When I was growing up in Texas in the 1960s, natural gas was cheap, abundant, and generally regarded as one of the boons of modern life. For a time, my father even worked for Lone Star Gas, the local franchisee in Fort Worth. We had a gas stove, gas floor heaters and space heaters, a gas water heater, and many people we knew even had decorative gas lanterns that looked like miniature street lamps standing on their front lawns, emitting a greenish-white glow from a gas mantle while consuming gas 24 hours a day, which was why the gas company promoted them so much.
So when I read recently that New York City, Los Angeles, and even some entire states are moving to ban the installation of natural gas in new construction, I understood their reasoning, which is that fossil fuels need to be phased out in favor of renewable-energy-produced electricity. But at the same time, I couldn't help but wonder what they're going to be missing.
Switching from gas to electric heating and cooking is climate-change-friendly only if that electricity is produced from renewable sources. As of February of this year, about 60% of electricity in the U. S. comes from fossil fuels, 20% from nuclear energy, and only 20% from renewables (primarily wind, hydropower, and solar). So even if we shut off every gas valve in the country (except those at power plants) and used electricity instead, we'd end up producing more greenhouse gases under present circumstances.
Why? Because if you start with a given amount of heat energy from natural gas, it's more efficient to burn it right where you use it—in a stove or a heating furnace—than it is to burn it in a power plant, make steam with the heat, turn a generator with the steam, and transmit the electricity to the place you're going to use it. So-called Carnot-cycle heat engines, of which a fossil-fuel-fired power plant is an example, inevitably have efficiencies less than 100%, so it will take more gas to make electricity that is then turned into heat, than it would simply to burn the gas where you need the heat in the first place.
Of course, as the electric grid moves away from fossil fuels, this argument will gradually lose force, but right now it's still valid to the degree that places banning new natural gas installations still derive some of their electric power from fossil fuels.
A recent article in National Review pointed out that certain types of restaurants depend on gas stoves for cooking particular kinds of food. Asian food cooked in woks and certain types of Latin-American food really need gas, according to some Los Angeles chefs who are facing costly conversions if the city cuts off their gas supplies. I have cooked Chinese dishes in a wok on an electric stove, and it can be done, but it takes longer than it would with a gas stove, and I can see why Chinese restaurants favor gas flames for cooking everything except rice.
Representatives of the American Gas Association oppose such bans, saying that it drives up costs for new construction while not yielding a clear benefit with regard to greenhouse-gas emissions.
This is a more complicated problem than it looks like at first glance. For one thing, some bans are set to phase in over a schedule that extends several years in the future. And a ban only on new construction using gas means that the total mix of housing using gas will gradually decline rather than falling off a cliff. At the same time, the fraction of electric energy made from renewables will probably rise. So the benefits in terms of greenhouse-gas emissions are hard to calculate and lie mostly in the future.
On the other hand, people living in places that have enacted bans or propose retroactive laws that don't exempt existing gas users are going to be put at a severe disadvantage pretty soon. Fortunately, exemptions are being considered for such cases, and there don't seem to be any Carry Nations of the anti-gas lobby going around shutting off gas lines without permission.
This is an example of how difficult it is to factor what economists call an externality (such as air pollution or greenhouse gas emissions) into local regulations that affect the lives of individual people differently.
Something similar happened when automakers began adding anti-pollution equipment such as catalytic converters to cars. Only in that case, most of the rules applied nationwide, although California tended to take the lead, using its large car market to impose regulations on the rest of the country almost by default.
However it happened, everybody who buys a car now pays a certain extra amount for the anti-pollution gear in order that everybody in a region (or the country as a whole) can enjoy clean air. After a good amount of tussling, we worked that problem out, and are well down the road toward the ultimate goal of zero-emission vehicles, which electric cars achieve if you don't pay attention to where the electricity comes from (see the above discussion about sources of electric energy).
It's not possible to make gas stoves or furnaces that burn a lot less gas for the same amount of heat, or burn it in a way that doesn't contribute to global warming. In other words, there's no such thing as a catalytic converter for a wok. So in order to reduce the greenhouse-gas contributions of residential and commercial gas users, they just have to be eliminated, or at least banned from new construction. And that is intrinsically a geographically-bound issue.
Not surprisingly, some states such as Utah have put a ban on gas bans—the state is acting to prohibit localities from banning gas appliances. Here in Texas, I haven't heard anybody promoting bans on natural gas, not even in the bluest part of Austin. It's just too much a part of our regional DNA to turn our backs on something that was foundational to the prosperity of the state, and to a large degree still is.
But that's the beauty of federalism—we don't all have to do things the same way. Berkeley and New York City can make do with electric-range kung-pao chicken (it is possible), and Texans can still say good-by to their evening guests by the light of a gas-mantle yard lamp. Only in America.
Sources: The article "Gas Stove Bans Are Starting to Look Racist" appeared on the National Review website at https://www.nationalreview.com/the-weekend-jolt/gas-stove-bans-are-starting-to-look-racist/. I also referred to an article in the Stateline blog section of the Pew Trust website at https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2022/01/06/natural-gas-bans-are-new-front-in-effort-to-curb-emissions. The percentages of electric energy sources are from https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3.
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