Natural gas bans falter after ruling
It can be difficult keeping up with the latest environmental fads, which seem designed to annoy us rather than improve the ecosystem. We regularly cover such proposals on these pages, including the latest nonsense: a legislative attempt to ban the sale of thick “reusable” plastic bags at grocery stores. They replaced the thin “single-use” bags that were banned a decade ago, but that law actually increased the amount of plastic waste. So lawmakers are back at it again.
At the local level, some San Francisco Bay Area cities have been banning the installation of natural gas lines in new buildings. Such trendy bans have spread after reports suggest that poorly vented gas stoves and appliances can cause indoor-health hazards. Americans have been cooking with gas stoves for more than a century, so that struck as a manufactured “crisis” – one designed to gin up the state’s climate-driven move away from fossil fuels.
Always on the cutting edge of progressive hogwash, Berkeley in 2019 imposed a ban. To get around the federal Energy Policy and Conservation Act, which overrides local and state regulations regarding gas appliances, the city “enacted a building code that prohibits natural gas piping into those buildings, rendering the gas appliances useless,” a federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal panel explained last year in striking the law.
The court in January denied a request to revisit the ruling.
The California Restaurant Association had filed the successful legal challenge. Restaurants rely on natural-gas stoves and cooktops, so this law imposed burdens on new businesses. In response, Berkeley repealed its ban – and some other cities and counties that jumped on the bandwagon also are suspending their bans to avoid litigation.
This municipal fad isn’t about potential health risks, but climate-change policy. Environmental groups argue it’s less costly to construct new buildings without gas infrastructure, but builders are best able to determine such matters.
Los Angeles and all cities that passed similar laws ought to immediately heed the court, rescind their bans – and leave restaurants and homeowners with the freedom to cook and heat with gas.