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05 February 23
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And yet, despite the reach of Bruen, I am fairly confident that five justices will reverse the 5th Circuit and uphold a variety of laws that our ancestors would have rejected, including the federal ban on owning a gun while subject to a restraining order for domestic violence. Why? Because I do not think five justices agree with Bruen. Yes, it was a 6–3 decision. Yes, every justice in the majority joined Thomas’ opinion in full. But one justice, Brett Kavanaugh, wrote a separate opinion laying out a different standard that cannot be squared with Thomas’. And another, Chief Justice John Roberts, joined him. Under the Kavanaugh-Roberts test, disarming alleged abusers—and other individual adjudged to be dangerous—is almost certainly constitutional.
It is almost never wise to be optimistic about this Supreme Court. And it is frightening to think that thousands of lives depend on Kavanaugh ruling the right way. But in this most unusual case, I think cautious confidence is in order.
To see why, just hold up Thomas’ and Kavanaugh’s opinions in Bruen side by side. Both justices agreed with the bottom line: New York’s concealed carry law, which required applicants to demonstrate a heightened need for self-defense, violates the Second Amendment. But take one step beyond that and the justices start to diverge. Thomas devotes his opinion to articulating a new legal test: Modern gun restrictions are “presumptively” unconstitutional unless they have enough “historical analogues” from the 18th and 19th centuries to prove that they are rooted in “this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” That’s the test that the 5th Circuit used to find that the government cannot bar people from owning guns while they are under a restraining order for domestic violence.
Although Kavanaugh formally signed onto Thomas’ opinion, he spent the bulk of his separate concurrence recasting it as something very different. Kavanaugh wrote that he wanted “to underscore two important points about the limits” of Thomas’ opinion. First, he clarified that the decision does not affect “the existing licensing regimes” in 43 states that let any law-abiding adult carry a concealed weapon. “As the court explains,” Kavanaugh declared, “New York’s outlier may-issue regime is constitutionally problematic because it grants open-ended discretion to licensing officials and authorizes licenses only for those applicants who can show some special need apart from self-defense.” In other words, New York’s “outlier” law violates the Second Amendment because it grants state officials so much latitude in determining who deserves to carry a gun.
But that’s not actually what the court—that is, Clarence Thomas’ majority opinion—said! Thomas did not focus primarily on the problem of state officials’ “open-ended discretion.” He instead zeroed in on the ostensible lack of a historical basis for such stringent limits on concealed carry. These are two very different things! In his concurrence, Kavanaugh then went on to preemptively greenlight a variety of restrictions on concealed carry permits, including “fingerprinting, a background check, a mental health records check, and training in firearms handling and in laws regarding the use of force.” All these requirements, he declared, are “constitutionally permissible.”
Wait—they are? Why? Under Thomas’ test, that’s an open question: The government would have to demonstrate that in the 18th and 19th centuries, a critical mass of states forced citizens to jump through these hoops before acquiring a concealed carry permit. It’s extremely unlikely that states demanded fingerprinting (which did not exist at that time) or a background check (frequently impossible in an era with scarce, scattershot paper records) or a mental health records check (since the very concept of mental health was in its infancy). These requirements are only constitutional—indeed, obviously constitutional, per Kavanaugh—under a more lenient test. A test that, for instance, measures the importance of the government’s objectives against the burden on the individual’s rights. Yet Thomas expressly disclaimed this kind of “means-end scrutiny,” insisting that it is irrelevant how many lives a particular gun restriction might save.
Turn now to Kavanaugh’s second “important point” about “the limits” of Bruen. The justice reiterated a famous passage in D.C. v. Heller, the 2008 decision that first established an individual right to bear arms. In Heller, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that this right “is not unlimited,” adding: “Nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms. … We identify these presumptively lawful regulatory measures only as examples; our list does not purport to be exhaustive.” Kavanaugh reprinted this entire passage just to endorse it.
Here’s the thing, though: Scalia did not want to add that passage to Heller. He only inserted it because Justice Anthony Kennedy, the swing vote, asked for language limiting the decision’s reach. Kennedy knew he could extract this concession from Scalia as the price of his vote. Lower courts routinely cite that passage when upholding all manner of gun restrictions. By reprinting and endorsing it, Kavanaugh signaled that he was on board with at least some limits on firearms that “our ancestors” wouldn’t have liked. It’s true that people accused of domestic violence do not automatically fit into the category of “felons and the mentally ill.” But it stands to reason that if the government can disarm someone adjudged to be mentally ill in a civil proceeding, it can disarm someone adjudged to be a domestic abuser in a civil proceeding, as well.
If I am right that Kavanaugh (along with Roberts) sought to limit Bruen’s scope in his concurrence, the question arises: Why not force Thomas to tone down his opinion for the court? Why not follow the approach of his predecessor and mentor, Anthony Kennedy, and extract a concession in the form of a limiting principle or a more lenient test?
My suspicion is that Kavanaugh did not want to be accused of betraying the gun rights movement by watering down a landmark victory for the cause. It’s also possible, however, that Kavanaugh simply did not want to bother negotiating with Thomas when he could write his own opinion laying out a different vision of the Second Amendment. After all, the justice has a well-known habit—infuriating to conservatives—of limiting majority opinions through separate concurrences. Maybe he already knew Roberts would sign on, thereby sending an important message: There are not, in fact, five votes for the no-holds-barred assault on modern gun regulations that Thomas craves.
If there is any group of people whom the government has a good reason to disarm, it’s people accused of domestic abuse. These individuals are vastly more likely to kill their partners or commit mass shootings. To Thomas, this fact does not matter one bit. To Kavanaugh, I think it does. The 5th Circuit may be convinced that Bruen gave it carte blanche to invalidate every gun safety law under the sun. But its certitude may well be misplaced.
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Amber Heard, Megan Thee Stallion, and Olivia Wilde are three of the women who have had the phrase “Time’s Up” trending next to their name over the past year. (photo: Amanda Northrop/Vox)
How Susan Faludi’s feminist classic predicted this moment.
In the fall of 2017, as if out of nowhere, people en masse began to evidence a deep concern about the problem of sexual violence in America. The Me Too movement was formally founded in 2006 by activist Tarana Burke, but 11 years later, all of a sudden, the public actually cared about it. It was part of that apocalyptic feeling that emerged after Donald Trump won the presidency, when suddenly every injustice in American life felt massively visible and consequential.
First the news broke that film producer Harvey Weinstein had assaulted dozens of women. Then dozens more women who had been assaulted by Weinstein came forward. Then it was woman after woman coming forward with their own stories of assault by other people, and after that, not just women but men too. Every day another story broke about another powerful man assaulting another defenseless person; every day that story was greeted with widespread shock, outrage, and horror. Weinstein, Charlie Rose, Louis C.K., Kevin Spacey: the stories came out one after another, and again and again the public response was, for once, not to turn away and look in the other direction.
People lost their jobs. They were arrested. There were lawsuits and federal legislation.
This state of affairs, we feminists agreed, could not possibly last. America has never been willing to spend time caring about the safety of women without making them pay for it later. The Me Too moment was going to end. Then there was going to be a backlash, and it was going to hurt.
The backlash has arrived.
In June 2022, the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The decision made it possible, for the first time since 1973, for US states to outright ban abortions, with no exceptions left for survivors of rape or incest and little to no room to care for the health of people whose lives might be endangered by a pregnancy. Most abortions are now illegal in 13 states.
There are other, less seismic indicators of backlash. Three big Me Too cases that had finally made their way through the court system this year hit massive legal setbacks, with Danny Masterson’s rape case resulting in a mistrial, a jury exonerating Kevin Spacey of sexual assault, and Johnny Depp winning his defamation case against Amber Heard, who had accused him of domestic violence. Women who have found themselves in the public spotlight over the past few months, including Heard, Olivia Wilde, and Megan Thee Stallion, have been targeted by a misogynistic outpouring that’s often bizarrely inflected by the rhetoric of Me Too.
Public opinion polls show the backlash rolling on. Feminism is becoming less popular, especially with young men. According to a 2022 study by the Southern Poverty Law Center, 62 percent of young Republican men say feminism is a net negative for society, and 46 percent of young Democratic men agree. (Less than a quarter of young Democratic women agree with that statement.) In contrast, in 2020 a Pew study found 60 percent of men across parties agreeing that feminism was “empowering,” and only 34 percent saying it was “outdated.”
The problem of fashionable feminist activism followed by extreme backlash is a known problem for the American women’s movement. It has been ever since it was chronicled by Susan Faludi in her 1991 classic Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women.
Backlash was written in the aftermath of the Reaganite conservative ’80s response to the gains of the second-wave feminist movement of the ’70s. Yet Faludi makes it clear that she’s not talking about one particular moment in time. Instead, she’s looking at a particular pattern of what she describes as “flare-ups” of misogynistic attitudes and legislation across the sweep of American history, from the colonial era onward.
Importantly, the backlash is rarely the product of a grand conspiracy or concerted effort among sinister misogynists to bring women down. It’s simply a mass reaction to a mass movement. Those who enact the backlash, Faludi writes, are often unaware “of their role; some even consider themselves feminists. For the most part, its workings are encoded and internalized, diffuse and chameleonic.” But she finds the pattern of this diffuse, unplanned backlash emerging throughout American history, every time the women’s movement appears to be making gains.
The American women’s movement is generally dated to the Seneca Falls convention of 1848. In the half-century that followed, as women agitated for the vote, more than 100 states passed laws restricting divorce. In the late 19th century, for the first time in American history, it became a federal crime to distribute contraception, and most states had outlawed abortion.
Meanwhile, studies circulated warning that only 28 percent of college-educated women would ever be married. A bestselling book by a Harvard professor argued that a “brain-womb conflict” would lead educated women into an infertility epidemic. Career women were said to be succumbing to “hermaphroditism.” Teddy Roosevelt declared the white women who postponed childbirth to be “criminals against the race,” while the married women pushing for rights were creating a “crisis in the family.”
“If we trace these occurrences in American history,” Faludi writes in Backlash, “we find such flare-ups are hardly random; they have always been triggered by the perception — accurate or not — that women are making great strides.”
In 2017, women seemed to be making great strides. The backlash is here to correct for that.
The backlash has two targets: Reproductive rights and financial freedom
Faludi argues that each feminist backlash always centers on two “pressure points,” which it rapidly endangers: a woman’s control over her own fertility, and a woman’s claim to her own paycheck. That’s the case here, too.
The Dobbs decision was a wrecking ball aimed squarely at a woman’s control over her own fertility. Generations of women went to bed one night entitled to a constitutional right they were born with — a right to reproductive freedom — and woke up the next day without it. Almost immediately, story after story emerged of women facing painful, traumatic miscarriages; of a 10-year-old rape victim, forced to cross state lines to get an abortion.
As for a woman’s claim to her own paycheck: It’s worth remembering that Me Too is, at its core, a workplace safety movement. The stories that launched Me Too into public consciousness were about people (mostly women) accusing their professional superiors (mostly men) of using their professional power to facilitate sexual harassment and assault.
In a time of backlash, Faludi writes, “the culture simply redoubles its resistance [to women in the workplace], if not by returning women to the kitchen, then by making the hours spent away from their stoves as inequitable and intolerable as possible.” One of the culture’s strategies, Faludi finds, is “subjecting them to harassment.”
We’re currently in the midst of a spate of high-profile celebrity trials focusing on whether women should get to keep their money or whether they should be dependent on men who they have said behaved violently to them. Frequently, the results are not looking great for women.
This year, we’ll see a lawsuit between Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie proceed, with Pitt suing Jolie over her decision to sell her share of a vineyard they used to own together. Pitt says that Jolie sold her half of the property to a hostile company after promising never to sell it, but Jolie says she tried to sell her shares to Pitt directly and he refused — unless she was willing to sign an NDA swearing she would never discuss the infamous 2016 plane ride during which Pitt allegedly assaulted both Jolie and their children. Here, Pitt is seemingly attempting to tie up Jolie’s money with her silence in the face of his own alleged violence. The gossip media is overwhelmingly supporting Pitt’s side of the story, painting Jolie as a wronged woman out for revenge.
In June, a jury found in favor of Johnny Depp in his defamation case against Amber Heard after she accused him of domestic violence. This case might not seem to fit into the pattern of the backlash separating women from their paychecks, since Depp and Heard were married, but it’s important to remember that they were also co-workers. They met when Depp cast Heard to play his love interest in The Rum Diary in 2009. Their romance began on the set where they worked together. After their divorce, Depp allegedly attempted to get Heard “blacklisted” from movie projects. Heard did not experience the beginning of her relationship with Depp as an abuse of his power, but after she left the violence of their relationship, Depp used his professional power to target her ability to earn her living.
The examples have continued to mount: Danny Masterson was accused of rape by four women, one of them a former co-worker. His December trial was deadlocked. Kevin Spacey was found not liable for battery in a civil suit brought against him by Anthony Rapp, who says Spacey molested him when Rapp was 14 and Spacey 26, after they had appeared in Broadway shows together. Megan Thee Stallion was shot by a fellow rapper after she made it clear she outranked him professionally. She found herself the subject of intense scrutiny and mockery over the course of his December trial.
Backlash covers its tracks by stealing the language of feminism
One of the oddities of our current moment is how frequently the backlash avails itself of the rhetoric the Me Too movement developed. That slippage, too, is characteristic of backlash, which Faludi used as the title of her book in reference to a 1947 film of the same name, in which a man frames his wife for the murder he committed. “The backlash against women’s rights works in much the same way,” Faludi writes: “its rhetoric charges feminists with all the crimes it perpetrates.”
Me Too and its sister Time’s Up campaigns were built around a rhetoric of justice: At last, powerful men would stop being able to get away with it, would be made to face meaningful consequences for what they had done. The backlash flips the script: At last, all these powerful people (women en masse) will stop being able to get away with it (preying on men).
The #TimesUp hashtag was created to push for systemic change in Hollywood and other industries, to call for the professional empowerment and advancement of women so that the Harvey Weinsteins of the world wouldn’t be able to abuse their own power so easily. But now, it’s become a way to call out any woman who is currently unpopular, painting the callout with a veneer of activist virtue, in what Faludi calls “a coup through euphemism.”
Now, when a famous woman is in the cultural crosshairs, she is charged with having committed some nebulous abuse of power. At various points over the past few months, social media has trended with #TimesUpOlivia (because Olivia Wilde was in a consensual relationship with Harry Styles, who was 10 years younger than her and an actor in the film she directed), #TimesUpAmber (because a tenet of faith for Depp partisans is that Amber Heard was the true abuser in their relationship), and #TimesUpMeghan (because Meghan Markle has been accused of bullying her staff).
This rhetorical reversal can also happen in more subtle ways. Last November, Ben Smith — media critic, former editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News, and founder of the media company Semafor — wrote a story on Junot Díaz, the novelist who was accused of sexual misconduct in 2018. In his article, Smith favors Díaz’s story while giving the impression that he is correcting an unethical bias in previous reporting. Smith suggests throughout the piece that the accusations against Díaz have been blown out of proportion, and that Díaz did not deserve to lose his professional standing so dramatically: that Díaz has, in other words, faced a miscarriage of justice. “It’s like being in prison for a crime you didn’t commit,” Smith quotes one of Díaz’s friends as saying.
Smith’s article is exemplary of backlash because of how thoroughly and invisibly it returns to a pre-Me Too understanding of how we should treat accusations of sexual misconduct. As the writer Jude Doyle has argued, Smith downplays and belittles the accusations against Díaz. He reveals with a flourish that when Díaz was accused of a “forcible kiss,” the kiss in question was only on the cheek — as though a kiss on the cheek cannot constitute sexual harassment. He treats the stories of Díaz’s accusers with extreme skepticism and the stories of Díaz and his allies with extreme credulousness. He does not engage with or outright ignores many of the public accusations against Díaz. Multiple people who spoke out against Díaz in 2018 say Smith never contacted them in reporting his story.
One of the distinctive patterns of backlash is its strategy of making false concessions. Its rhetoric will generally admit that there was at one point a problem; that at some point in the bad old days, women really did have to worry about inequality. Then the backlash posits that the problem has been solved well before it actually has been. “The anti-feminist backlash has been set off not by women’s achievement of full equality but by the increased possibility that they might win it,” says Faludi. “It is a preemptive strike that stops women long before they reach the finish line.”
“The reckoning brought on by the #MeToo movement, reported on by my Pulitzer Prize-winning colleagues at The Times, was long overdue and a huge net positive,” wrote New York Times opinion columnist Pamela Paul last May. “It took years of dogged reporting on odious cases like those of Bill O’Reilly, Matt Lauer and Harvey Weinstein to fuel the #MeToo movement, bringing necessary attention to the prevalence of sexual harassment and assault in the workplace. The behavior here was clearly egregious; the results were clear-cut and necessary.”
But, Paul went on: Surely Me Too had by now gone far enough? Surely it had targeted too many innocent men? “We’ve thought a lot, as a country, about what to do with the men who are guilty of sexual violence and harassment,” Paul concluded. “We’ve thought about how seriously to take such accusations and what to do with the monsters. But we still haven’t thought enough about how to handle all accusations with proportion and fairness.”
After all, she pointed out, not every accused predator is Harvey Weinstein.
The monsters at the center of the movement
In December, Harvey Weinstein was found guilty of rape in California. He is now awaiting sentencing for that conviction, on top of the 23-year sentence he is currently serving after being convicted in New York state on multiple counts of rape and sexual assault.
Weinstein’s multiple convictions have served as a milestone of sorts for the Me Too movement: the ogre whose crimes sent the whole movement screaming into the public eye, the boogeyman next to whom everyone else’s monstrousness looks small and petty — at last, he has been brought to justice.
Weinstein is 70 years old. It is extremely likely that he will die in jail. In a culture that only speaks carceral languages when it comes to responding to crimes, surely this is what justice looks like.
The question I keep asking myself during this time of backlash is: Are Weinstein’s convictions a victory, or are they a scapegoating?
I can’t shake the sense that these convictions are a way of targeting all the movement’s anger onto one man, rather than onto the systems that let him operate with impunity, or the other men who took advantage of those systems in perhaps slightly less grotesque ways than did Weinstein. Rather than doing the difficult work of redistributing power and thinking about what a meaningful response to various forms of sexual misconduct should look like, we can simply point to Weinstein’s fate and say, “See? We fixed it. And anyway, this predator isn’t as bad as Weinstein, so what does it matter?”
Weinstein also serves as an avatar for the figure whom Me Too seems to have been, in a way, intended to punish: Donald Trump. Trump was elected despite being caught on tape apparently bragging about assaulting women, and despite more than 20 women accusing him of sexual misconduct. It is no accident that Me Too hit its peak of public outrage in the year that Trump took office; it is also no accident that public interest in the movement cooled dramatically as soon as he was out of office. Me Too was the punishment of Trump by proxy, with Weinstein playing the role of the comically villainous and far-too-powerful predator mogul.
Currently, Trump is facing a lawsuit from writer E. Jean Carroll for defamation and rape. If Carroll wins and Trump is found liable, how much will this be a victory for the movement? And how much will it be a public sacrifice for a movement the public has already dropped?
If we want real and lasting change, we have to do more than target two individual monsters and then go back to ignoring all our other problems. I don’t want to have to wait another 30 years before we get to make progress again. What will it take to break the backlash pattern once and for all?
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Shahram Hadian, right, Pastor at Truth and Love Ministries, embraces Pastor Ken Peters, of the Church at Planned Parenthood, during a protest rally and church service led by The Church at Planned Parenthood on May 19 at Planned Parenthood’s offices at 123 E. Indiana Ave. in Spokane. (Tyler Tjomsland/Spokesman)
The Church at Planned Parenthood was ordered to pay $110,000 in civil damages to Planned Parenthood last month after a Spokane County judge ruled that the group interfered with patient care, violating state law.
The group was also required to pay Planned Parenthood’s attorney fees.
Those attorney fees total $850,000, according to Legal Voice and Planned Parenthood. That number was reached as part of a settlement between Planned Parenthood and the church’s insurance company, Wendy Heipt with Legal Voice confirmed.
Litigation related to the civil case has been ongoing since 2020, with multiple law firms involved, Heipt said. The Church at Planned Parenthood was founded by Covenant Church, where former state Rep. Matt Shea was a pastor. Since then, Shea has split from co-founder Ken Peters, who now pastors Patriot Church. Shea leads On Fire Ministries in Spokane.
“This is a critical victory for Planned Parenthood at a time of historical attacks on abortion access,” Paul Dillon, vice president of public affairs for the local Planned Parenthood chapter, said in a statement. “We are so thankful for the work of Legal Voice as well as the overwhelming support of the community. We are proud to provide a safe, welcoming environment for our employees and our patients, so they can get the high quality health care they need.”
The groups hope the large sum will serve as a warning that there are consequences to disrupting access to health care, Heipt said.
Peters did not immediately respond to request for comment. Last month after the judge ruled on damages, Peters posted to his Facebook page noting the organization owes Planned Parenthood a lot of money for what he characterized as “lawful and peaceful assembly,” despite multiple court rulings indicating the protests were unlawful.
“I would do it again,” Peters wrote. “It’s a badge of honor.”
PLANNED PARENTHOOD provides women's health care, as well as family planning in poor communities. Uninformed zealots cheat women out of the care they need.
Darren and Courtney Johnson sit on the back of a truck outside their home in Center Hill, Fla. Three weeks after they bought a used SUV and took it home, they were told by a dealership manager that they needed to return and sign a new contract with different terms. Things went downhill from there. (photo: Octavio Jones/NPR)
"I was excited," says Courtney Johnson. "I felt like I'd made a good decision as a mother."
Johnson had just had a baby when she and her husband, Darren, decided to buy a newer, safer car for the family. They live in a rural area outside Orlando, Fla. He's a fire sprinkler inspector; she's stopped working to raise the kids. And they bought a little used Hyundai SUV.
"It had the backup camera," she says, "and passenger and kid's airbags in the back."
But a full three weeks after they bought the car and took it home, they got what's called "yo-yo'd."
"I received a phone call from the finance manager of the dealership," Darren Johnson says. The manager told them the financing for the car had fallen through and if the couple wanted to keep it, they had to come back and sign a contract with different terms.
"I was kind of confused," Johnson says. "I thought this was a legally binding contract. ... We've had this vehicle at home. What do you mean it's not financed?"
Most of us would be confused too. But odds are good that in the paperwork you signed when you bought your own car, there was some legal language saying the sale may not really be final. It often asserts that if the car dealer has trouble with the financing on its end after the sale, it can later cancel the deal, try to get you to agree to different terms, and take the car back if you refuse.
"It does happen all too frequently"
NPR has found that this happens regularly around the country — sometimes with painful consequences, such as losing your car or even getting arrested — and that tougher rules for car dealers can make a difference. All this is especially relevant right now, as the Federal Trade Commission is in the midst of drafting new rules for dealers.
In the Johnsons' case, the new deal raised the price of the car, paid less for their trade-in vehicle, and removed an insurance policy they had in the first deal.
The Johnsons signed the new deal because they wanted to keep the car. But then a week later, they say the dealership told them they had to sign yet another deal.
"At that point, it just all seemed really fishy," says Darren. The couple refused to return and sign it.
The dealer, Greenway Hyundai Orlando, sent a tow truck and repossessed the car.
Meanwhile, documents show that Greenway had already sold their trade-in vehicle and didn't give it back.
"We both were just kind of like mind blown at the whole entire situation," Courtney says. "Like, how is this even possible?"
Documents from a later arbitration case show that the dealership wouldn't return their calls. And it didn't pay off the loan on their trade-in vehicle. So the Johnsons were stuck paying the loan, with no car, for nearly a year. They eventually used a chunk of their small retirement savings to pay the loan back.
"I just remember being like ... embarrassed, confused," Courtney says. Without a car, she had to ask friends to drive her and the baby to doctor visits. "I was, like, counting out change, trying to give friends money for gas to get places."
Greenway Hyundai Orlando declined an interview but said in a statement that "Greenway's goal is always to match customers with the financing they need to purchase the automobile of their choice ... it is a lose-lose scenario to have any customer's financing fall through."
The company also said "the communication in this situation around the trade-in ... was hindered by the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic." The dealership did not explain how the pandemic stopped it from returning the Johnsons' car, which the dealership sold in October of 2019.
To get a sense of how often yo-yo sales happen, NPR sent a survey to consumer attorneys who work on auto cases. Forty of them responded. Together, those few dozen lawyers said they've gotten calls from nearly 900 car buyers in just the past year who say they felt victimized by a yo-yo car sale.
They said that often the terms are worse for the customer under the new deal. And they said that about half the time the dealer tells the customer it's too late to get their trade-in vehicle back.
So what happened to the Johnsons is not just a bizarre one-off situation.
"It does happen all too frequently," says John Van Alst, an attorney with the nonprofit National Consumer Law Center.
Usually, when you finance a car through the dealer, technically you owe the dealership the money for the car. But the dealer wants to quickly sell the credit contract you signed to, for example, the credit arm of Ford or Toyota or some other auto lender.
That's why car dealers often put in the fine print that if they have trouble doing that, they can cancel the sale.
"They want you to feel bound by the contract," says Van Alst. "But they want to be able to walk away."
Many car dealers want you to buy a car the day you walk into the dealership, he says, because if you leave, you'll keep shopping around.
And to get you to buy the car, the sales person might agree to a monthly payment that's too low. Or for whatever reason, they can't find an auto lender willing to essentially buy your car loan, at least at a price the dealer is willing to take.
Sometimes the car dealer made a mistake and thought they'd be able to find a lender.
But other times, Van Alst says, "it's used as a technique by dealers to try to force consumers into a worse deal."
In those instances, he says, the salesperson knows the deal is too good to be true, but lets you think you've bought the car anyway. So you take it home, show it to your friends and family. Then a few days or weeks later you get the phone call yanking you back like a yo-yo.
"'Oh, no,'" Van Alst says the dealer tells you. "'You're going to have to accept an 8% higher interest rate.'" And at that point, he says, "It's a whole lot more difficult for the consumer to walk away. The dealer might have already sold their trade-in."
That's called "unhorsing" the car buyer. "They are then sort of at the mercy of the car dealer," he says.
As it drafts a new set of proposed rules for car dealers, the FTC has requested public comment. And the agency is asking directly — should something more be done to specifically address the problem of yo-yo car sales?
Eighteen state attorneys general say yes. "The FTC can and should go farther to prevent this unfair and deceptive practice," the attorneys general wrote together in a letter to the agency. They urge the FTC to consider "an outright ban on the practice of allowing consumers to leave the dealership with a vehicle before the transaction's financing is finalized."
Laws can make a difference
NPR has found that tougher rules for car dealers can make a difference.
In 2015, a new state law in Maryland went into effect. It says dealers have just four days to cancel a sale or it becomes final. And dealers are banned from selling trade-in vehicles until the sale is final. So if need be, the car buyer can get their trade-in back.
NPR obtained and analyzed data made up of complaints to the Maryland attorney general's office. In the three years prior to the new law, there were 122 complaints related to yo-yo car sales, or "spot-delivery" sales as the industry calls them. But now, in the three years ending in 2022, complaints have fallen by more than half.
"Absolutely the law has made a difference," says Karen Straughn, an assistant attorney general with the Maryland attorney general's Consumer Protection Division. She says it took a few years for some car dealers to change their practices. But now, she says, most have.
She says yo-yo sale cases are also more easily resolved now. She says some dealers used to argue that they didn't do anything wrong. Now the rules are clear.
"We advise the consumer and the dealership of exactly what the law requires," Straughn says. "We find that most times dealerships and consumers are able to work together and resolve it amicably."
But Paul Metrey with the National Automobile Dealers Association says the FTC doesn't need to change the rules at the federal level. He says the vast majority of car sales go through with no incident. "You have tens of millions of transactions where this happens all the time," Metrey says, even when the sales contract gives the dealer the right to cancel it later.
So he says there's nothing wrong with contracts that give dealers the right to cancel after the fact. He says he doesn't have data on problems with yo-yo sales but that it seems to him that it's rare that the original terms don't work and a car buyer needs to be called back.
"That's a situation that you want to avoid," he says, because if the buyer walks away, the dealer gets stuck with a car with more mileage on it making it worth less. It's a headache for everybody involved.
"Perhaps most significantly, you have an unhappy customer," Metrey says. "The reputation of the dealership is key."
The dealer association says car buyers like the current system and changing the rules would create unnecessary delays. Dealers call these contracts spot deliveries because they allow buyers to take the keys and drive off right away, on the spot, even if the dealer hasn't finalized the financing.
Metrey says there are always going to be bad actors at some dealerships, but "to the extent there is an issue, it's something that can be addressed under current federal and state law."
"Nobody should have to go through something like that"
Still, the FTC says in its rulemaking that current laws in general don't appear to be working well enough to protect car buyers. And with yo-yo sales there definitely can be bad outcomes.
NPR spoke to two different car buyers where the dealer reported the car stolen after the buyer resisted agreeing to different terms or returning the car.
Kaitlyn Arland is an Army service member stationed at Fort Riley in Kansas. The summer before last she was 19 years old and bought a new Kia sedan with a $325 monthly payment.
"I was so excited," says Arland. "I remember asking the gentleman, like, 'I'm good to go?' And he was, like, 'you're good to go.'"
She says the salesman didn't say anything about the sale not being final as she drove away. But then, eight days later, came the yo-yo phone call. She says the dealer told her the financing didn't work out, she had to come back, sign a different contract, and make a $2,000 down payment.
"I straight up told him, 'I'm sorry. I don't have $2,000,'" Arland says. "He proceeded to ask me if I had a credit card that I could pay it on. And I said ... financially I can't do it, I'm sorry."
Arland had never bought a car before. But this didn't seem fair. She had a good credit score.
But when she pushed back on the car dealer, she says the finance manager told her if she didn't bring the car back immediately they were going to report it stolen. And apparently they did.
"So the brigade commander reached out to my commander and said that the dealership said that I had stolen this car and I wouldn't return it," Arland says. "I was already new to the unit, and I just found out I was pregnant, so I was already super worried about what everyone was thinking about me."
Arland was worried this was going to wreck her young career in the military. "I was bawling my eyes out in front of my entire unit."
And after all that, the dealership took the car back.
For Andre Flynt, a car buyer in Cleveland, things ended badly too.
"One night I'm just driving and next thing you know, I get pulled over by the police," Flynt says. "I got my girlfriend in the car, my little brother."
This was about a year ago. Flynt had bought a used Chevrolet Camaro from an AutoNation dealership outside Cleveland. But then he says he got tangled up in a yo-yo sale situation. The dealer was trying to get him to bring the car back. Flynt said he would, but then he didn't. And the dealer reported the car stolen. Flynt says when he got pulled over he showed the police the paperwork indicating he had bought the car legally.
"They got me at the back of the car, one officer was talking about why was he pulling me over when all the paperwork and everything is in my name," Flynt says. "I'm like, there's so many cop cars behind me, it looked like I robbed a bank."
Flynt says it was scary.
"I'm black, too, so it's like any slight movement, anything man, it could have been just all downhill," Flynt says. "It was terrifying. It shook my girl up, 'cause we didn't know what was gonna happen."
The officers arrested him and he spent two nights in jail before he managed to get released.
"Nobody should have to go through something like that when you actually didn't do anything," says Flynt.
The police returned the car to the dealership. AutoNation said in a statement to NPR that the sale had a "stipulation" that Flynt would provide a copy of his Social Security card the next day and that he did not. Flynt and his attorney both say that's not true, that there was no stipulation about a Social Security card and that it's not mentioned in the sales contract Flynt signed.
Flynt says it wasn't until several days later that the dealership contacted him saying it needed more documentation for the loan financing, which he had trouble providing. Emails show that an AutoNation manager repeatedly, over several weeks, told Flynt that if he didn't return the car he would report it stolen.
Consumer attorneys say these are the sorts of messy situations that result when dealers sell someone a car, hand them the keys, shake their hand, and then later try to yo-yo them back.
And there are plenty of successful car dealerships that say they don't engage in the practice of canceling a sale and renegotiating after the customer has already driven off the lot.
"Once the customer signs the paperwork and we sign the paperwork, that's a contract ... it's done," says Scott Addison, the head of sales at Fitzgerald Auto Mall, which operates 23 dealership locations in Maryland, Pennsylvania and Florida.
"We sell 27,000 cars a year," Addison says. "At no point are we going to bring somebody back in and renegotiate."
He says they run into an issue with the financing with maybe 15 or 20 of those sales every year. But the dealership just absorbs any cost related to that and it's rare.
Addison says with technology today it doesn't take very long for his dealership to get a customer's financing approved. "We usually have an approval within seconds of submitting the deal."
For their part, Courtney and Darren Johnson in Florida managed to find a lawyer who took their case, which ended up in arbitration as is required in many sales contracts. But it turns out suing a car dealership can be perilous.
"These are risky cases to bring," says their attorney, David Abrams. "The dealership counterclaimed against them," he says. "They actually went after Darren and Courtney and sued them."
Greenway Hyundai sought to recover its attorney fees and even "storage fees" for the trade-in car that it never returned to the Johnsons. So Abrams says if they lost the case the couple would likely have owed tens of thousands of dollars in legal bills. "They would have had to have declared bankruptcy."
Abrams says most state laws around deceptive practices don't spell out where the line is that car dealers can't cross. "It's very vague," he says.
That's a big reason he'd like to see the FTC craft a rule that directly addresses spot-delivery and yo-yo sales. "Having some bright line rules," he says, would make the buying process more transparent for buyers and "would make the law much easier to understand and interpret and enforce."
The facts in the Johnsons' case were striking enough, though, that the arbitrator ruled emphatically in their favor, saying the dealership's actions bordered on "criminal conduct" and were "precisely the type of wanton and willful disregard for the rights of others that evinces gross negligence and warrants punitive damages."
Last month, the couple was awarded more than $225,000 in damages.
"I was excited," says Courtney Johnson.
"I'm glad the dealership got punished," says Darren.
The couple says they're thinking they might use the money to start their own fire sprinkler installation business.
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Demonstrators march in support of abortion rights on June 24 in Austin. The Supreme Court overturned the 49-year-old legal precedent that guaranteed the right to an abortion that day. (photo: Jabin Botsford/WP)
Conservative judges likely to decide fate of Texas lawsuit seeking to ban mifepristone nationwide
Driving their anxiety is a Texas lawsuit brought by conservative groups seeking to revoke the decades-old government approval of a key abortion drug.
The suit has been widely ridiculed by legal experts as rooted in baseless and debunked arguments. But in recent weeks, abortion rights advocates and some in the Biden administration have grown increasingly concerned that the case is likely to be decided entirely by conservative judges who might be eager for a chance to restrict abortion access even in Democrat-led states where the procedure has remained legal since the fall of Roe v. Wade.
“It’s hard to really comprehend the full and terrible impact if what the plaintiffs have asked for in that case is actually granted,” Liz Wagner, senior federal policy counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights, told Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra during the meeting at a Virginia abortion clinic. “It would be catastrophic.”
The case was filed in Amarillo, where U.S. District Court Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, nominated by President Donald Trump and known for his conservative views on issues like same-sex marriage and abortion, could rule as early as this week. An appeal would land in the right-leaning Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, ultimately presenting the Supreme Court with another major abortion case less than a year after its conservative majority retracted the constitutional right to abortion.
“Obviously we have people who are not fans of the administrative state on that court and also obviously people are not fans of abortion,” Jenny Ma, senior counsel for the Center for Reproductive Rights, told Becerra. “It’s a perfect storm.”
The suit aims to undo the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s 2000 approval of mifepristone, one of two drugs used in a medication abortion. The regimen, which includes a dose of another drug called misoprostol, now accounts for more than 50 percent of abortions nationwide. While misoprostol is widely used on its own to perform abortions around the world, studies show it is less effective than the two-step regimen, and usually causes more cramping and bleeding.
Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal group that has been involved in antiabortion litigation, filed the suit in November on behalf of four antiabortion medical organizations and four doctors who say they have treated patients with the drug.
The FDA has repeatedly deemed the two-step medication abortion protocol to be a safe and effective alternative to surgical abortions. But the conservative group’s 113-page lawsuit argues that the FDA chose politics over science when it approved “chemical abortion drugs,” purposely ignoring what the plaintiffs claim are potentially harmful side effects.
“We think that when the court will look at the law and the facts of what the FDA has done that it will agree that FDA has failed in its job to protect America’s women and girls,” said Julie Marie Blake, senior counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom.
Wagner said in an interview that she and her colleagues have struggled to get people to take the case seriously. In a recent briefing on Capitol Hill with congressional staff, Wagner said, some attendees had a hard time understanding how abortion access could be under threat in states like New York and California.
“We were getting comments like, ‘But these states protect the right to have an abortion,’” said Wagner, adding that she and Ma had to repeatedly explain that the right to abortion was not a right to a specific method of abortion.
At the Alexandria, Va., Whole Woman’s Health clinic last week, Becerra pointed the lawyers to the Justice Department, which he said was “paying close attention” to the Texas case. His staff declined to comment further.
Inside the Justice Department, a reproductive rights task force established in July by Attorney General Merrick Garland has been searching for legal avenues to protect access to abortion pills.
The department issued a legal opinion in January saying that the U.S. Postal Service may deliver abortion pills to people in states that have sharply restricted the procedure, arguing that federal law allows the mailing of the pills because the sender cannot know for sure whether the recipient would use them illegally.
Now, officials say, the task force has its eyes on the case in Texas.
“We are vigorously defending the FDA in unprecedented litigation that is seeking to withdraw mifepristone from the marketplace — an action that would work severe harm to all who rely on the medication,” Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta, who chairs the reproductive task force, said at a public event in January.
The Justice Department has conceded in its legal arguments that the Supreme Court’s opinion striking down Roe stands as the reigning federal law. The crux of the department’s opposition in the Texas case is that Congress empowered the FDA to approve the use of new drugs — not states. Allowing abortion pill opponents to undercut the FDA’s judgment with “cursory and baseless allegations of harm” could spark challenges to other approved drugs and fuel public distrust of the process, Justice Department lawyers argued in a filing in the case.
Despite a widespread belief among abortion rights advocates that the lawsuit’s claims are baseless, providers have been preparing for their worst-case scenario, with many ready to implement new protocols if they can no longer distribute mifepristone.
“I don’t think it’s a stretch at all,” said Amy Hagstrom Miller, chief executive of Whole Woman’s Health, a network of abortion clinics with locations across several states, including Texas before the Supreme Court ruling triggered a law banning almost all abortions there. “I have a lot of experience with these crazy legal theories that sound radical in Texas actually becoming reality.”
In a two-step medication abortion, a patient first takes one pill of mifepristone, which terminates the pregnancy. Approximately 24 hours later, they typically take a four-pill dose of misoprostol, a drug first introduced in 1973 to treat stomach ulcers, to soften the cervix and prompt contractions that expel the fetus.
If the Texas case results in taking mifepristone off the market, Hagstrom Miller said, her clinics would likely default to a misoprostol-only protocol for medication abortion, prescribing just misoprostol pills instead of the standard regimen of mifepristone and misoprostol together.
While she has discussed this plan with several members of her staff, she said, she still needs to discuss it with the clinic’s lawyers.
Many Planned Parenthood clinics also have a misoprostol-only protocol in place, said Ma, ready to be implemented if needed.
“We want to provide patients with the safest and most effective regimen,” said Deborah Nucatola, a chief medical officer with Planned Parenthood, who has facilitated both types of medication abortion since she started practicing over two decades ago. “That is mifepristone and misoprostol.”
The Justice Department warned in its legal filing opposing the lawsuit that banning abortion pills would lead to overcrowding and delays at clinics that provide surgical abortions, putting a burden on health-care systems.
Inside her clinics, Hagstrom Miller fears that a mifepristone ban would trigger “a huge amount of congestion and waiting.” Because a misoprostol-only regimen would likely take some time to implement, she said, far more patients would need to have surgical procedures — which generally require more time and staff resources than medication abortion.
She anticipates converting every possible room into a space that can be used for surgical abortions.
While she is trying to prepare her clinics as much as possible, Hagstrom Miller said, there is only so much energy she can devote to this hypothetical.
Especially since the June Supreme Court ruling, she said, “we already have so much we’re trying to navigate.”
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Sepehr Khosravi, left, and Nasrin Nav, right, shout slogans against the Iranian government during a rally outside Los Angeles City Hall on Saturday. (photo: Brian van der Brug/LA Times)
The decree by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, part of a yearly pardoning the supreme leader does before the anniversary of Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution, comes as authorities have yet to say how many people they detained in the demonstrations. State media also published a list of caveats over the order that would disqualify those with ties abroad or facing spying charges — allegations which have been met with wide international criticism.
Khamenei "agreed to offer amnesty and reduce the sentences of tens of thousands accused and convicted in the recent incidents," the state-run IRNA news agency said in a Farsi report. A later IRNA report carried by its English-language service said the pardons and commuted sentences were for "tens of thousands of convicts, including the arrestees of the recent riots in Iran." Authorities did not immediately acknowledge the discrepancy in the reports.
The reports about the decree offered no explanation for the decision by Khamenei, who has final say on all matters of state in Iran. However, prisons and detention facilities already had faced overcrowding in the country after years of protests over economic issues and other matters.
Activists immediately dismissed Khamenei's decree.
"Khamenei's hypocritical pardon doesn't change anything," wrote Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam of the Oslo-based group Iran Human Rights. "Not only all protesters must be released unconditionally, but also it is a public right that those who ordered the bloody repression and their agents are held accountable."
Authorities also did not name any of those who had been pardoned or seen shorter sentences. Instead, state television continued to refer to the demonstrations as being a "foreign-backed riot," rather than homegrown anger over the September death of Mahsa Amini, an Iranian-Kurdish woman detained by the country's morality police. Anger also has been spreading over the collapse of the Iranian rial against the U.S. dollar, as well as Tehran arming Russia with bomb-carrying drones in its war on Ukraine.
More than 19,600 people have been arrested during the protests, according to Human Rights Activists in Iran, a group that's been tracking the crackdown. At least 527 people have been killed as authorities violently suppressed demonstrations, the group said. Iran hasn't offered a death toll for months. It already has executed at least four people detained amid the protests after internationally criticized trials.
All this comes as Iran's nuclear deal has collapsed and Tehran has enough highly enriched uranium to potentially build "several" atomic bombs if it chooses, the United Nations' top nuclear envoy has said. A shadow war between Iran and Israel has risen out of the chaos, with Tehran blaming Israel for a drone attack on a military workshop in Isfahan last week as well.
Meanwhile, a long-detained opposition leader in Iran is calling for a nationwide referendum about whether to write a new constitution for the Islamic Republic.
Mir Hossein Mousavi's call, posted late Saturday by the opposition Kaleme website, included him saying he didn't believe Iran's current system giving final say to a supreme leader worked any longer. He also called for the formation of a constitutional assembly of "real representatives" to write a new constitution.
It remains unlikely Iran's theocracy will heed the 80-year-old politician's call. He and his wife have been under house arrest for years after his disputed presidential election loss in 2009 led to the widespread Green Movement protests that security forces also put down. However, he himself had supported and served in Iran's theocracy for decades.
In 2019, Mousavi compared Khamenei to the former Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, whose rule saw troops gun down demonstrators in an event that led to the Islamic Revolution.
Separately, former reformist President Mohammad Khatami urged "free and competitive elections" after the release of political prisoners both imprisoned and under house arrest.
"Reformism at least has faced a ... dead end, so people have a right to be frustrated about it as they are about the ruling system," Khatami said in a statement circulated online.
Currently, hard-liners control all levers of power in the country. Reformists like Khatami and Mousavi previously sought to change and open up Iran's Islamic Republic while maintaining its system. But increasingly, protesters have demanded an end to theocratic rule in the country.
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Gas utilities and cooking stove manufacturers knew for decades that burners could be made that emit less pollution in homes, but they chose not to. That may be about to change. (photo: Sean Gladwell/Getty Images)
Four decades ago, the gas industry and appliance manufacturers developed a partial solution for this problem. They created a cleaner and more efficient burner. But you can't buy ranges with those burners because the industry never manufactured those appliances for sale.
Appliance manufacturers and gas industry allies say there are reasons for that: these burners cost more, are less durable, harder to clean, and they didn't see consumer demand for them.
But now the industry appears ready to revisit the humble gas burner. The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) is investigating whether gas stoves need tighter regulations to protect human health. One commissioner even left open the possibility of banning sales of new gas stoves.
This week, the Department of Energy (DOE) proposed rules that would require all stoves to be more energy efficient. If approved, more than half the gas cooktop market today wouldn't qualify under the new requirements, according to the DOE. The proposed regulations would take effect for sales of new stoves in 2027.
Even if the federal government only tightens regulations on gas stoves, that would boost efforts from climate activists who want Americans to switch from gas to electric appliances and heaters. Studies from Princeton University, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the National Academy of Sciences, find that zeroing out greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. by 2050 will require electrifying buildings, making appliances more efficient, and powering them mostly with emission-free sources like renewable energy.
A cleaner burner, but without a blue flame
In the 1980s indoor air quality was in the news, and the CPSC was taking aim at another home appliance that burns fossil fuels: kerosene heaters. Sales were increasing, and regulators grew concerned, because the heaters emitted harmful pollution into homes, mainly nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide.
The EPA says both pollutants can cause breathing problems, especially for people with asthma. And nitrogen dioxide, at higher levels and over longer periods, may contribute to developing asthma.
The natural gas industry saw regulators' interest and worried the CPSC might come for gas cooking stoves next, according to a 1984 Science News article. That prompted two industry research groups to begin working on burner improvements.
Out of that process emerged a "jet-powered infrared gas-range burner."
Instead of the iconic blue flame that you normally see at a gas stove, the infrared burner had "a flat ceramic plate... honeycombed with window-screen-like perforations," according to the article. Air and fuel burned as they were sent across the plate and ignited bright red in a way that makes the flame itself difficult to see.
This infrared burner consumed about 40% less natural gas to reach cooking temperatures and emitted 40% less nitrogen oxides. The Science News article said designers touted another benefit of the infrared burner: a kitchen stays cooler because more energy goes into the cooking vessel instead of the room.
A Pennsylvania-based stove manufacturer, Caloric Corporation, expressed interest in the infrared burner. That company is no longer in business and was absorbed into Whirlpool Corporation, which did not respond to multiple inquiries about why the burner was never offered in retail stoves.
Another company involved in developing the infrared burner, Thermo Electron Corporation, is now called Thermo Fisher Scientific. A spokesperson says the company couldn't speak to the infrared burner development, and that the process might have been led by an independent researcher.
"I'm sure the cost of that burner was probably significantly more than the existing technology," says Frank Johnson, research and development manager at GTI Energy in Des Plaines, Ill. The non-profit organization used to be called the Gas Technology Institute and is a research group closely tied to the gas industry.
Johnson says he doesn't know exactly how much more the burners would cost, because the, "technology has never been fully developed into a working range burner."
Kitchen range makers, such as Wolf, do offer infrared burners for charbroilers and griddles but not for stovetop or oven burners. Sub-Zero Group, which owns Wolf, did not respond to NPR's questions.
Johnson delivered a warning to high-end manufacturers at an industry conference in Minneapolis last September, according to a recording of the event NPR had access to: "The days of paying $6 for a burner on a $7,000 range may be over."
Gas utilities are under pressure
Both stove manufacturers and gas utilities face increasing scrutiny as scientific evidence accumulates that shows having a gas stove in the home may affect health, especially for children and people with breathing problems.
Nitrogen dioxide is the big concern for health experts these days. Because of nitrogen dioxide emissions, the American Public Health Association labels gas cooking stoves "a public health concern," and the American Medical Association warns that cooking with gas increases the risk of childhood asthma.
A recent peer-reviewed paper found that more than 12.7% "of current childhood asthma in the U.S. is attributable to gas stove use." The gas utility industry pushed back on this latest study, which was funded by RMI, an environmental organization that encourages people to switch from gas to electric appliances.
"Organizations that are making these allegations are relying on reports that did not test natural gas stoves and have ignored research that found no association between gas stoves and asthma," wrote American Gas Association (AGA) President Karen Harbert in a statement to NPR.
The AGA often tries to equate emissions from fossil fuel combustion to cooking fumes. Harbert pointed to research GTI Energy conducted last year, which compared electric and gas stoves and showed, "no difference in their particulate emissions."
But particulate emissions from cooking are different from combustion emissions that come with burning natural gas. And when members of the industry talk amongst themselves, they are much clearer about that distinction.
In a presentation two years ago, the AGA's Ted Williams cautioned colleagues not to discuss ventilation of combustion emissions, because not everyone with a gas stove has a hood that vents outdoors.
"[G]as cooking does generate indoor air emissions of contaminants, including carbon monoxide, oxides of nitrogen, trace amounts of materials such as formaldehyde and so forth," said Williams in the 2020 webinar material provided to NPR. At the time, Williams was AGA's senior director for codes and standards.
"But recognizing that, it's not an issue that's going to be easy to paper over, because... these products do have emissions," said Williams.
For nitrogen dioxide, specifically, the EPA recommends reducing exposure by installing and using over a gas stove an exhaust fan that's vented outdoors. But that message isn't reaching consumers.
"There isn't much information available for people about the potential health risks of using a gas stove or the need for ventilation," says Matt Casale, director of environment campaigns at the United States Public Interest Research Group (US PIRG).
His organization surveyed 39 stores in 10 states to learn what customers are told about health effects of cooking with gas. Casale says a few sales staff did mention that they'd heard of indoor air quality issues with gas ranges and a push toward electric appliances. But that was only after they were specifically asked about the problem.
Casale says the CPSC missed an opportunity to address this issue and regulate gas cooking stoves in the 1980s.
"It's 40 years of potential cases of asthma and missed school days and missed workdays that potentially could have been avoided," he says. But he's pleased to see the commission now "doing its job" by opening an information-gathering process that could lead to new regulations on gas stoves.
When Consumer Product Safety Commission member Richard Trumka, Jr. talked with US PIRG in December about "Pollution-free cooking for the holidays," he spent time detailing the growing body of scientific evidence that shows emissions from gas cooking stoves can be harmful.
It was only after that he said, "That's why I think we need to be talking about regulating gas stoves, whether that's drastically improving emissions or banning gas stoves entirely."
Then a few weeks later, Trumka said the same thing to Bloomberg. That's when conservative politicians took up the issue, and it became part of the culture war.
CPSC Chair Alexander Hoehn-Saric wrote on Twitter, "I am not looking to ban gas stoves and the @USCPSC has no proceeding to do so."
Still, Hoehn-Saric wrote, "CPSC is researching gas emissions in stoves and exploring new ways to address health risks." But that did little to quell the uproar.
An industry effort to reduce pollution from stoves... again
Amid the kerfuffle, gas stove manufacturers and gas utilities appear to have a renewed interest in exploring cleaner burners for gas stoves.
"The design of cooking equipment has not changed a lot over time. But it's starting to change now, and it's just going to take time for those to become... available," GTI Energy's Johnson says.
At upcoming trade shows, Johnson says many of his meetings and conversations will be focused on improving gas burner designs.
"There is a strong possibility to do things like improve the efficiency, improve the controls, improve the characteristics," Johnson says. "And if you're going to do that, of course, you're also going to improve the emissions."
Individual manufacturers, including Whirlpool and Wolf, didn't respond to NPR's questions. The trade group Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers says it's likely appliance makers didn't adopt the infrared burners from 40 years ago because they're more expensive and the ceramic plates that glow red break.
Also, since consumers weren't aware of air quality issues, reducing emissions from gas cooking is not something they asked for in a stove.
Instead, AHAM says manufacturers focused on what consumers want: gas ranges that are easier to clean and more powerful. To address cooking and combustion emissions, the association has focused on standards for adequate ventilation above ranges. AHAM also says a new set of voluntary standards for nitrogen dioxide emissions from gas stoves is in the works.
But that's not enough for critics like Amneh Minkara of the Sierra Club, who doesn't trust the industry to implement voluntary standards.
"It's been 40 years since they first realized that there was a safer alternative," Minkara says. "I think if they're going to act, they're going to have to be forced to act. And I think it's the job of the regulators to make that happen."
The CPSC says it will start its "request for information" process on March 1st. While moving from that to developing actual regulations can be a long process, Commissioner Trumka told the US PIRG in December that "with enough public pressure, it doesn't have to be – we could get a regulation on the books before this time next year."
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