In the face of mounting health concerns, the industry has taken an approach right out of the tobacco playbook, citing a lack of regulation by the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the EPA as evidence of why the public shouldn’t be concerned. But the EPA has never said gas stoves are safe. In 2016, the agency linked short- and long-term nitrogen dioxide exposure to respiratory problems like asthma. The UCLA study found that indoor NO2 emissions from running a stove alone can sometimes cause levels that the EPA would consider unacceptable outdoors, and running an oven at the same time makes things even worse. Indeed, the data shows that California’s buildings emit more nitrogen oxides than power plants, and only slightly less than cars.

The gas industry claims that proper ventilation can take care of any combustion fumes. Yet even among families who are aware of the potential health effects, many cannot afford to install a sufficiently powerful hood vent, and there’s certainly no regulation requiring it. Indeed, most stove fans do little more than move the polluted air about. Because of dated building codes and an unregulated market, low-income Americans, many of whom are renters, have to put up with invisible combustion byproducts in cramped living spaces.

“If we’re able to get gas bans in new buildings, then these gas companies are losing their growth, they’re losing their new market share, and they’re going to start shrinking,” says Stokes. “That sort of downward spiral becomes very problematic, because then investors start to think this isn’t a good company to invest in. The fights that are playing out in California and New York are really bellwethers for the gas industry overall.”

Environmentalists see the defection of the PR firms as evidence of a shift in public sentiment. Consumers are beginning to realize, “I’m burning fossil fuels with an open flame in my house, and it’s contributing to asthma my kid has; it’s harming my mom, my dad, and my grandparents,” says the Sierra Club’s Gillespie. “I think people’s perception of what it means to have a gas stove changes pretty quickly.”

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Cooking is the no. 1 way you're polluting your home. Switch to induction stoves that use magnetic fields.

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