A new report from InfluenceMap reveals the fossil fuel industry has been waging an international lobbying war to prevent cities and towns from requiring newly built homes and businesses to install climate-friendly heating and other appliances.

So far, 26 U.S. states have passed laws designed to prevent towns, cities, and other local governments from crafting new “natural gas bans” or enforcing those laws, according to the report. The analysis shows how utilities and their trade associations have pushed to take away local government’s power to phase out fossil fuel appliances or to limit new buildings’ connections to natural gas pipelines.

“The scale and persistence of the worldwide anti-electrification campaign is alarming,” said InfluenceMap senior analyst Emilia Piziak.

Over a fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions come from houses and other buildings, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates – and those emissions have been rising worldwide.

But the rise of heat pumps and other energy-efficient appliances means it’s possible to make big changes. Up to 85 percent of the emissions from buildings in Europe and North America could be “mitigated,” according to the IPCC, as could up to 45 percent of emissions from buildings in Australia, another major consumer of natural gas.

The push for building electrification has become one of the major battles in the energy transition, with building codes and rules for new construction projects representing one of the dominant ways that cities and towns can take local action on climate change.

Lobbying in the U.S.

Over the past five years, over 50 American cities passed laws that would encourage the transition away from fossil fuels by discouraging new buildings from burning natural gas. But the fossil fuel and utility companies are lobbying to undercut those efforts, InfluenceMap shows.

Of the 26 U.S. states with new laws preventing natural gas bans, many didn’t have any local natural gas restrictions to begin with, InfluenceMap notes. “Geographically, these laws have appeared in regions where electrification has not even been a popular policy consideration (parts of the South, Midwest, and East Coast),” the report finds.

Both multinational oil and gas companies and local utility companies are backing those  “preemption laws,” according to the report. For example, the report highlights previously reported emails from the U.S.’s Dominion Energy “to several major utilities and industry groups to build support for preemption bills” and finds that “Sempra subsidiary SoCalGas was particularly active in opposing local gas bans in California.”

Both companies have a history of trying to pass on lobbying costs to their customers.

“In Virginia, state regulators have flagged and removed millions of dollars in lobbying charges by Dominion Energy in rate cases in 2021 and 2023,” Canary Media reports. “In California, an investigation by state regulators found that the utility SoCalGas improperly charged customers for lobbying to promote the use of natural gas.”

Because natural gas utilities are usually monopolies, they’re typically overseen by state-level utility commissions charged with ensuring they don’t abuse their market power.

“In the U.S., it seems that too few decision-makers understand how much of these misleading narratives are reinforced by the utility companies that are supposed to be representing the best interests of their customers,” Piziak said. “This information needs to become common knowledge so that positive actors can effectively counter this misleading messaging and advocate for policies that allow Americans to affordably electrify their homes.”

“Natural gas has been one of the primary drivers for achieving environmental progress, energy security, and economic vitality across the globe,” Karen Harbert, president of the American Gas Association (AGA), a trade group that represents U.S. natural gas utilities, said in an emailed statement to DeSmog responding to the InfluenceMap report. ”From providing affordable energy to consumers to driving down emissions, the benefits this fuel has for our nation and our world are indisputable.”

“This industry continues to innovate and advance technologies to help ensure Americans have access to the safe, efficient, and reliable energy they need and expect,” Harbert said. “Despite advocacy groups spreading misinformation on the safety of gas stoves and promoting ill-informed energy policy that would drive up prices and sacrifice environmental progress, this industry will continue to implement inclusive solutions to deliver life-essential energy and reduce emissions for our customers and communities.”

Over the past several years, scientific studies have increasingly called attention to health risks posed by gas stove emissions. The AGA has disputed scientific research linking gas stoves to childhood asthma, including a 2024 study from researchers at Stanford and Harvard, which connected tens of thousands of cases of childhood asthma to pollutants, including carbon monoxide from gas stoves.

International Actions

InfluenceMap also looked at lobbying in the European Union and Australia, concluding that fossil fuel producers and utilities on three continents are “collaborating on a global scale” and “relying on a common fossil fuel playbook” to stall building electrification requirements.

That playbook includes three basic moves. One seeks to influence the public using social media and public messaging “to tie the concept of building electrification to relatable negative impacts facing the public such as high energy prices or freedom restrictions,” according to the report. A second involves creating campaigns and front groups that present like grassroots groups but act like sophisticated policy organizations and use “targeted ads and deep involvement in the policy-making process,” fueled by funding from corporations and trade groups, the report states. The third involves direct engagement with policy-makers by the companies and trade groups themselves, including not only lobbying but also litigation. 

Messaging is tailored for specific regions, the report finds.

In the E.U., natural gas advocates call for “technology-neutral policy as a means to promote fossil gas technologies,” with nearly a dozen companies and trade groups using that narrative, InfluenceMap found. But that, the report notes, runs counter to the IPCC’s finding that “technology-specific” policies actually help fight climate change and have “led to a greater use of less carbon-intensive (e.g., renewable electricity) and less energy-intensive (especially in transport and buildings) technologies.”

In Australia, natural gas supporters tend to argue that an energy transition will drive up costs and that natural gas is “part of the solution,” InfluenceMap found. That doesn’t take into account the full costs of natural gas, including the fuel’s impacts on people’s health. The IPCC found that decarbonizing buildings “has significant macro- and micro-economic effects, such as increased productivity of labor, job creation, reduced poverty, especially energy poverty, and improved energy security that ultimately reduces net costs of mitigation measures in buildings (high evidence, high agreement).”

“Wind and solar are cleaner and healthier, and choosing these to power our communities is the right ethical choice,”  Kate Wylie, executive director of Doctors for the Environment Australia, said. “The pattern recognized by InfluenceMap shows a disturbing global effort and a disregard for the weight of health literature on the health harms caused by coal, oil, and gas.”

In the U.S., natural gas advocacy campaigns tend to center on “consumer choice” messaging and to frame local building electrification policies as “natural gas bans.”

“This argument was used in over 50% of tracked engagements, with at least 23 different companies and industry associations using identical or very similar language,” InfluenceMap found.

It’s a bit of a stretch to call the local rules natural gas “bans.” The rules would only apply to new construction – and new construction represents just a tiny sliver of U.S. housing. Roughly 98 percent of U.S. homeowners live in houses built before 2020, when the first U.S. city imposed a “gas ban” for new construction, the latest data from the National Association of Home Builders shows. Most U.S. homeowners live in houses that are decades old, putting them well beyond the reach of rules for new buildings.

But the pushback against “bans” has so far been strikingly successful. The first local gas “ban” was passed by Berkeley, California – and was later rescinded following a lawsuit supported in legal filings by the American Gas Association and the National Manufacturing Association.

That said, the climate movement appears to be already adapting. Last week, for example, the city of Ashland, Oregon, adopted a new ordinance on natural gas installations in new homes – imposing a fee for new natural gas appliances rather than a blanket prohibition.