Down to Earth: How gas stoves ignited an American culture war

Oliver Milman
Thu, 19 January 2023


This piece first appeared in Down to Earth, the Guardian’s climate and environment newsletter. 

The US is deep into its second week of a strange culture war over, of all things, gas stoves. It’s a snarky sort of battle that tells us a lot about how the next phase of the effort to tackle the climate crisis may play out.

The gas stove saga (yet to be dubbed “stovegate” but give it time) began when an official from the US Consumer Product Safety Commission said gas stoves are a “hidden hazard”, and banning their sale was “on the table”. This followed a study that found one in eight childhood asthma cases in the US could be due to the copious amounts of indoor air pollution emitted by gas stoves.

Cue a rather overwrought reaction from conservatives. Matt Gaetz, the Republican congressman, tweeted a picture of his stove’s flickering blue flame, warning “You’ll have to pry it from my COLD DEAD HANDS!” Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor and potential 2024 nominee, mocked up a Gadsden flag with a gas stove on it, tweeting “Don’t tread on Florida and don’t mess with gas stoves!” A chef and regular Fox News guest even taped himself to a gas stove in a sort of protest.

The outrage should soon simmer down: the White House has ruled out a national ban on gas stoves, although some cities such as New York and Los Angeles are moving to block gas hookups in new buildings for climate reasons. But the episode shows the challenge of trying to alter personal routines in dealing with environmental crisis.

While most of us want action to deal with global heating, we are most comfortable with the idea that solar and wind power will proliferate to solve this problem while we continue our lives as normal. The UK, for example, used to run largely on coal and now coal has virtually disappeared, without any tangible change when a light is switched on.

Unfortunately, planet-heating emissions are weaved into almost every action of our lives, meaning that we will each need in some way to confront this emergency. While climate change will be solved at a societal rather than individual level – you can’t recycle your way out of this, sorry – this shouldn’t negate the reality that some habits may have to change, which some will find meddlesome or even oppressive.

Donald Trump, if you recall, complained that new energy efficient lightbulbs made him look orange and became fixated upon the idea that water-saving toilets required flushing “10, 15 times”. Trump nemesis Greta Thunberg may have done much to stigmatise flying, meanwhile, but air travel has picked up globally since the depths of Covid-19 and most people won’t think twice about jetting off for a holiday.

Eating meat is so ruinous to the climate that scientists now recommend cutting back to two burgers a week, at most, but emissions from food production are expected to rise 60% by 2050 amid a worldwide rise in meat eating, driven by a newly wealthy middle class in countries such as China.

Despite being a vegetarian I recently tried lab-grown, or “cultivated”, meat from a California company that is looking to grow cells from an (unharmed) pig to make into meatballs and bacon. This sort of simulacrum of the real thing is, much like electric cars, a way to closely substitute a harmful practice without fundamentally changing what people are used to doing.

Given the rapid pace of required emissions cuts, however, environmentalists and politicians will have to sell a bit of change. We need to drive less and walk and cycle more, not just switch cars. It would be sensible to cut down on meat eating, for a variety of reasons, and think about using alternatives to flying.

If we don’t find an agreeable way to impose change, the climate system will do it for us less agreeably. This month, the water was cut off to the community of Rio Verde in Arizona. The desert town has seen a boom in home building despite the US west being in the grip of the worst drought in 1200 years, fueled by the climate crisis.

Arizona has to reduce the amount of water it uses from the dwindling Colorado river by 21%, equivalent to the water use of two million households a year. It is learning painfully, as we all may have to do, that clinging on to the status quo isn’t going to get us out of this crisis.