Gavin Newsom vetoes bill to put warning labels on gas stoves

California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday vetoed a bill that would have made California the first state in the country to mandate labels on gas stoves warning of health risks.

Newsom vetoed Assemblymember Gail Pellerin's AB 2513 , which would have required warning labels on natural gas stoves sold online to Californians starting next year and in stores starting in 2026.

He said the bill would have been overly prescriptive. "This static approach falls short in enabling timely updates to the labeling content that should align with the latest scientific knowledge so that consumers are accurately informed about their purchases," he said in a veto message .

The bill is one of the embers of a national political conflagration that flared up over natural gas stoves last year and mostly died out early this year. The warning label proposal was tried in New York and Illinois along with California.

It was an entry in a broader back-and-forth over gas stoves that has played out from Berkeley — where a voter-approved ban on new gas stoves was repealed as part of a legal settlement — to the halls of Congress, where Republicans seized on potential gas stove regulations to claim Democratic overreach.

Democrats in New York warned that the proposals could risk playing into "gas stove hysteria."

A former California Democratic state Senate majority leader, Gloria Romero, cited gas stove policies earlier this month in announcing her decision to switch to the Republican Party.

The bill, backed by the California Public Interest Research Group, passed the Legislature last month along party lines but with a significant number of Democrats declining to vote.

It drew opposition from the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers, SoCalGas, the California Building Industry Association, the California Chamber of Commerce and the California Manufacturers and Technology Association. The groups said the science isn’t settled on the health impacts and that the label would ignore risks of fine particle pollutants that come from cooking indoors even with electric stoves.

California’s proposed label originally cited the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and a state environmental health agency saying stoves emit pollutants indoors at concentrations that exceed outdoor air quality standards.

Pellerin amended it in June to remove the attribution. It would have warned that the pollutants "can be toxic to people and pets," are associated with increased respiratory disease and that "young children, people with asthma, and people with heart or lung disease are especially vulnerable."

AHAM's president and CEO Kelly Mariotti praised Newsom in a statement Saturday, saying the veto "stood on the side of science."