with statistics on the extent to which gas stoves increase the concentration of nitrogen dioxide and rates of respiratory illness or other relevant information. Californians already suffer from warning label blindness; this will be just an ugly block of text on an everyday object for citizens to ignore. NPR acknowledges that the gas-stove campaign “is part of a larger climate effort to get consumers to switch to electric appliances.” California legislators should do so as well.

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