Once again “the Science” has come riding to the rescue of the poor, downtrodden American proletariat.
We learned last week that the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) is considering a nationwide ban on killer gas stoves. These murderous appliances, “studies show,” are responsible for all sorts of adverse health outcomes, including almost 13% of childhood asthma cases. Over at CNN, one of the network’s “investigative journalists” broadcast the frightening information that having a gas oven in your home is just the same as having an SUV with the engine running parked in your living room.
In yet another demonstration of the American people’s cluelessness and ingratitude, this news was greeted with widespread incredulity, outrage, and mockery. “Republicans pounced.” And progressives reacted with their trademark dexterity regarding facts. “Fake news,” they insisted. No such thing was being contemplated by the CPSC. It was just one more instance of the phony culture war chaos beloved of the Right.
As a matter of fact, it was a CPSC commissioner, one Richard Trumka, Jr., who floated the idea of a ban on gas stoves—not for the first time, either. And of course, gas appliances have long been in the sights of climate warriors. Local and state bans on them are already in the works in Democrat-dominated jurisdictions from coast to coast, e.g. the state of New York. So the “fake news” decried by progressives isn’t so fake after all.
What’s more, the studies cited by proponents of a ban on gas stoves, purporting to show all kinds of deadly threats to health, constitute junk science. Many of them bear the fingerprints of the climate-change gang, a cohort not known for its devotion to scientific objectivity. A broad-scale study of the issue that can be taken as credible, conducted in 2013, concluded that there was “no evidence of an association between the use of gas as a cooking fuel and either asthma symptoms or asthma diagnosis.”
In short, this gas stove health scare has been manufactured by the usual suspects: people who believe that fossil fuels are the focus of evil in the modern world.
Climate warriors are wont to wring their hands over the difficulty of persuading the public to accept their claims concerning climate change. Blinded by their self-righteousness, they cannot see that the problem is one they’ve created for themselves. To take a recent example, when former Vice President Al Gore travels to Davos on his private jet, there to throw a public tantrum over boiling oceans, “rain bombs,” etc., people tune him out. The oceans are obviously not boiling, and who has ever seen a “rain bomb”?
But for Al Gore, climate change isn’t really a scientific, political, or economic issue. It’s a morality play, with him and people like him in the role of the Saints and the rest of us featured as sinners and evildoers. It’s impossible to miss the malice, the red-eyed sense of outrage, that drives the climate warriors. A desire to hurt people, to take away their nice things, to criminalize the simple pleasures of life, is what props up and propels the Al Gores of the world. If they could have their way, pan-broiling a sirloin steak in butter and oil on a gas cooktop would be a federal crime.
That’s why so many people roll their eyes when they hear the words climate change. They may tell you that they wouldn’t buy an electric vehicle because EVs cost too much, are a pain to recharge, have inferior performance, etc. But also they’ve noticed that the most enthusiastic proponents of EVs are also the prophets of doom who rant about boiling oceans and rain bombs and the evils of cooking with gas. Let’s just say that monomaniacal hysteria doesn’t move product.
Not much has been heard recently about the Green New Deal. But it’s worth recalling the way in which Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez & Co. marketed it: as something so much more than “the Science.” The Green New Deal was about “social justice” and “antiracism.” The Green New Deal would not only “fight climate change”: It would engineer the progressive-oriented, “fundamental transformation” of America that Barack Obama had promised but somehow failed to deliver. This vision of the Radiant Future was so compelling, so thrilling, so virtuous, that questions concerning its associated costs and disruptions were simply waved away.
And so it’s not possible to have a rational discussion with the climate warriors about the pros and cons of renewable energy versus fossil fuels, the transitional costs, the economic trade-offs and impacts, and the countless associated issues involved. For those true believers, a principle of polarity rules all such discussions: Any measure of compromise is a concession to the dark side. Those who champion windmills and solar panels are the Saints; those who do not are devils incarnate.
Since their self-righteousness renders them incapable of compromise, climate warriors resort to force politics. What they cannot achieve through persuasion they aspire to enact with the help of the regulatory state—for instance, the Consumer Product Safety Commission. This casts an interesting sidelight on postmodern progressivism’s professed devotion to “our democracy,” a devotion that stops short of allowing democratic accountability a role in the development of policies touching on climate or energy.
In that attitude may be detected an echo of the Marxist concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat and its Leninist elaboration, the vanguard party. If the masses will not march joyfully into the Radiant Future, they must be led—or be driven like cattle— behind a banner inscribed: Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but gas cookery!
This stuff is *not* "The Science." Actually, it's an absurd, flimsy piece of junk. A quick look at the "study" will confirm that it's laughable, not even undergraduate level. That won't stop the media, of course. Pretty soon they'll label those point it out as "racist" or "conspiracy theorists" or whatever.
The causes of childhood asthma are actually well understood and have been for decades (pollens and ragweeds, dust, insect detritus, gasoline fumes). It has nothing to do with natural gas stoves.
See: https://doomberg.substack.com/p/home-cooking for more about who's behind this absurdity.
Here's another good example of why I stopped reading the conventional media years ago, except for the Journal. There's the prestige press (Atlantic, New Yorker), less and less worth reading every year.
“Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but gas cookery!” (Thomas M. Gregg)
It’s even more ironic than it seems. Richard Trumpka, Jr. is the son of the immediate past President of the AFL-CIO, Richard Trumpka, Sr. who died in 2021.
Trumpka, Jr. was a nepotism hire by Biden given in payment for the support of the Labor Union leadership in the face of a massive movement of the rank and file towards the election and then reelection of Donald Trump.