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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(Active transcript)
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
