U.S. District Judge Franklin U. Valderrama
CHICAGO — The village of Oak Park can use its building code to ban natural gas appliances from being installed in homes and other buildings, effectively sidestepping a federal law that otherwise prohibits governments from banning natural gas-powered appliances, a federal judge has ruled.
On July 30, U.S. District Judge Franklin U. Valderrama granted judgment to Oak Park in the challenge brought against the village's ordinance by the group known as the Clean Energy Choice Coalition.
In the ruling, Valderrama acknowledged that the federal law known as the Energy and Policy Conservation Act prohibits state and local governments from using state or local laws or regulations to ban appliances based on the type of fuel used to power them.
But the judge said Oak Park's ordinance doesn't regulate the appliances themselves. Rather, the ordinance simply forbids anyone from installing natural gas-powered appliances in their home or business.
And the judge said that means the village's ordinance isn't preempted by the EPCA, even if it accomplishes the same goal as merely banning natural gas-powered appliances outright.
"Because the Ordinance here regulates the types of energy or fuel that covered appliances may use in certain buildings, rather than establishing or affecting the appliances’ federally regulated energy-efficiency or energy-use performance standards, the Ordinance does not 'concern' energy use under EPCA," Valderrama wrote.
The ruling marks the latest in a growing string of decisions from judges and courts across the country determining that the EPCA doesn't actually prevent any state or local government from banning natural gas appliances, so long as the state or local ban is framed as a building code rule or a local emissions regulation.
Throughout the U.S., environmental activists and their allies in state and local governments in Democrat-dominated states like Illinois and California have pushed forward initiatives to use new laws and regulations to achieve their ultimate goal of prohibiting homeowners and business owners from installing and using natural gas-powered water heaters, furnaces, stoves, ovens and other appliances.
Supporters have asserted such bans are needed to help combat air pollution and reduce carbon emissions, which they claim fuel harms associated with climate change.
In California, for instance, local air quality regulators have imposed pollution standards that essentially ban natural gas stoves, water heaters and other appliances in the name of fighting smog.
Other governments, like Oak Park, have moved to use their building codes to ban the installation of natural gas appliances in new construction, a move that manufacturers, builders and other critics have said would artifically dramatically limit the market for the appliances and eventually lead to such appliances disappearing from the market.
Oak Park enacted its natural gas appliance ban in 2023. Like the others, Oak Park claimed its ban was needed to combat climate change and air pollution.
Those bans have been challenged in court by groups like the Clean Energy Choice Coalition.
The CECC includes labor unions, contractors, gas providers and industry associations, including the Chicagoland Apartment Association and National Association of Home Builders.
Challengers to such bans appeared to score an early and important win in 2023, when the San Francisco-based U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a building code regulation in the city of Berkeley, California, prohibiting the installation of natural gas pipes in new construction. In that ruling, the Ninth Circuit agreed with challengers that the Berkeley ordinance was blocked by the federal EPCA law.
However, the victory proved short-lived. Federal judge elsewhere, including federal appeals courts, since then have consistently upheld state and local natural gas appliance bans presented as building code changes or new air pollution standards.
And all of the courts have ruled, like Valderrama in the Oak Park case, that the EPCA's language prohibiting state and local governments from banning natural gas appliances should be narrowly interpreted to only mean that state and local governments can't ban the appliances themselves.
Manufacturers can continue to make the appliances, but state and local governments can prohibit anyone from installing and using them, the judges have said.
Some judges have pointed out such decisions are all but splitting legal hairs.
In the Ninth Circuit, for instance, the court overruled its prior decision in allowing a southern California air quality management district to set emissions standards to zero, a standard that natural gas appliances cannot meet.
But a dissenting judge on that court noted such reasoning means the EPCA's language forbidding states from banning natural gas appliances is all but meaningless.
Ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court may have the final word on how to apply the EPCA to local natural gas appliance bans. Groups like the NAHB have indicated their intent to ask the high court to weigh in on the question.
In the meantime, however, Valderrama said he agrees with Oak Park and its environmental activist allies that federal law doesn't prevent the village from banning natural gas appliances from being installed.
The CECC has not yet indicated if it will appeal Valderrama's ruling to the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. That court handles appeals of federal district court rulings in the states of Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin.
The CECC is represented in the action by attorney Christine Skoczylas and others with the firm of Barnes & Thornburg, of Chicago and Indianapolis.
Oak Park has been represented by attorneys from environmental legal activist organization, EarthJustice, of Chicago, New York, Seattle and Washington, D.C.; and from the firm of Elrod Friedman, of Chicago.
