Cooking with Smoke: How the Gas Industry Used Tobacco Tactics to Cover Up Harms from Gas Stoves

This publication documents the intertwined paths of the tobacco and gas misinformation campaigns, and the similar health detriments of their products, concluding with ways state and local governments and public health advocates can come together to address the harms from indoor gas just as we have from indoor smoke. In recent years, our staff has been astonished to discover the parallels between methane gas and commercial tobacco, including surprising similarities between the pollutants released by both gas stoves and tobacco, the similarities of health harms from secondhand smoke and gas stoves, and the two industries’ mirror-image deception campaigns designed to conceal those health harms and prevent public awareness and government regulation. While the public is familiar with the health dangers of tobacco and the long and sordid history to mask these dangers by the tobacco industry, we are just starting to become aware of the full range of impacts of burning methane gas indoors, and the gas industry’s misdeeds to disguise and deny those impacts. The health research showing the harm from gas stove indoor air pollution dates back decades, but is only now earning the attention it merits, in part because new research is revealing shocking similarities between the pollutants in tobacco and gas stoves, and the health harms from secondhand smoke and gas stoves.