Dive Brief:

• The Trump administration is suing to force two California municipalities, Morgan Hill and Petaluma, to rescind their bans on gas appliances in new properties, both commercial and residential.
• “The natural gas bans not only impose crushing costs on California residents but are also unlawful,” the federal government says in the lawsuit, filed this week in federal district court in Northern California.
• The government — relying on the Constitution’s preemption clause — says the Energy Policy and Conservation Act, or ECPA, that Congress passed in 1975 allows appliances, including gas appliances, to remain available in the market if they meet government standards. “A natural gas ban is and should be declared invalid under the Supremacy Clause and its enforcement should be permanently enjoined,” the lawsuit says.

Dive Insight:

A number of cities have gas appliance bans in place but several of them in California rescinded their bans after Berkeley, California, which enacted the country’s first gas ban in 2019, lost a legal battle over its ban in 2023 and agreed to rescind it in a 2024 settlement. 

“Numerous other California cities have repealed or suspended their equivalent or similar gas bans,” says the lawsuit, naming Los Angeles, San Luis Obispo, Encinitas and Santa Cruz.

In the Berkeley ruling, the court cited the preemption clause in siding with the plaintiffs, the California Restaurant Association. 

“Completely prohibiting the installation of natural gas piping within newly constructed buildings” is “preempted by Congress” in ECPA, the court said in the 2023 ruling. 

“For cities in the 9th Circuit that have laws that are modeled closely on the Berkeley ordinance, this is a door closing,” Amy Turner, director of the Cities Climate Law Initiative at Columbia University, said at the time of the decision.

In the Morgan Hill and Petaluma lawsuit, the government says states and localities can implement their own energy regulations but they can’t go beyond ECPA. 

“EPCA preempts not only state and local regulations that are stricter than (and therefore would effectively supersede) a federal standard, but more broadly any regulation ‘concerning the energy efficiency, energy use, or water use of’ products subject to a federal standard,” the lawsuit says. 

The U.S. Department of Energy has tested and approved a number of gas appliances under ECPA, which means they should remain available for “manufacturers … to market and sell,” the lawsuit says. 

These include gas-fired commercial warm air furnaces, commercial packaged boilers, commercial storage water heaters, instantaneous water heaters and hot water supply boilers, among others, according to the lawsuit. 

Jurisdictions whose bans aren’t modeled on Berkeley’s law are likely in a better position to keep their bans, a Grist report published last year suggests. The piece points to a New York City emission law that survived a court challenge in which the judge rejected the preemption argument made in the Berkeley case. 

“Now there’s … a good reason for hope for local governments that may have back-burnered their building electrification plans to bring those to the forefront again,” Turner told Grist.  

The New York City ban, Local Law 154, takes a different approach than Berkeley by not targeting gas appliances directly but rather restricting how much carbon dioxide a building can emit.  

“That standard effectively bans gas-burning stoves, furnaces, and water heaters, and any other fossil-fuel powered appliances,” the Grist report says. 

A group representing mayors who support curbs on emissions criticized the Morgan Hill and Petaluma lawsuit as meddling in local matters. “Mayors and the people who elect them should decide the type of energy that powers the future of their communities,” Kate Wright, executive director of Climate Mayors, said in an email. “The Justice
Department’s lawsuit does nothing but tie the hands of local leaders who seek to help families find relief from high energy prices. 

Separate from these legal challenges, some members of Congress are weighing in with legislation that would end gas-appliance bans outright. The Energy Choice Act, introduced by U.S. Rep. Nick Langworthy, R-N.Y., would make it illegal for states and localities to ban an energy service’s connection, reconnection, modification, installation or expansion based on the type or source of energy to be delivered. 

“This legislation will prevent these one-size-fits-all mandates from wreaking further havoc on small businesses and their local economies as electricity demands continue to break peak records,” Louis Bertolotti, principal of federal government relations at the National Federation of Independent Businesses, said in a statement. 

The bill cleared the House Committee on Energy & Commerce late last year.