Clash of the kitchens: California leads the way in a new climate battleground

The most luxurious gas stoves and ovens a home chef could desire fill the cavernous Snyder Diamond showroom in Van Nuys, but the cooking appliance the owner seems most excited about doesn’t use gas at all — or look like an appliance. “Don’t California My Florida,” warns a pamphlet from an organization called Power Florida Forward, one of many industry-backed groups formed around the country to keep the gas lines flowing. The fossil-fuel-friendly Texas Public Policy Foundation cheered that state’s prohibition on cities restricting gas use by branding “California-style bans on natural gas utilities” as “arbitrary constraints on Texans’ freedom.” A gas stove is lighted as Stanford researchers monitor air pollution in the kitchen of a townhome in Mountain View. She talked about rallying the AARP, restaurants, builders, laborers and farmers to industry’s side, as well as local mayors, legislators and African American groups “so that we have more friends on our side willing to talk about how great natural gas is.” Cities moving ahead with gas bans, AGA President and CEO Karen Harbert said in a statement, “have not properly studied the burden it will place on families or the negligible greenhouse gas reduction potential.” The stakes are so high in this campaign that both sides are using tactics that have become a story in themselves. On the AGA’s “Cooking With Gas” website, there are testimonials from one chef after another — including some in Southern California — speaking from their kitchens about the virtues of cooking with fire.