Liam Denning, Columnist

Natural Gas Just Became a Kitchen-Table Issue in America

Debate about oven safety aims more at choking off gas’s future rather than ripping out its past.

January 12, 2023 at 12:20 PM UTC

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

The new frontier in US debate over natural gas.
Photographer: Anita Pouchard Serra/Bloomberg

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Welcome to Elements, our daily energy and commodities newsletter. Today, Bloomberg Opinion’s Liam Denning assesses the implications of banning gas stoves in the US. To learn why the coming cap on Russian fuel prices will be harder than it looks, click here. For a look at Wall Street’s new “debt-for-nature swaps,” read this. If you haven’t signed up to get Elements in your inbox, you can do that here.

Natural gas is now literally a kitchen-table issue. This week, an official with the US Consumer Product Safety Commission, calling pollution from gas cookers a “hidden hazard,” floated a potential ban. Meanwhile, New York’s governor proposed making it the first state in the US to ban gas heating and appliances in new buildings.