Radical efforts in moving away from fossil fuels is very risky

May 23, 2023

There has been a lot of talk lately about gas stoves, and the possibility of them being banned.

A story from the January edition of Popular Mechanics magazine quoted Richard Trumpka, Jr., who is a commissioner on the U.S. Consumer Product and Safety Commission, as saying that due to concerns about health conditions such as respiratory illness, cancer, and childhood asthma, the federal government has a ban “on the table” to prohibit gas stoves in homes. “This is a hidden hazard. Products that can’t be made safe can be banned,” Trumpka said.

Trying to put concerns of a ban to rest, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm assured members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee that the Biden administration does not seek to ban gas stoves.

“I will say that the Department of Energy is not banning any gas stoves, that we are doing our duty to make sure that appliances are more energy efficient as we are required to do under the Energy Policy Conservation Act of 1975,” she told the Committee. “Nobody’s taking my gas stove, nobody will take your gas stove. But in the future, gas stoves that are high-end, which is all that we looked at, can be more efficient.”

Also, at about the same time came news that in order to combat health and climate risks, the state of New York has banned the use of natural gas for cooking and heating in most new residential buildings. And, the Energy Department, “is proposing new efficiency rules for gas stoves that only about half of current models on the market would likely comply with,” The Washington Times reported.

Also, a number of cities in California, Massachusetts and Washington are working to end using natural gas in homes and other buildings.

Burning things like coal, oil, natural gas, kerosene and wood is not good for the environment, as we all know. Burning natural gas in stoves emits nitrogen dioxide (NO2) when it is burned at high temperatures in the presence of nitrogen in the atmosphere. This can irritate human airways and can cause or exacerbate respiratory problems. 

Smoking too much, drinking too much alcohol, and lots of other things are also harmful, but they are not banned, and in some cases not even heavily regulated. The key to this is knowing how harmful to people young and old is it to burn natural gas in homes. 

An article on the Scientific American website notes: “The American Gas Association (AGA), a natural gas industry group, issued a statement pushing back against the December 2022 study that linked gas cooking with asthma. The statement claimed the study authors did not conduct measurements of real-life appliance use and ignored some of the scientific literature on this topic. The AGA cited a separate study that found no evidence of a link between cooking with gas and asthma symptoms of diagnosis.”

While it is true that the AGA has a vested interest in opposing the idea that burning natural gas can potentially cause health issues, the Biden administration also has a vested interest: its mission to kill all fossil fuel use. But since American natural gas is the cleanest on Earth, is our use of it really that harmful to the environment?

And given the way China and India continue to increase their use of fossil fuels, and considering our efforts to make them cleaner, is our using them really a serious problem? Should the U.S. work at a pace to eliminate fossil fuels so fast that it will negatively affect its people, particularly when other nations increase their damage to the environment more than the U.S. reduces it?

Virginian Mark Christie serves on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). He wants people to understand the trouble the nation is headed toward with its current path on energy.

He joined the FERC panel in January 2021, prior to which he was a member and former chairman of the State Corporation Commission, Virginia’s energy regulator, for 17 years.

Appearing before a U.S. Senate committee earlier this month, Christie said that “The United States is heading for a very catastrophic situation in terms of reliability. The arithmetic doesn’t work,” he said. “This problem is coming. It’s coming quickly. The red lights are flashing.”

Christie bases his warning on problems in the recent past, such as the deadly energy catastrophe Texas experienced two years ago, and the problems in the eastern part of the country last year as Christmas approached.

Three other FERC commissioners joined him in the message to the Senate, and Virginia’s Governor Glenn Youngkin and Dominion Energy Virginia have expressed their concerns, too.

The message they are sending is that eliminating most or all fossil-fuel-produced electricity too rapidly, and replacing it only with wind and solar, is a recipe for failure. 

Wind and solar are nowhere near the point where they can carry the load alone. Solar panels and wind turbines produce nothing most of the time. Fossil fuels work all of the time.

Someday in the future wind and solar will have developed sufficiently through natural development to replace fossil fuels. We don’t need this radical effort to force it on the nation.