In this episode, climate communications expert Sage Welch gives scientific and social context to the politicized brouhaha around gas stoves.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsEarlier this month, gas stoves exploded into the news. Overnight, everyone had an opinion and Republican Congresspeople were threatening violence if jackbooted government thugs arrived to confiscate their stoves.A great deal of this gas stove discourse has been lamentably stupid, and some of it has been educational, but on all sides, there's just been a lot of it, so I thought it was worth doing a podcast trying to tease out the facts.To help with that I contacted the Sage Welch of Sunstone Strategies, a climate communications firm that's been supporting electrification policies since 2018. Welch has spent years tracking the science (which has been accumulating for decades), public opinion, and regulatory action on gas stoves. Together, we dig into how this controversy arose, the science informing it, how the politics are shaping up, and what it portends for the future of decarbonization.Alright, here we go. Without any further ado, Sage Welch, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.Sage WelchThank you for having me.David RobertsSo we're going to do this, we're going to get into stoves. Those of us who have been following decarbonisation and electrification have known about this for a while and probably have been cooking with induction for a while, but Lordy, did it bust into the popular consciousness in the past week or two and just cause a frenzy of nonsense. So, we're going to try to walk through the whole thing here, the background, the science, what's ahead. We're going to try to get it all, God help us. Alright, so, Sage, first of all, why now? What happened? Why is everybody talking about gas stoves now?Sage WelchYeah. So the roots of the past couple weeks debate is the result of three different things that happened in December. So, in December, the Public Interest Research Group held a webinar. The webinar was to launch a report that they had done with the Sierra Club based on a ten state survey of what information, if any, gas stove shoppers were receiving at point of sale from the nation's three largest retailers of stoves about the health risks and how folks can protect themselves, et cetera. And the answer to that was like, not very much information at all.David RobertsYeah, I'm guessing none is approximately none.Sage WelchNone and a lot of disinformation. Don't worry about ventilation. And many folks just hadn't heard of it. And to be fair, the retailers haven't been able to train their sales associates and staff. This just hasn't been on the radar. But they thought it was important to take a look and just see does anyone even get any inkling of this information when they're shopping? And so Richard Trumka, Jr., who is a consumer product safety commissioner, joined that webinar and he used that time to announce that the CPSC would be opening an RFI, a request for information on gas stove pollution in 2023.And he used pretty strong language. He said we need to be talking about regulating gas stoves, whether that's drastically improving emissions or banning gas stoves entirely. And this is pretty surprising, even to health and consumer advocates who've been urging CPSC to investigate this in recent years, but also going back 40 years.David RobertsSounds like it was pretty surprising to his own agency and to his bosses. Sounds like it was pretty surprising to everyone.Sage WelchThe world was not ready for Trumka Jr. to make this statement.David RobertsDo you know why? I mean, is he just the kind of guy who gets excited and gets out over his skis? Do you hear any hint of deliberate twelve-dimensional chess here? Or is this just Trumka getting too excited?Sage WelchI mean, it was a PERG webinar, so I'm not sure that, like, there was a lot of chess playing going on.David RobertsThat's a lot of dimensions of chess if you're starting there.Sage WelchThe sense I get about his position on this, and again at the CPSC level and we'll get to this, this issue is like, not new. But the sense I get is that he just takes his role and the role of the commission quite seriously as far as duty to protect consumers. And this question about whether gas stoves are safe or can be made safe has been hanging around for a while. But when he says banning gas stoves, I think maybe what he is getting at is like, he made these follow up remarks to Bloomberg a month later on products that can't be made safe can be banned. And I think, again, what he's getting at is just like, there is a duty at the commission to ensure safety of products. And as we'll jump into, there is what EPA and many others deem a safe level of NO2 pollution. And jury's still out on whether gas stoves are safe in that regard.David RobertsOr can be made safe in that regard.Sage WelchAnd can be made safe, exactly.David RobertsOkay, so Trumka says this on the webinar and then it didn't blow up immediately, right?Sage WelchIt didn't. Some folks actually did cover this. So the Hill Chicago Tribune actually kind of technically broke this story, but it doesn't blow up immediately. And then the following week, I think just somewhat coincidentally, Senator Cory Booker's office released a letter from 18 members of Congress calling on the CPSC to investigate gas stoves, calling out the health harms. And again, not the first time that a congressional body or a subcommittee has made this recommendation. And actually the Senate committee escapes me, but the head of a Senate committee also made this recommendation last August as well. So this is something that's been brewing in Congress in recent months and years. And then that happens and there's a little bit of coverage.But then in late December, a new study was published in a prominent medical journal from researchers at RMI Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the University of Sydney. And this study found that 12.7% of childhood asthma cases in the US are attributable to gas stove use. And that in some states, like Illinois, New York, California, where there's really high rates of gas cooking, that number is actually much higher. In Illinois and California, it's over 20%. So that study was fairly shocking, although it's based on statistics that have been around for quite a while that find that kids living in homes with gas stoves have a pretty substantial increased risk of developing asthma symptoms.David RobertsRight. Maybe we can touch on this again later, but just to be clear, this new asthma study was not a direct...it's just sort of a regression run on existing data from this 2014 study.Sage WelchYeah, this 2013 meta analysis. And actually, they only focused in this study on risk factors that had been established through North American peer-reviewed published data. But it is basically like a math problem. We know that this percentage that living with a gas stove can increase risk of developing asthma symptoms. And, therefore, when we look at the number of kids with asthma living in homes with gas stoves, it's called like a population attributable factor.David RobertsYeah. Right. The point being, it's not new. It's just that information was sitting there in that meta analysis basically has...Sage WelchExactly. It just helped them put a fine point on the number of cases that could be linked.David RobertsAnd so those three happened, and then the Bloomberg story followed up on that.Sage WelchYeah. So Bloomberg reporter Ari Natter was covering that report and then also thought to go ahead and do an interview with Trumka just based on those statements made in the webinar earlier. And so Trumka, in that interview, now utters what I feel like is just kind of this infamous statement that "Gas stoves are a hidden hazard. Any option is on the table, and products that can't be made safe can be banned," which is true. And so the Bloomberg piece publishes on Monday morning, and it just goes viral. Like, within 12 hours, everyone starts covering this potential ban. I think the language of the headline made it feel like this was far more imminent.David RobertsYes, I think he knew what he was doing here. So, just to be clear about what Trumka is talking about—not that the truth of what Trumka was talking about matters at all in this hysteria—but at best, he's talking about launching a process that will investigate things, that will go through rounds of whatever, that may someday result in gas stoves being banned from new construction. That is the worst possible—I mean, if you're scared of this—that's the worst possible outcome here. No one at any point was talking about going into existing homes and ripping out people's stoves. Let's just get that out there.Sage WelchNo, but the imagery ...