Politics

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis Includes Tax-Free Gas Stoves In Proposed Budget

(Photo by GIORGIO VIERA/AFP via Getty Images)

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Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has added a proposal to his “Framework for Freedom” budget proposal that would make gas stoves tax free.

“They want to go after the gas stoves,” the Republican governor announced, “and so we’re saying that we want you to be able to buy those free of charge from the state of Florida for taxes.”

The flare-up over gas stoves has become another political headache for the Biden Administration. On Jan 9, U.S. Consumer Product Safety commissioner Richard Trumka called gas stoves a “hidden hazard” and suggested that they could be restricted. Trumpka later addressed these comments with a tweet assuring the public that he would not be “coming for anyone’s gas stoves.”

 

according to a December 2022 study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.Gas-burning stoves are present in 35 percent of U.S. households and account for about 12.7 percent of the country’s childhood asthma cases.

However, as The Daily Caller has reported on before, whether gas stoves are linked to childhood asthma is not certain. Other studies, such as the 2013 International Study of Asthma and Allergies in Childhood, find no statistical correlation between, “the use of gas as a cooking fuel and either asthma symptoms or asthma diagnosis,”

Others have framed gas stove bans as a way to fight climate change. “We cannot reduce greenhouse gas emissions to the level required by climate science if we continue to burn gas in our homes and buildings,” Rachel Golden, co-lead of the Sierra Club’s building electrification initiative, wrote in 2019.

The notion that gas stoves affect climate has motivated over 100 cities or counties to prohibit or incentivize the replacement of gas cooking installations in new housing construction.