Gas stoves emit potentially harmful pollutants, but utilities and their trade group avoided regulation with tactics perfected by the tobacco industry to cast doubt on science showing health problems.
Dr. Carl Shy, a public health researcher, cooks on his electric stove at his home. In 1970, he published a study showing that families exposed to greater levels of the air pollutant nitrogen dioxide outdoors had higher rates of respiratory illness than families in less-polluted areas.The gas utilities called Operation Attack their"most ambitious advertising and merchandising program ever.
Along with material collected through its own reporting, NPR reviewed hundreds of pages of publicly available documents gathered by CIC that include scientific studies, trade journal articles and papers from the University of California, San Francisco's Those successful tactics are still relevant today, as state and federal regulators once again examine the health risks that come from cooking with gas, and as natural gas use becomes a flashpoint in the effort to reduce planet-heating emissions.
Richard Darrow led Hill and Knowlton's tobacco accounts, and he was also a key player in its work for the gas industry, documents included in the Climate Investigations Center report show. In 1972, at an AGA conference at Disney World in Florida, Darrow explained that he had long consulted for the industry andutilities they needed to respond. He told them to"mount the massive, consistent, long-range public relations programs necessary to cope with the problems.
The Gas Research Institute, which funded research for the gas industry, hired the firm Arthur D. Little to produce this kind of material. Arthur D. Little had a history of conducting similar work for the tobacco industry. A 1981completed by Arthur D. Little surveyed available research on the health effects of gas stoves but focused on questions the research did not answer and found the epidemiological data was"incomplete and conflicting.
"Over my career, there are people who felt that I waited too long before perhaps saying that X causes Y. But that's because I don't think we want to have false positive determinations," Samet told NPR. Scientists say accomplishing that in epidemiology can be tricky because often there are multiple factors present that could be causing a health problem.
Morton Lippmann chaired the EPA's Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee at the time, which reviewed the research the agency used to reach its conclusion. Lippmann, 91, is a professor emeritus of environmental medicine at the New York University School of Medicine and confirms that"the data were too fragmentary" to reach a certain conclusion. He says the EPA's decision to keep the existing standard was a judgment call for the agency.
Since then, independent scientists have continued to produce studies that provided more detail and evidence about how gas stoves affect human health.by Duke University and EPA researchers found that children in a home with a gas stove have about a 20% increased risk of developing respiratory illness. AThe weight of evidence is starting to shift again, away from the gas utility industry's interests.
Medical professionals do not appear persuaded by arguments like Gradient's. The accumulation of studies prompted the American Public Health Associationin April, funded by AGA, that surveys available research and concludes it"does not provide sufficient evidence regarding causal relationships between gas cooking or indoor NO2 and asthma or wheeze.
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