When Berkeley became the first US city to ban natural gas in new buildings, the California Restaurant Association fought back, and won. Now gas companies are planning to leverage that victory natio…
In the fight to ratchet down climate emissions and soothe the most dangerous effects of an overheating planet, one of the most withering setbacks in recent memory wasn’t delivered by the oil industry or coal excavators, but, rather, a group of restaurants in California.
After a see-sawing legal battle, the restaurants prevailed. When Berkeley’s last-ditch request for a rehearing was rejected earlier this year, the city in March canceled its ordinance, prompting a jubilant CRA to declare it a “significant triumph for chefs and restaurateurs.” A couple smokes at the Beverly Hills Café restaurant, after the city’s anti-smoking law was rescinded in 1987.
“Public health advocates need to understand that, with rare exceptions, when they talk to organized restaurant associations, they are effectively talking to the tobacco industry,” warned researchers at the University of California San Francisco in a 2002 paper. Meanwhile, SoCalGas and San Diego Gas & Electric, both subsidiaries of energy giant Sempra, combined to contribute over $1.3 million to CRA and its charitable arm since 2019, a sharp uptick from previous years. In a statement, SoCalGas said that it didn’t fund the Berkeley suit and its contributions went to the restaurant association’s charitable arm, which supported eating establishments that struggled during the pandemic.
For longtime tobacco watchdogs, like Joelle Lester, executive director of the Public Health Law Center at the Mitchell Hamline School of Law, it amounts to more than a striking case of déjà vu. They’re concerned the tactics that once slowed indoor-smoking bans will also stymie efforts to solve climate change.
Governments today are pushing for dramatic shifts away from gas. Lawmakers in the European Union agreed in April to abolish fossil fuels in new construction by 2030, while requiring retrofits for the least-efficient buildings. New York State, meanwhile, enacted a rule last year to ban gas in most new construction. Reichman Jorgensen filed a suit in October to block it on behalf of a slew of plaintiffs including homebuilders and gas companies.
The gas industry warns these policies will hike customer bills and increase the possibility of electric blackouts. “The choice available to us isn’t how to convert our nation’s energy system away from natural gas but how the customers can continue to benefit from the country’s abundance of affordable natural gas and ensure reliability and resiliency,” said American Gas Association chief executive officer Karen Harbert in a written statement.
Condie has spent much of his career fighting government edicts. During the 1990s, after a stint as a campaign manager and legislative aide to Republican lawmakers in the California state assembly, he worked for the California Manufacturers Association. There, he worked with the “Thursday Group,” a powerful coalition of industry groups that challenged environmental rules they deemed harmful to the state’s business interests, such as early efforts to regulate CO2.
The plan now, Kaminski explained to the audience, is to reach out to these local governments “and, for lack of a better word, strong-arming those municipalities into following the law.” Jorgensen then said this might begin with an initial “letter-writing campaign” to these cities to see if they’re going to withdraw their rules.
Meanwhile, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, which regulates air pollution for over 7 million people in and around San Francisco, has implemented rules that will effectively ban the sale of new gas-powered water heaters and furnaces. These regulations will be phased in starting in 2027. In 1995, California became the first state to prohibit smoking in enclosed workplaces, including restaurants. Three years later, it extended the ban to bars and taverns.
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