Former California state senate majority leader Gloria Romero has abandoned the Democratic Party over its neo-Puritanical crackdown on gas appliances, gas stoves in particular. The last straw for this Latina was one we Texans fully understand.
“I for example think we are going to solve nothing by banning gas stoves,” Romero told NBC News 4 San Antonio. “As a Latina, I will not give up my gas stove because you cannot toast a tortilla on an electric range.”
One might add, you cannot immediately adjust the temperature on an electric range, either.
While California is hardly the only state seeking to ban gas appliances (and natural gas altogether, despite the fact that it burns much cleaner than coal), the much-tarnished Golden State has been the chief hotbed of the controversy.
According to the Energy Information Administration, California in 2020 had the nation’s highest percentage of households using natural gas for cooking (70%); 88% used natural gas for some purpose, second only to Utah. While gas water heaters and furnaces also remain popular in California homes, the state’s powerful Air Resources Board unanimously in 2022 approved a proposal to ban the sale of all new gas furnaces and water heaters by 2030.
California also has twice as many internal combustion engine vehicles (over 31 million) than second-ranked Florida (16 million) and 13% of the national total. The combined number of electric, hybrid, and hybrid-electric vehicles in California (about 3 million) is only 10% of the current California fleet. But the California Puritans want to shame 90% of drivers.
While Los Angeles has been the nation’s smog capital at least since the 1940s, the California legislature has imposed draconian measures on the entire state and, if they have their way, on the entire nation.
The university-driven politicos in Berkeley in 2019 were the first to enact an ordinance banning natural gas hookups in most new residences and commercial buildings. Copycats in at least 50 other California cities and counties quickly adopted similar rules despite objections from local gas utilities.
But the California Restaurant Association sued Berkeley, alleging that the federal Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975 preempts the city’s regulation that barred installation of natural gas piping within newly constructed buildings. A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held that the EPCA preempts Berkeley’s building code. In the wake of that ruling, various other California cities and counties backed away.
The Biden-Harris Administration responded by stepping up its war on natural gas, proposing or finalizing rules for new efficiency standards for 24 household appliances. The rules, strongly opposed by the American Gas Association, as of 2028 require homes with gas furnaces to install expensive new condensing units to exhaust gas from their homes. Other rules targeted gas water heaters, refrigerators, and laundry machines in a mad quest to overburden the nation’s flailing electric grid.
Woke politicians led New York State in 2023 to be the first in the nation to ban natural gas stoves and furnaces and to require all-electric heating and cooking in new buildings shorter than seven stories by 2026 and for taller buildings by 2029. “Only” 77% of New York households currently rely on natural gas, lower than the 81% in neighboring New Jersey, and the majority of households in both states have gas stoves. [Damn those “evil” polluters!]
New York has also blocked 931 miles of interstate natural gas pipelines, cutting off shipments of natural gas to New England and forcing the Northeast to rely on Russia for home heating and cooking until the Ukraine war sanctions kicked in.
Meanwhile, the Biden-Harris Administration in January 2024 further attacked the natural gas industry by halting new exports of liquefied natural gas at a time when the U.S. was the world’s largest LNG exporter. The Biden ban ran into stiff opposition, and in July federal district judge James D. Cain, Jr., ordered the administration to resume issuing permits for LNG exports.
Until Senator Romero spoke up, the bulk of opposition to the Biden-Harris, California, New York, and other anti-natural gas zealotry had been from the natural gas industry and some “red” states that rely less on natural gas. This despite a June 2023 Harvard CAPS Harris poll that showed nearly 70% of respondents (including 55% of Democrats) oppose policies that de facto ban gas stoves.
And for good reason. A Virginia study found that a ban on natural gas energy could cost householders up to $26,000 to retrofit existing appliances. Earlier research by the Consumer Energy Alliance found that the cost to replace major gas appliances in homes nationwide would exceed $258 billion – a figure that has surely risen with inflation.
A 2019 Wall Street Journal article cited the average price of natural gas in California at the time was about $12.30 per million BTU. The cost of electricity at the time (18.84 cents per kilowatt-hour) translated to $55 per million BTU – more than four times the cost of natural gas. Those numbers have not improved since, and California continues to be plagued with brownouts.
“Green” politics has had a very successful run after switching public concern over pollution from sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, and other harmful pollutants to carbon dioxide – a compound essential for all life on Earth. The “tortilla rebellion,” though, may signal a beginning of the end of the politics of punishing and shaming constituents by limiting choices, skyrocketing energy and fuel prices, and supply shortfalls.
The walls may even be cracking on the censorship of good science that contradicts the prophets of doom selling an all-electric future, one most easily disrupted by an electromagnetic pulse or any number of other power outage events.
Could it be that the voting public is awakening to the counsel of American Gas Association president and CEO Karen Harbert – “Any push to ban natural gas would raise costs to consumers, jeopardize environmental progress, and deny affordable energy to underserved populations.” The 70% majority who believe natural gas is just fine may finally have had enough.
Duggan Flanakin is a senior policy analyst at the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow who writes on a wide variety of public policy issues.