The US gas stove blow up

A new debate in the US has us hoping it doesn't come to Australia

Imagine being a soldier on the front line of the culture wars. You’re a veteran of the renewable energy wars, sporting battle scars from your ardent defence of open-carry. Your new mission? Defending the gas stove. You hear Fortunate Son playing somewhere as you crack your knuckles, charge into the Twitter hellscape, flamethrower dutifully roaring away.

In case you were lucky enough to miss it, gas stove tops are the latest topic to fall into the deeply partisan divide (along with M&Ms). The Franz Ferdinand moment for the gas stove hubbub? A study on the links between cooking with gas and childhood asthma, which concluded that somewhere between 6.3% and 19.3% of current childhood asthma in the US is due to gas stove cooking.¹ However, the declarations of culture war were made in earnest after the US Consumer Product Safety Commission announced that it was considering some health regulations for gas stoves. From there, it was just a short hop, skip and jump to right wing media firing up the base with concerns that Joe Biden was going to personally rip your gas stove out the wall. Republican Presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis is now pushing for a sales-tax exemption for gas stoves as part of his Framework for Freedom.

Is the gas stovetop blow up coming to Australia?

While the Australian public tends to get an easier ride than our US counterparts, we’re certainly not immune. Senator Bridget McKenzie from the National Party has warned of Energy Minister Chris Bowen and Greens leader Adam Bandt turning up on doorstops, spanners in hand, ready to remove gas cooktops.

Much of the flammability of the gas stovetop issue can be attributed to the tendency for US politics to seize on just about anything and turn it into a debate about the role of governments, wokeness and liberty. However, the role of industry in covertly influencing and inflaming these sentiments shouldn’t be underestimated. The gas industry has a storied past of campaigns to influence public support for the use of “natural” gas.²

Fortunately in Australia, we don’t seem to have these debates with the white-knuckle fervour of our US counterparts. Some parts of the media even saw the most recent Australian Federal Election as a repudiation of the Liberal Party’s partisan reluctance to act on climate change (or maybe it was just ScoMo?). However, as is the case in the US, gas companies here wield sizable influence. In FY2022, fossil fuel companies donated $2 million to Labor, the Liberals and the Nationals. Industry groups like the Energy Networks Australia have fact sheets extolling gas in homes, and gas company Jemena has used local influencers to run campaigns on gas hot water.

So, can we say Australia will skirt around this one? While the Australian media does like a beat up, it seems unlikely that there will be the same level of attention given to gas stoves. However, as more policy focus is given to electrification (such as subsidies to replace gas stoves with induction cooktops), there is still a pretty good chance you’ll catch gas stoves in an Andrew Bolt column.³

Should we ban gas stovetops?

There aren’t any credible proposals that we’ve seen that propose to regulate existing gas appliances out of existence. Instead, the regulatory focus is on stricter regulation about the ventilation requirements for gas cooking (such as requiring ventilation from stove tops to be vented to outside), or on banning gas connections for new houses or suburbs.

Burning gas indoors has health impacts and for some consumers, that will be enough justification to replace them. Other climate conscious consumers will look to electrification and renewable energy as a more climate friendly alternative. Others will prefer to use gas for cooking and will continue to use gas stovetops.

However, the more likely reason for a decline in gas cooking in Australia will probably be the economics of gas, and climate change solutions on a grander scale.

The costs of gas (as well as electricity) for consumers has shot up following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In addition, the owners of gas networks may try recovering the capital costs of their networks at a faster rate in anticipation of people using less gas (this in turn drives up costs for remaining customers, pushing more to disconnect etc., a phenomenon called the death spiral). For network connections for both electricity and gas, consumers pay a daily fixed charge. The only way to avoid this cost is to disconnect from the gas network.⁴ This may push consumers to leave the network, and has big real estate developers moving to exclusively using electricity in new projects.

At a higher level, governments across the country have made climate commitments and will be making policies to meet their emissions targets. For this reason, governments will increasingly be displace gas use with electricity (alongside replacing petrol and diesel with electricity for transport). Replacing cooktops isn’t necessarily easy or cheap though, hence the need for supportive policy. For example, the Victorian government outlined its gas substitution roadmap, which would establish incentives and subsidies to help households replace gas appliances with electric ones. The ACT has suburbs being built without any gas connections, and has legislation to prevent new gas connections for homes and businesses.

There will be attempts to push back, including proposals to blend hydrogen into the natural gas network (which we’ll cover at some point in the future), but hopefully, for all of our sanity, we can sidestep the manic fervour that’s so characteristic across the Pacific and instead argue about something more culturally significant, like Fairy Bread.

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Things happen

• The Economist reports that the level of cobalt needed in battery manufacturing is falling rapidly. Cobalt mining has been associated with modern and child slavery, particularly in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

• Debate continues in Australia regarding the Safeguard mechanism, a policy that would aim to reduce industrial emissions and has broad industry support. The Greens are threatening to block the bill passing through the lower house unless Labor commit to no future gas or coal mines.

1. This study isn’t the first to look at the health impacts of gas cooking — studies go back to the 1980s trying to understand the link between burning gas and health impacts, including nitrogen oxide and carcinogenic benzene.

2. Rebecca Leber wrote a great piece detailing the history of these PR campaigns.

3. But if you do, that’s kinda your fault right?

4. In more extreme cases, people go completely off-grid and disconnect from gas and electric networks.