President-elect Donald Trump is reportedly considering taking executive action to protect gas stoves from regulatory overreach, Reuters reported Tuesday. [emphasis, links added]
The executive order being considered would also cover other gas-powered appliances, including heaters, after Democrats and the Biden administration spent years advancing regulations that would restrict their use over time, according to Reuters.
The details of the action under consideration are not yet clear, but the policy would likely be in line with a Congressional push to cut funding to dissuade state and local governments from pursuing gas appliance phase-out policies.
“It speaks volumes when an order from the White House is needed to stop our government from banning natural gas furnaces and water heaters,” Karen Harbert, president of the American Gas Association, told Reuters in a statement.
Approximately 75 million American households used natural gas to power at least one appliance as of 2020, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Approximately 47 million U.S. households used gas for cooking purposes in 2020, an increase from 39 million households in 2015.
Over its one term in office, the Biden administration pushed forward energy efficiency rules for stoves, portable generators, pool pump motors, water heaters, and more, many of which would gradually guide markets toward electric or energy-efficient models and away from gas-powered versions.
Consumer Product Safety Commission Commissioner Richard Trumka Jr. suggested in 2023 that gas stoves could potentially be banned after studies linked the appliances to cases of childhood asthma, though the Department of Energy declared in May 2023 that the notion the federal government is targeting gas stoves is “misinformation.”
Moreover, the Biden administration also worked to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to help state and local governments devise building codes that effectively amount to backdoor efforts to phase out gas-powered appliances, energy policy experts explained to the Daily Caller News Foundation in December 2023.
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