Colorado was the first state to pass a law requiring warning labels on gas stoves. (Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels)
Colorado passed first-in-the-nation legislation requiring warning labels on gas stoves in June 2025. These warnings are similar to what is required by cigarette labeling laws.
The required labels urge consumers to educate themselves about the air quality implications of indoor gas stoves and direct consumers to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment for information on the health impacts. This could have a substantial impact, as government agencies estimate that about one-third of Colorado’s households use gas as their primary cooking source.
The law went into effect on Aug. 6. The Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers is now suing Colorado and is asking a federal court to temporarily block the law from being enforced while the case proceeds. The parties are awaiting a hearing on this request.
I’m a legal scholar with expertise in First Amendment law. I research and publish papers focusing on laws, such as the new Colorado statute, that compel businesses to disclose information to consumers.
In my opinion, in opposing warning labels, the gas industry and its trade association are weaponizing the First Amendment to undermine a commonsense regulation that aims to keep residents safe and informed.
Warning Labels in the US
Walk down an aisle in any toy store and you’ll see tags alerting parents to the risk of choking. Flip over your prescription medication and you can read its side effects and interactions with other drugs. In the grocery store, food products have labels bearing information about calorie and sugar content to help consumers make healthier decisions.
Often taken for granted, these warning labels provide critical information to protect Americans’ health and safety. Perhaps the most recognizable warning labels can be found on cigarette packages, required in the U.S. since 1965, to inform customers about the health harms of smoking. Despite the fact that warning labels on cigarettes have saved millions of lives, the tobacco industry fought tooth and nail against them to keep consumers in the dark. Since that time, federal, state and local laws requiring businesses to make truthful factual disclosures about their products have become commonplace.
Colorado Lawsuit
In its lawsuit, the gas industry invokes the First Amendment’s compelled speech doctrine. This doctrine prohibits the government from forcing people to make ideological statements they don’t actually believe, such as reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.
News report on the lawsuit against Colorado’s new law.
In 2018, in National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra, the U.S. Supreme Court greatly expanded this rule and opened the door for challenges to government efforts to require businesses to disclose truthful statements of fact. The court held that the government cannot compel businesses to disclose factual information if it is “controversial.”
Of course, it would be hard to find a manufacturer who does not think such disclosures are controversial, given that businesses are likely to disagree that their products are dangerous. If a subjective claim that a disclosure is controversial is all it takes to strike a law down, many such laws are vulnerable to legal attacks.
Interest groups representing the tobacco industry, the gas industry and others have seized on this opportunity to dismantle what most people understand to be routine labeling requirements. For example, companies have filed lawsuits challenging federal laws requiring companies to disclose that they use “conflict minerals” and local laws requiring beverage manufacturers to disclose that drinking sugar-sweetened drinks “contributes to obesity, diabetes and tooth decay.”
In its lawsuit, the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers, a trade association that lobbies on behalf of the home appliance industry, argues that Colorado’s law compels gas stove manufacturers to place warning labels on their products that it believes contain “scientifically controversial and factually misleading” information around gas stoves.
However, abundant evidence shows that cooking with a gas stove releases pollutants that harm human health. Multiple studies have shown that burning methane gas produces nitrogen oxide, carbon monoxide, formaldehyde and benzene that can worsen respiratory illnesses such as asthma and increase the risk of cancer.
Furthermore, in 2022, the American Medical Association recognized that gas stove use can increase household air pollution, the risk of childhood asthma and asthma severity. The same year, the American Public Health Association recommended putting warning labels on gas stoves as an official policy position.
Public health advocates contend that the gas industry has known about the health harms of gas stoves for decades, but that the industry has repeatedly attempted to paint its products in a better light.
A 2023 expose by The New York Times, for example, revealed that the gas industry paid toxicologist Julie Goodman to downplay the health impacts of gas stoves. Just eight years earlier, Goodman provided testimony on behalf of tobacco companies. A judge described her testimony on tobacco as “contrary to consensus of the scientific community.”
Risk to Consumers
If the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers’ claim succeeds in court, it could, in my analysis, make it much easier for companies to fund biased research or bring in experts to argue that something is not well-established science.
For example, a drug manufacturer could hire an expert to dispute the side effects of a drug. Food producers might claim their experts disagree with the science underlying nutrition and calorie information required by government regulation. Even manufacturers of everyday items such as lawnmowers or toasters could hire experts and proclaim that their products pose no safety harms.
Everyday people would bear the brunt of harm from the invalidation of warning label laws. These people currently have the right to know critical health and safety information before buying any product. If we let corporate interests undermine regulations such as warning labels, I believe we will no longer be able to inform the public about commonsense steps they can take to protect their health.
Alan K. Chen, Thompson G. Marsh Law Alumni Professor, University of Denver. He does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
This is not about a scientific study. It is a lawyer’s opinion. If StudyFinds wants to get political, then I don’t need them clogging up my inbox. Stick to science and keep politics out of it.
And the idea that labels on cigarettes has saved millions of lives is dubious at best. People knew smoking was bad for them LONG before the gov’t ever mandated warning labels on the packages. It is an unfalsifiable claim that gov’t intervention did anything to reduce smoking. Public attitudes towards smoking were already changing before the gov’t did anything. But this is always the story, isn’t it? The parade had already started, and then the gov’t jumps in an pretends to lead it. Child labor, workplace accidents/deaths, hourly pay, car safety.. all things that were getting better year over year long before the gov’t stepped in. But the gov’t gets the credit because articles like this confuse correlation with causality.
And let me get this straight… you think it’s unreasonable for a company to want to NOT put a label on its product stating “THIS PRODUCT MAY BE HARMFUL.” This is a joke, right? I mean, that couldn’t POSSIBLY hurt sales of their product, could it? It’s not like people like you haven’t voted for for and gotten the dumbing down of our population by leaps and bounds over the past 100 years. And now you expect to NOT frighten them with warning labels about how LIFE can kill you? I’m amazed that I breathe the same air that the people who come up with these ideas breathe.
Not unreasonable for something in your home that puts poisons in the air that can affect your entire family. So sick of the automaton trolls programmed to defend every corporate and ecological abuse.
We used to cook over WOOD FIRES people! Does anyone EVER look at these things with any kind of perspective? You want to talk about harmful chemicals! Wood fires knock the socks off of propane and natural gas fires! For God’s sake, there’s nothing that is 100% safe for humans! Humans themselves exhale CO2!!! My God, the humanity!!!! What is the suggestion, then? Everyone go out and buy electric stoves? Maybe expensive induction cooktops. And I get it, you think warning labels make a difference. They don’t. As my other post suggests, they just make people far stupider.
Using the absurd fact that nothing is 100% save is no argument against warning people against things that are hazardous to your health. What is it to you? Do you make gas stoves? Are you prevented from buying one? I have one, but I got an induction cooktop that I like much better.
This is, without a doubt, one of the stupidest articles ever written. Firstly, you don’t “educate” people by putting warning labels on products. And if your gov’t IS demanding to put warning labels on things like gas stoves (or cigarettes), you’ve already admitted that you public school system is DOA. If you population doesn’t know that breathing in the chemical potpourri of a cigarette is harmful to their health, what do you think a warning label is going to do. Perhaps we could put warning labels on stoves for EVERY possible negative outcome that could befall a person, then, like ladders, people would just ignore them. Plus, it will increase the cost of the stove… because that’s what we really want, right? And yes, retooling your production line to include the addition of warning labels, are hiring people whose sole job is to put warning labels on appliances WILL increase costs. Weaponizing the first amendment? Now you’re REALLY getting into the stupid zone. Where did this country go wrong where if someone opened a businesses their rights are up for grabs? Because that’s exactly what happens when you open ya business. Your right of free speech, your right of association, your very right to earn a living, is at the mercy of the govt and the ignorant voting public. You are not owed a gas stove.. and due to that simple fact, you are not owed a warning sticker on the stove. Legislation like this, far from making people safer or smarter, has created one of the stupidest populations to ever roam the surface of the Earth. When you outsource your safety and your knowledge to gov’t bureaucrats, you don’t create smarter people, you create dumber, more dependent people, who, instead of researching things on their own, wait for a gov’t official to tell them what not to use, when not to use it, how to use it, etc.
“If the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers’ claim succeeds in court, it could, in my analysis, make it much easier for companies to fund biased research or bring in experts to argue that something is not well-established science.”
I love this… as if the gov’t scientists are ALWAYS right. Talk about your appeal to authority. They might be right, but they are, and often have been, DEAD WRONG! And how would it make it “easier” for companies? Companies still have every right to fund their own research… or do you want to remove that right from them as well?
The Left-wing leanings of this publication become more unpalatable every time I receive their latest newsletter.
Wow, all the points you raise are irrelevent to putting warning labels on gas stoves. Maybe you should read it. Wating the products we buy to be safe should not be considered Left-wing – but weighing in on every issues and calling it Left-wing is definitely extreme Right-wing.