  It is proposed to use the pinch technique (PT) to obtain the
gauge-independent thermal $\beta$ function in a hot Yang-Mills gas.
Calculations of the thermal $\beta$ function are performed at one-loop level in
four different gauges, (i) the background field method with an arbitrary gauge,
(ii) the Feynman gauge, (iii) the Coulomb gauge, and (iv) the temporal axial
gauge, and they yield the same result in all four cases.
