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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31022 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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The most fun/silly culture war argument in a while: STOVES!

Hey, did you hear the Democrats are coming for your gas stoves? Variations on that were the instigation of a bizarre culture war spat last week. Apparently some government official speculated about banning gas stoves because of health concerns, and that started the now-predictable cycle of "No, you're wrong!" bouncing around social media. I saw various reactions to this in different spaces and they were interesting in the way they were filtered through the various political lenses. In the US gas stoves are mainly a blue-state / higher-end restaurant phenomenon, so I found the conservative media response to be a bit baffling because it's not really their fortress under assault here. On the other hand saw lots of bourgeois PMC foodies declaring that you would only take their gas stoves from charred, dead hands.

I'm a hobbyist cook. I love trying new foods, experimenting with new recipes, and making food for friends and family. I'm the one who gets chained to the stove all through Christmas time (I like it though). So I found this a refreshingly fun (amid the inherent stupidity) culture war. My short opinion, having cooked with both gas and electric (rare to have gas in Canada); average gas stoves are better than average electrics, but among better ranges it depends what you want to do. I have a nice electric stove right now and I reckon I prefer it to gas because it is a lot more powerful which helps for high-temperature cooking (good for meat, Chinese food), and also is more constant at low temperatures (I make a lot of soft-scrambled eggs). But gas generally has much finer temperature control which is very practical for restaurant applications and to a certain extent rewards higher skill in a cook.

Gas does have real health/environmental implications. Yes, good ventilation goes a long way to preventing serious health risks, but it's not nothing. And gas is much less efficient energy-wise; not only does it shed a lot of heat in the energy transfer to the cooking vessel, it's in general less efficient than electric (but often cheaper depending on your locale). How much these considerations weigh against the legitimate reasons people have for preferring gas for cooking depends on the individual. But certainly people resent a top-down government intervention to force them to change their preference, and are skeptical of the reasoning presented.

But you know what this really reminds me of? The hot culture war debate of 20 years ago: incandescent lightbulbs vs. fluorescents. I've mentioned this a few times before here, but it's one of those culture wars that just disappeared, and I think many people would be genuinely forgetful or surprised if you brought it up to them now. It was a big thing at the time: as a kid I would remember reading the op-ed section of the newspaper and see endless letters to the editor about how using incandescent bulbs were our God-given right or you were a heartless rapist of the earth if you didn't immediately switch to fluorescents. The breakdown of that culture war was pretty simply liberal/conservative (should be obvious which side was which), whereas this one doesn't align people so neatly. But what the real comparison to the present is what ended the previous culture war: a new technology came along that made both previous ones (and their partisans) obsolete. LEDs ended up just being simply superior to both in every way. Progress ended the culture war.

Enter: induction cooking. It's electric. No particulate emissions. It's extremely powerful. It has fantastic temperature control. It's getting cheaper. You can have a traditional range, or just a hotplate: it's flexible and scalable. It's much safer, both for risk of burns and for starting fires. The only downside is that some existing cookware isn't compatible with it (you need ferrous metals in your vessel for it to work).

My prediction is that by the end of the decade induction replaces all gas stoves and most electrics. And twenty years later people will be bemused and embarrassed that we had such a silly argument over this.

So in your Schism crosspost, trolls are pointing at my heat pump thing "over at tHe BaD pLaCe" as evidence for banning gas appliances (ignoring that induction stoves are resistance heat, not heat pumps with a 3-4x efficiency multiplier over gas!)

This is exactly why I was reluctant to make the post without a ton of disclaimers, and obviously I should have been strident enough to stop people like that feeling it supported them.

(Also how the hell do people fill up a 200amp breaker panel without running a machine shop? I'm so fucking tired of being lectured about the "climate crisis" by people who waste dozens of times as much energy as I do on frivolous upper middle class lifestyle signalling. My house panel only has a 100a feed, and it's nowhere near maxed out!)

FWIW the size of the panel is not directly related to service capacity, it's just a factor of how many branch circuits you need.

That's so weird: I also just assumed there's some NEC rule limiting breaker amps on a panel to like 150% or something, but section 220 says it really is just based on the load calc. It's never come up for me for obvious poorfag reasons.

It's funny how nitpicky and micromanaging some parts of the code are, and others are just like "yeah, use common sense or whatever, I'm not your mom"

I wouldn't mind getting induction one day, but as far as I was aware, induction is nowhere near gas right now. Where I am, a poor induction stove costs 3x as much as a fairly good gas stove with power burners. The induction stoves I've seen absolutely do not have good temperature control, they're a quantized step-function control, not a continuous dial. So no fine-grained control. Not to mention that you can't use all cookware on induction. Not to mention that you need to get a special power line installed in your house because induction stove require higher voltage or current or both. Due to these reasons, right now switching to induction sounds like a total disaster, at least from my searching around a few months ago when I was looking for a new stove.

Induction needs bigger 'burners', they're often only 6 inches and can warp cookware because of uneven heating.

And gas is much less efficient energy-wise; not only does it shed a lot of heat in the energy transfer to the cooking vessel, it's in general less efficient than electric (but often cheaper depending on your locale).

I very much doubt that burning natural gas in a power plant, converting the heat into electricity, transferring it to your home, and then converting it back into heat is more efficient than transporting the gas and burning it for heat directly, even if electric is more efficient at transmitting the heat to the cookware. The first source I found with a quick search said the same:

https://home.howstuffworks.com/gas-vs-electric-stoves.htm

The clear winner in the energy efficiency battle between gas and electric is gas. It takes about three times as much energy to produce and deliver electricity to your stove. According to the California Energy Commission, a gas stove will cost you less than half as much to operate (provided that you have an electronic ignition--not a pilot light).

The potential climate-change argument against gas stoves would be that, in a hypothetical future with plentiful and very low-carbon electricity generation, a gas stove might lock in fossil fuel consumption. But unless you live in an area where the electricity is already all hydroelectric/nuclear this is a risky gamble, if during the timeframe the stove is operating your area is still using fossil fuels to generate electricity the electric stove will cause more emissions. I don't anticipate the energy-generation mix changing that dramatically early in the lifespan of a stove bought today. (If the "three times" figure is true it would have to happen less than a third of the way through its lifespan.)

in a hypothetical future with plentiful and very low-carbon electricity generation, a gas stove might lock in fossil fuel consumption.

Unless the gas is produced from said low-carbon electricity generation....

Enter: induction cooking. It's electric. No particulate emissions. It's extremely powerful. It has fantastic temperature control. It's getting cheaper. You can have a traditional range, or just a hotplate: it's flexible and scalable. It's much safer, both for risk of burns and for starting fires. The only downside is that some existing cookware isn't compatible with it (you need ferrous metals in your vessel for it to work).

It has some stupid protections that make stuff like proper searing impossible - some idiotic thermal protection to protect the internals (you can't heat a cast iron pan properly) and most of them work in a bang bang way - you don't have constant output no matter what it's just on off with a timer. Also you have the mother of all hotspots where the ring itself is on the cheaper units. I like induction a lot - and I use it, but I have top down infrared grill (basically a cordierite gas plate at 800C) that I use for finishing proteins.

In the US gas stoves are mainly a blue-state / higher-end restaurant phenomenon,

Did not really know this. But I am a blue state residing right of center person who hates his current electric stove and pines for the gas stove of my parent's house. I haven't gotten to try induction yet, but the people who praise it are people who generally make dubious assertions in other environmentally-related fields such as praising trains and buses, or saying the low range of EVs isn't really an issue.

The hot culture war debate of 20 years ago: incandescent lightbulbs vs. fluorescents. I've mentioned this a few times before here, but it's one of those culture wars that just disappeared

That culture war largely disappeared ALONGSIDE Ffuorescent lightbulbs. They were shit, remain shit, and were replaced by LEDs, which are dozens of times better. The CW died because it never should have been fought. Progressives should have just waited 10 years for LEDs to come out and be genuine upgrades to incandescents for 90+% of uses. As is the typical case of environmental regulation, just don't do it and wait for industry to magically solve your problem.

My prediction is that by the end of the decade induction replaces all gas stoves and most electrics.

This will be true if induction is as good as the induction lovers claim it to be. It will not be true if it is not, and in that instance, gas will be slowly banned through weird regulations that are not outright bans but make it an expensive PITA to install and use and the CW will remain until all the people with memories of glorious gas stoves die, and then the world is poorer permanently. As is the case with modern dish and clotheswashers.

This will be true if induction is as good as the induction lovers claim it to be.

I've used both extensively, and I'd say that they are broadly comparable in goodness, with a small set of advantages/disadvantages of which the disadvantages of induction might not even be relevant for the vast majority of Western/Northern European home cooks.

Pro gas:

  • You can lift your frying pan or wok off the surface and toss without losing heating.

  • You can easily set your aerosolized grease on fire, which is relevant for some schools of East Asian cooking.

  • You can char certain things on an open flame.

  • Successfully heats some cookware induction doesn't work on.

Pro induction:

  • Much easier to keep clean.

  • No soot, gentler on the cookware it does work with.

  • Little lingering heat. Unused spots can double as work surfaces within minutes after use.

  • Higher peak performance/faster "zero to boiling" time on higher-end consumer-grade devices.

  • The health risks of gas driving the current culture war.

In the US gas stoves are mainly a blue-state / higher-end restaurant phenomenon, so I found the conservative media response to be a bit baffling because it's not really their fortress under assault here.

You underestimate the degree to which conservative online discourse is driven by politically-conservative residents of blue states/cities (because online discourse generally is driven by people in blue jurisdictions, as well as structurally/culturally blue-tribe people.) [Edit: added a close-paren]

because online discourse generally is driven by people in blue jurisdictions, as well as structurally/culturally blue-tribe people

I posit another reason: Exposure to the policies. Victor Davis Hanson and California conservatives were the canaries in the coal mine on a lot of progressive policies, like immigration because they were the first to see the results up close. Conservatives in Iowa are much less likely to have to go to a school board meeting to confront administrators over their daughter's sexual assault by a "girl" in the bathroom, because teachers in Iowa are less likely to tolerate it (although schools will always be a hot button because of the leftist lean of teachers everywhere).

The change in school policies has moved very very fast so that even (not so) conservative Iowa is not free of the sort of CW fodder you'd see discussed.

This is sort of the most underrated thing about politics - for instance, in polling of the 2022 midterms, cancel culture and trans issues were among the things that GOP voters cared about least, let alone independent or democratic voters. So, why is it something consistently pushed by all sorts of right and centrist-leaning media, including the establishment and anti-establishment media?

Because it's something that effects college-educated right-leaning people in red areas, with a side dish of the occasional centrist getting upset at it. If you're a big state school graduate who now lives in the big urban area of your state, or a coastal area, but you're a conservative, of course you're upset about all this, and since you're more likely to be on Twitter, you'll post more about it. This becomes even more true when it's very right-wing people who have lots of clout on social media who live in insanely blue areas. Of course, say, some FOX News personality who lives in New York thinks the woke agenda out of control.

Now, I'm not saying some blue-collar worker in rural Alabama is pro-trans or thinks the 1619 project is great, it's that it's incredibly likely, despite occasional drummed stories about "50% of this class is now trans or non-binary", they likely have never heard of the 1619 project nor have their been more than maybe a handful of trans kids, if that, in the past decade. Now, immigration, or gun control, or abortion - that, they'll care about, because they believe it effects them.

The reality is if instead of spending tens of million (reportedly) on anti-trans ads this past cycle, if that money had gone into pretty bland 'hey, inflation is bad and crime is up' ads, Kevin McCarthy wouldn't have needed 18 rounds to become Speaker and Mitch might be Majority Leader again.

Of course you’re not seeing it. New capacity involves things that are icky.

LEDs aren't strictly superior to good incandescent light sources. At their peak, in the last few years, they are competitive. I don't mean longevity or efficiency or safety, they certainly beat the hell out of previous technologies in these terms. I mean color rendering index, smoothness of the emission spectrum (most importantly the prominence of blue peak) and flicker-free luminance – properties that make for comfortable, natural light. CRI is defined as a fraction of color rendering that an incandescent gives. There's a nice Russian website with a database of those and other measurements, creatively called lamptest.ru. The best LEDs have CRI=99. Cheap ones are more like 93 now, and 80 yesterday.

Incidentally, office-tier fluorescents could go as low as 60-something.

There are alternative measures and some debate, of course, but the gist is this: sometimes you walk into a store or an exhibition or some other venue where electricity cost is an afterthought, or just a bitter clinger old-timer's home, and you notice that it's easy to see things, even though the nominal luminous power is weak and tinged with yellow. That's because there are powerful incandescent and probably halogen lights installed, and your retina is hit with continuous color gradients it had evolved for. It's almost as pleasant as sunlight, and as bittersweet as a scent bringing back childhood memories.

It's like wireless earbuds or earphones. Sure, after trying out a decent pair, you wouldn't want to get back to tangled cables and the microphone effect and the need to lug the audio source around. But every once in a while you plug in your electrostatic planars into an amp, or just 4BA+DD buds into an old laptop –and remember what it was like before convenience outweighed the taste for fidelity one could mistake for snobbish pretense.

Or one could think about our computers, and their embarrassing latency despite undeniable improvement in computing power.

Grandpa might still remember the thing with transistor radios and what they had superseded.

And so it goes all the way to Socrates and his warning against committing knowledge to written medium, that gets in the way of learning by heart – which in his mind was identical with true understanding, and it's frankly pretty compelling once you think about the compromise inherent in retrieval transformers.

I'm not sure if people had voiced the same opposition to speech.

But I digress. In exchange for convenience, we grow used to a slightly inferior experience at the core of the activity, some accidental detail that made it wonderful, and stop noticing it, and begin to find it amusing that some eccentrics still fiddle with the obsolete. The experience of few such transitions may be what makes people so averse to accept the next new thing, even when it is plainly superior across the board.

I had a 300 (or was it 600 ) watt ‘deckenfluter’ – “ceiling flooder” – in my old room and it felt amazing, warm and clear. You could do anything. The night was powerless, you kept your own hours. The friend who recommended it had a theory that people don’t read because they lack light. The halogen bulbs are now banned here.

You can get very close in subjective comfort by going overboard with very good LEDs (and I think that, if assisted by like 100W of halogen, it'll be perfect). Last time I was in a position to bother, I bought these bad boys. CRI of 97, 5753K color temp (so, daylight but not yet annoyingly bluish), 4128 Lumen per 38.6W. The problem is they're humongous and won't fit into normal chandeliers, so you'll need to hack together some diffusor because those spot LEDs are annoying and bad for the eyes (and you'll lose some performance with the diffusor absorbing light, naturally). But it's nothing a visit to a hardware store and half an hour of tinkering won't solve. If I owned a home office, I'd have installed such a lamp on every square meter of the ceiling (or, actually, I'd have substituted some for low-temp equivalents). You can get a great deal of light from ~300W of power with these things. 33K Lumen, in fact. Allowing for 20% losses, that's 26K... in a modest 15 sq m room it'd get you close to a normal overcast day.

LED strips can be even better, but they're even more fiddly. This "DIY" corn lamp, too, is obviously assembled from normal Aliexpress components and strips.

I surmise there must be Youtube guides to do much better than that.

Where do I find an illegal incandescent bulb dealer?

Don't buy illegal light bulbs, buy 100w heating elements with e27 socket that glow when used.

I've seen them in Chinese junk shops. The one I bought exploded the glass off the connector (in one piece at least...) pretty quickly though.

Feed stores.

Halogens are still widely available. I bought some at Walmart last month.

Have you tried looking in dark alleys?

Shouldn't one look in a bright one or is that where you find the halogen dealers?

It has fantastic temperature control.

Depends on the stove. We have an induction hot plate in our summer home, and without an inverter it's basically "one second at 1200W, nine seconds at 0W" on its lowest setting of "120W". Not that bad when you're making a stew, terrible when you're cooking something delicate.

I enjoyed Steve Sailer's commentary on the gas stove controversy. His theory is that this is really a climate change move, but needs to be dressed up as a health move to get the public to accept it. He sees this as a fumbled attempt to orchestrate academic "research," the media and regulators in that sequence to build momentum for a ban -- fumbled because the regulator spilled the beans too early, before the Cathedral finished its sermon.

I enjoyed Steve Sailer's commentary on the gas stove controversy. His theory is that this is really a climate change move, but needs to be dressed up as a health move to get the public to accept it.

Current state of climate change discourse is dismal and gets worse every day.

A: Climate change is real and it will kill us all! You must eat bug, you must stop flushing your toilet, you must spend hours sorting your trash (that goes afterwards to the same landfill), you must throw away you incadescent light bulbs and buy LED ones, throw away your gas stove and buy electric one, throw away your ICE car and buy electric one (add list of arbitrary and nonsensical commandments too long for this space), OR WE WILL ALL DIE IN 12 YEARS!

B: Climate change is not real, it is all hoax! I will not eat bug!

C: Climate change is real and awesome, we could use some more heat!

D: Climate change is real and no big deal, few degrees will make no difference.

E: Climate change is real and it could fuck up human race badly, and all official efforts supposed to combat it are at best complete waste, at worst completely counterproductive and directly worsening the problem.

If there is any hope, it is in B, C, D and E joining in common struggle against A.

(no, I am not holding my breath)

All official efforts to combat it? It seems pretty straightforward that it would be nice to be emitting less greenhouse gases, and by and large I'm seeing pretty good progress and ideas focused on that goal, among others.

The Rocky Mountain Institute is the group behind the study that gas stoves are super dangerous to children. But if you check their about page, you find that they're most focused on climate change and energy use.

https://rmi.org/about/history/

In recent years, the rise of the climate crisis and the need to transition global energy systems away from fossil fuels has amplified the need for and impact of our mission, to help usher the world toward a clean, prosperous, and secure low-carbon future for all.

Child health seems like a pretext for achieving their carbon free mission.

I don't care whether induction is the preferred cooktop tech or gas, but I wish there were more serious consequences for politicians pushing for the removal of gas there better not be a picture of you cooking with gas proudly on your twitter feed.

Im not sure there actually that good orchestrate disparate parties that well - wouldn’t we have a twitter files of all this planning versus just have a conspiracy of similar interest groups.

That being said on the academic science does anyone take the science as real anymore? Or just some stat manipulation to get what you want or in the case of masks they just said it was science and never presented anything.

Enough people have lived with gas stoves that it should be obvious if it was health risks of significance. Smokers know that smoking hurts their health. We didn’t need science to tell us that. You just needed to go for a run after having too many cigs.

wouldn’t we have a twitter files of all this planning versus just have a conspiracy of similar interest groups.

We wouldn't have a Twitter Files of Twitter either if Elon Musk hadn't taken over. Unless the forum is owned or infiltrated by ideologically unaligned people, and there's public demand for news of the collaboration, then it doesn't even register as a conspiracy and never gets public play at all; it's just science, industry and regulators sharing information, which in some capacity we all agree that they should.

Climate gadfly says "regulator, pls ban", regulator says "we would never take such a step without a strong empirical justification of harm," researchers see the opportunity for impactful "scholarship" in this area and produce it, news media see the regulatory statement and the existence of "scholarship" in the area and hype it, regulator waits for the crescendo and then bans it. All of the communication can even take place in broad daylight at various climate and air quality fora.

I can't wait for good induction ranges to become the norm in cold places. 3/5 of the last 5 houses I've stayed in have had shitty electric burners. So from my POV, induction is a huge upgrade. I'll be in a rental house for at least the next 5 years, and I do not trust my landlord to care enough about ventilation for gas to cause zero damage. If gas has to die to make induction happen, so be it.

One complaint : My wok warps into a bowl when exposed to induction's fast heating, making it impossible to be used as a flat-bottom which induction needs. But I feel like this problem can be solved with thicker bottomed woks and more innovative ways of creating surface -> magnet contact instead of plates.

end of the decade induction replaces all gas stoves and most electrics. And twenty years later people will be bemused and embarrassed that we had such a silly argument over this.

Very likely.

The best videos on ranges that youtube has to offer - 1 2

Woks don’t make much sense on induction (or electric) stoves. They are fundamentally designed to be used with gas stoves. Using them on electric or induction stoves turns them into very shitty skillets. Just use a normal skillet. If you like woks, too bad.

If you like woks, too bad.

YOOO, Youtube reads my mind !

My top recommended video 2 minutes ago was literally an induction burner for woks : https://youtube.com/shorts/-49EuKOCTqs

I am ready to jump on this hype train. (Legit gonna buy this in a month or so)

I take it that when people refer to "electric" stoves they don't mean induction ones?

I'm hardly much of a cook, but I prefer induction ones over gas stoves by a longshot, just being able to dial in values instead of worrying about wth "medium heat" means is a boon as far as I'm concerned. Not to mention that it's less risk of burning down the house.

Classic electric stoves look essentially the same as gas stoves but with a round electric resistance heating element on the ranges.

just being able to dial in values instead of worrying about wth "medium heat" means is a boon

Ugh, my induction stove is just old enough to still have the stupid old fashioned dials instead of being able to set exact temperatures and it frustrates me to no end. It runs way too hot so when anyone besides me cooks they constantly burn things, I wish I could find a way to limit the dials.

Couldn't you just label the dial positions?

In hindsight, yes I should probably do that.

My short opinion, having cooked with both gas and electric (rare to have gas in Canada); average gas stoves are better than average electrics, but among better ranges it depends what you want to do.

I've worked extensively with all 3 stove types, though not at the absolute highest end of the range.

Fundamentally, electric stoves are now a non-starter for me. Even when you "know" your stove well you're adding ~10 minutes to every cooking session and drastically increasing the chance of burning food. When you multiply this by every time you cook it's untenable if you can afford the alternatives.

Induction is a lot better. Things can get violently hot very quickly, and is far more controllable. I'd live with it if I had it. It's still a huge downgrade compared to gas:

  • Unable to use most cookware ever made. My parents got to throw away $400 of cookware for the privilege of using induction. If you have a mix of non-stick thrown in things get even worse. This is huge for most people (but admittedly not everyone - if you're building a house immediately after getting married or moving away from home you're already bootstrapping your equipment)

  • Inability to use raw fire. Roasting peppers, heating tools, lighting coals.... the ability to have real heat in this way accessible instantly is a massive convenience.

I do think getting a gas line to your house needs more than just a stove to justify, but if you have a line you should be cooking with it.

It seems like you've adopted the "conservatives pounce" position that was sent out as soon as people realized the trial balloon was made of lead. Now all of a sudden it's a "vile culture war attack from conservatives, which just proves they're not human"

I found the conservative media response to be a bit baffling

Indicates that you didn't actually see the response: you saw the left narrative about the response.

The rollout was a flop, but the damage control gaslighting was very effective. Notice how the messaging is now an incoherent mix of "it's fake news" and "stupid conservatives are fighting for the right to have cancer, this proves we have to ban gas stoves."

What's really amazing is that different levels of the left are getting individual narratives tailored for them that are completely contradictory, but this doesn't seem to hurt the overall message! I've seen everything from "this is already a big victory" from professional eco activists who don't have to lie about their goals, to "this was a false flag by the gas industry to make eco activists look bad" to people who need to be lied to.*

You got the "fellow traveler" package that focuses on the "boo conservatives" angle, from the sounds of things. That one's always a safe bet for a broad demographic.

* You see a lot of this multi-track messaging now. Remember how the europe painting attacks were both "a conspiracy by an oil baroness to make us look bad" and "fully justified Direct Action, comrade" depending on how deep down the leftist rabbit hole the listener was? You also see it on the very extreme right where a shooter can be both an FBI false flag crisis actor _and_ a righteous $racialSlur-slayer who should be imitated.

You got the "fellow traveler" package that focuses on the "boo conservatives" angle, from the sounds of things. That one's always a safe bet for a broad demographic.

Okay, this latest shtick of yours - where you chattily ask an ideological opponent which bot subroutine they've been programmed with.

Knock it off.

deleted

I mean the very first thing that came up on google when I searched for a representative article was a WSJ op-ed with the the sub-headline "Don’t believe this week’s denials. Progressive Democrats really are coming for your kitchen appliances."

At least among Canadian conservatives the response was similar. For example from the Toronto Sun: Just the gas stove? No, green zealots want your furnace, hot water tank, too

I'm not a partisan in this debate. I think it would be good if gas stoves get eased out in the near future (more important in areas with high renewable energy production), but there are valid practical, aesthetic, and survival reasons for having a gas stove.

I don't see the disagreement. By your own admittance, Democrats are likely to get their way within a decade. Please pick either 'Democrats aren't coming for your stove' and 'They are but it's for your own good'.

I'm not a partisan in this debate. I think it would be good if gas stoves get eased out in the near future...

This framing speaks volumes about how the Overton Window gets set on these sorts of arguments, in practice. The extreme positions are that stoves should be banned immediately or that people should just be allowed to choose what stove they'd like. The centrist position is that a federal government agency should just make it cumbersome, expensive, and inconvenient to have a gas stove, leading to their eventual phaseout.

I second that. It seems like the moderate or centrist position is ‘people cook with whatever it is they want, barring obvious stupid cases like using spent nuclear fuel as a heat source’. The ‘we should phase out gas stoves’ is a radical left position no matter how gradual.

You can take my enriched plutonium oven from my blistered, dead hands!

Ok, I’ll grab my nuclear level hazmat suit and wait for the media to start wondering if you angered Putin.

Our induction range is wonderful, and as a PMC foodie, works just fine with all the Le Creuset and Staub we originally bought for use with gas.

This controversy really is a perfect embodiment for why conservatism delenda est. The mainstream Right wing is hardly more than an exhaust valve opposing all the big ideas that come from the left. In this day in age, 2023, with everything that is going on, "hands off our gas stoves" is the banner to rally the conservatives.

The left will force the LGBT flag into the pantheon of sacred banners, the right will make flags that say "don't mess with gas stoves".

What if it said 'Don't tread on me.' and had a depection of a gas stove setting alight an alphabet people couple?

It could also feature Bob Hope saying, "Now we're cooking with gas."

I mean, the GOP is out of power. The party out of power naturally takes a more reactive posture.

Trump wasn't great at setting and pursuing the agenda for the GOP, but I have hope that DeSantis will be better at it.

This controversy really is a perfect embodiment for why conservatism delenda est. The mainstream Right wing is hardly more than an exhaust valve opposing all the big ideas that come from the left. In this day in age, 2023, with everything that is going on, "hands off our gas stoves" is the banner to rally the conservatives.

What is wrong with such banner? It is, for once, banner defending something regular people use, need and want. Something that resonates with normie voter more than "no abortion" or "no drag queens".

It's an affirmation of @Hoffmeister25's thread last week. The mainstream Right wing has no Will to Power, it has no big ideas. The Left wing is pushing forward major social upheavals at breakneck speed, and conservatives are trying to muster outrage and votes with gas stove flags. You are not conservative, so I think it's a bit concern-trolly to pat conservatives on the back for choosing such a comically non-threatening banner to rally behind.

Yes, that is the problem with conservatives, they don't have any really terrible ideas like the Left do. What they need is some completely out-of-touch bug-eyed academics to tell us that brushing your teeth is racist or that we should abolish traffic lights or that bicycles should be outlawed. That will really show the Left (the path to unopposed power when the Right loses every elected office in the galaxy).

If it is fight over stoves, it is indeed silly and non threatening.

If it is fight over constant and neverending bullying in the name of "safety" or "mother Earth", no matter how dubious,no matter how pointless and absurd it could be serious.

"No, you cannot have flushing toilets that really flush. No, you cannot have plastic straws. No, you cannot have incadescent light bulbs. No, no, no. Trust the experts."

Repeated thousand times over our lifetimes, with no end in sight. Stand must be made somewhere, why not over stoves?

https://twitter.com/GovRonDeSantis/status/1613556347488079872

Remember, only conservative movement that really conserved something is gun right movement - and not only conserved RKBA, but rolled back gun control laws nation wide.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Right_to_Carry,_timeline.gif

No matter how you feel about guns, it is proof that something can be done, that people banning and outlawing everything do not have to be on the "right side of history".

Are guns special case because of second amendment, or could this success be generalized? This is the question.

And gas stoves are a great Schelling fencepost, because taking away gas burners from the kitchen naturally suggests removing all the gas from home: gas room heating, gas water heater, and home gas electricity generators for rural or distant/fancy suburban areas.

Just like guns provide security, gas provides power. Having people who can control their own room heat, water heat, food cooking, and even flow of electricity, instead of relying on state-regulated power, is a nightmare for an authoritarian state. The centralization of power is a real project for the Cathedral, and we know it, and holding onto our freedoms by our bare fingernails can include such ridiculous-seeming projects like keeping our gas stoves.

If centralisation and dependence was the goal they would ban at-home solar instead of (sometimes) subsidising it.

As others have mentioned, there's no need to ban at-home solar if you want to centralize power. A revolutionary who can't generate enough heat to cook the chemicals for a pipe bomb when it's too cloudy out isn't much of a concern. Not to mention that anyone who can lay out $20k + for solar and battery backup that'll last a couple days at best isn't going to be part of the uprising.

Most at-home solar electricity nowadays goes directly into the grid, not to your home. You can be experiencing a grid brown-out or scheduled blackout during the hottest days of summer, leaving you with no AC in full sunlight and your panels at peak watts, and your generating station agreement with the local electric utility means you’re not allowed to add an inverter without penalties. It’s the perfect example of centralisation and dependence.

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You don't even need to be that distant suburban. In 2021 the same February storm that caused the Texas power crisis also caused outages in Oregon on the order 5 days up to almost two weeks all through the major metro area. That's a long time to be without power and unlike in Texas the natural gas lines were still operating (as were natgas powered standby generators).

The mainstream Right wing has no Will to Power, it has no big ideas.

This is a tautology, isn't it? The Right's "big idea" is to be wary of big ideas, so of course they aren't proposing their own big ideas. That's a feature, not a bug. Maybe they need to express this idea more effectively, but what they don't need is to become right-wing progressives.

(It also depends on which "Right" you're talking about. The alt-right has "Big Ideas" that I'd rather not see enter the Overton window. The free-market constitutional center-right should remain anti-big ideas no matter which side they come from.)

EDIT/ADDENDUM: In the scope of history "Don't Tread on Me" is a pretty fucking big idea, and continues to be one.

I think “depress the home values of the DMV area by heavily curtailing the admin state and moving parts of it out of the DC” counts as a somewhat big idea.

Thats just leftist sub speaks that the right doesn’t have any ideas. They do for the most part prefer to govern less.

  1. There are actual national socialists on the right (in the economic sense) Who want a bigger welfare state in the ways they like it and with the cultural package of the right (pro-marriage);Such as family support.

  2. Build the wall was a policy prescription. And from a HBD perspective there’s a fairly rich debate in coded language on what kind of people we can let in. Garret Jones versus Kaplan debate and probably more important for civilization but can’t be open about.

  3. Taking China seriously was a policy that has jumped from the right to the left. That was a big break from the neoliberal prescription of being pro-China growth.

Education reform is another, Arizona's school voucher program is huge and it came from the right.

This is a tautology, isn't it? The Right's "big idea" is to be wary of big ideas

The "big idea" of being wary of big ideas loses to the people with big ideas. It's a feature not a bug to the extent that mainstream conservative thinking was consciously designed to keep a potential Right on the reservation.

EDIT/ADDENDUM: In the scope of history "Don't Tread on Me" is a pretty fucking big idea, and continues to be one.

Progressives have a far better claim on "Don't Tread on Me" than libertarians. Who the hell is scared of treading on a libertarian? People are genuinely afraid of repercussions for treading on progressivism, even the most red-tribe conservatives. Even faithful conservatives here will admit that it's a losing proposition, they just say they would rather accept a losing proposition than "become a bad person", and their conception of "being a bad person" suspiciously conforms to progressive demands on the boundaries of their way of thinking.

or "no drag queens".

That one's a bit more popular when people realize there's a "in schools and libraries" appended to that.

The hot culture war debate of 20 years ago: incandescent lightbulbs vs. fluorescents. I've mentioned this a few times before here, but it's one of those culture wars that just disappeared, and I think many people would be genuinely forgetful or surprised if you brought it up to them now.

An underlying current of that was the US elite purposefully deindustrializing the US. Incandescent bulbs in the US were all made domestically by union labor. Offshoring didn't make sense because the primary expense was the equipment and the machinery in the US was paid off. It was low margin but provided a decent number of jobs.

So manufacturers built up CFL plants in China, got people in DC to invest in them, then lobbied to ban incandescent bulbs.

The incandescent factories are now long gone, rebuilding them would be very expensive. So it's not a practical fight.

This is similar in that the underlying motivation is anti-fossil fuel sentiment. The study about health is garbage. Deep blue cities in California were banning new gas installs long before it came out.

I doubt that the elite really wanted to deindustrialize the country. Consider it collateral damage to their agenda, sure. But the elites don’t actually want to deindustrialize.

I'm curious as to why it would be in elites' best interest to not allow US domestic industry to languish in favor of cheaper overseas industry.

No particulate emissions

This needs an asterisk after it. My gas stove doesn't measurably raise PM2.5 levels ... until we make something like fajitas, and then the smoky sizzle which gets past filters sends PM2.5 through the roof.

It would be funny if this was a confounder to any studies: people who really want to sear meat get gas stoves, searing puts a ton of PM in the air, and yet they'd be breathing the same PM after a switch to high-powered electric.

Before we look for subtle confounders, though, I'd first like to see some reassurance that we aren't really ignoring obvious confounders too.

Do we really want people cooking in their own homes at all? Even aside from the emissions and particulates, food cooked too much is carcinogenic and food cooked too little can cause food borne illness. Both of these are large scale health care problems. People also tend to use too much salt and not enough vegetables when cooking for themselves. And of course the kitchen is one of the most likely places for potentially lethal residential fires to take place, and the countless food prep accidents involving lacerations from knives and appliances. Ordinary stove tops can get hot enough to melt copper! This is incredibly dangerous as burns from hot oil or sugar can cause severe tissue damage and disfigurement.

It might be okay for a properly trained, licensed chef to cook their own foods, and I'm not saying people shouldn't be able to make a peanut butter sandwich or cheese and crackers, but the average person really is very likely to end up harming themselves in some way from long term diseases to death and dismemberment. Wouldn't it be a much safer, more efficient society if we left cooking to the experts and eliminated home kitchens?

A modest proposal.

And don't get me started on the chef knifes - they are long and sharp and let me tell you - if you can cut a meat with them, you will also be able to cut a human. Think what a maniac will be able to do if they get their hands on one.

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This is my understanding as well; most of the emissions come from what you're cooking rather than the heat source. I've definitely smoked up my apartment a time or two searing steaks on an electric stove.

The gas stove emissions in queation are NOx, not particulates

These "studies" that just query a dataset or two and then pull out some correlations from it are really making me want to burn down the libraries. Any monkey with an installation of python or R can do that.

Why not create a lab environment that emulates various home kitchen configurations all the way down to air circulation and ventilation rate? Then actually test various scenarios with various kinds of stoves. And arrive at a mechanistic argument? They can use the second dataset of PM2.5 levels joined with asthma rates to push the party line anyways.

Why not create a lab environment that emulates various home kitchen configurations all the way down to air circulation and ventilation rate?

Because that's hard, and ideological hacks (defined here as "the sorts of people who go into writing a 'paper' firmly knowing what result they want out of it, usually because of unrelated political or ideological reasons, and will not stop until they get that result.") are lazy.

Consider:

  • Induction requires magnetic cookware which may be more costly and may be bad for the environment

  • Electric requires more electrical components which are sourced from somewhere, how does the trade of these materials compare to gas

  • If the poor can only afford electric foil ovens, the longer time to boil might add up over time

  • Estimated days per year of power outage. When the power is out, the stove is the only way many people can still cook a meal. I imagine power outages in some parts of the country will be more frequent over the next decade.

At least when I was outfitting my first apartment years ago, cast iron was the cheapest cookware option on the shelf, which was nice because I was making minimum wage then, especially considering the expected life (beyond the owner's).

Not to mention cost. I got into this with the heat pump article, but "It's 95% vs 80% efficient!" is an incredibly misleading thing to say when one form of energy costs three times as much per watt.

Which is the whole point behind this forced all-electric thing anyway. Realized when I did the heat pump research that there's a huge amount of industry and public money pouring into orgs like the "Rocky Mountain Institute," to launder all these all-electric mandate policies. Once the price of electricity skyrockets as it did in germany, they don't want people to be able to substitute.

I don't think they've thought it through that much. It's climate makework, they just want to do something to do something, whether it makes sense or not. Like recycling. More of a religious ritual. The greater the cost, the greater the penance.

I imagine power outages in some parts of the country will be more frequent over the next decade.

Specifically because of switching everything to electric while shifting the grid to less constant / reliable sources of electricity. If every state had a fission plant feeding its major cities, I wouldn’t see as much of a problem with de-gassification, especially here in the Southwest US, but fossil is still the best way to heat cold climate regions.

Making a good roux over electric takes forever, although I’d be willing to try one over induction.

The idea of gas stoves being a blue tribe thing seems a little far- being a foody is probably more blue tribe than red, but it just seems like everyone acknowledges that gas stoves are better(although, anecdotally, blue tribe conservatives are the ones that seem the most thrilled about them).

And of course the Biden admin trying to tell me what to cook over on the basis of a flawed study showing a small effect size from using a gas stove inside a plastic bag sticks in my craw.

Im guessing cast iron type pans are banned on induction stoves. Because they don’t work on electric either as I’ve learned and ruined the glass surface before and had to replace it. That’s probably an area that a lot of people would hate to lose.

Gas is sexy. I have electric now. Personally I find electric more convenient but prefer the fire.

The health risks I’m making a small gas is being vastly overrated. And is going to fall into the category of studies that don’t replicate.

Im guessing cast iron type pans are banned on induction stoves. Because they don’t work on electric either as I’ve learned and ruined the glass surface before and had to replace it.

I'm confused as to why cast iron wouldn't work on electric. I use cast iron for maybe >80% of my cooking (either my skillet or Dutch oven) and I've had no problems.

Cast iron is presumably perfect for induction because of how ferrous it is, but I've not had the chance to try it myself.

Glass surface. Cast iron usually coarser so high risks of scratching or cracking the glass surface. My electric stove manual said not to use them.

I think mine said something similar, but:

1: Who cares? It's a stove.

2: Glass is harder than steel, and certainly harder than cast iron -- I use old cast iron pots on my (cheapish) glass-top electric all the time (for around 15 years) and the top is not scratched.

Once the shitty electronics in my stove finally fail, I will probably get induction -- mostly because there is no gas at my house, and it's not worth getting a big propane tank just for the stove. But I think it will need to be close to the high-end of induction-stove prices, because the cheaper units probably do have issues that would make them net-worse than my current electric unit.

I do have a little plugin induction hotplate thing that I use sometimes for canning/simmering/outdoor burner -- the top on it is plastic and probably could be scratched in heavy use, but a) I don't care and b) I haven't noticed it being scratched either. I suspect that the low-end induction ranges are similar. The cast iron pans work very well in terms of cooking ability on this thing though -- I don't really have any straight aluminum cookware.

Thing is, my original stove was ~$600, low-end induction is more like $1600, and the unit I'd buy is around $3000 -- so 'better' doesn't really survive a cost-benefit analysis if we're being realistic.

I have wolf so the part is 600 if glass cracks. I got a few uses with a cast iron before it cracked. Now my coordination is a little sloppy but they will crack glass countertops.

Huh -- mine is like mid-low range Kenmore (so probably hecho en Mexico by Whirlpool or something); despite being in general kind of a piece of crap, the glass is fine.

Did yours crack in some specific incident? (like, dropping a pan on it or something)

I can't say that I'm super gentle, but I tend not to wave the pans around like a wok-chef. Not because the top is glass particularly, but I guess I could imagine cracking the top by banging it with a heavy skillet.

I'm currently using an electric range because, uh, someone was throwing it out (for being the wrong colour!) and you can't beat free. But piping propane from an outside tank for my previous range wasn't difficult, and imo the results were a lot better. Hauling propane tanks from the truck to the storage alcove was a bitch though.

Probably going to get a big propane burner for a semi-outdoor cooking area I'm setting up. Seems like the best option to avoid having to vent half the house air every time I do a steak or stir-fry, and obviously not ideal to set up an induction burner outdoors. Ideally will save the indoor stove for low-temp, low-splatter stuff.

The most fun/silly culture war argument in a while: STOVES!

Yes, the brand new gas stove question.

Why not, it is welcome respite from the eternally recurring gas chamber question ;-)

If the question is: "Gas Stove: Death Machine or Torch of Freedom?" it is indeed silly.

If the question is: "Should some anonymous, unaccountable comissars suddenly decide that things that were fine for a long time are not fine any more and take them away from you with no recourse?" it is less silly.

Asbestos and leaded fuel were also "fine for a long time".

In the US gas stoves are mainly a blue-state / higher-end restaurant phenomenon, so I found the conservative media

A lot of conservatives live in blue states or have gas stoves in red states.

Gas does have real health/environmental implications.

I don't think the evidence for this is very strong. I lived with a frequently used gas stove in a tiny apartment with no ventilation and my air filter did not measure any detectable effect of the stove on the air quality, which was excellent.

Did the filter measure NOx? That's the theorized mechanism of action, and my own detectors (which do cover CO, CO2, PM2.5, radon, etc) don't measure it.

Yes, it did. The levels were much lower than they were outside on a normal summer day, in a city without a lot of air pollution.

Thanks for checking on this. If that’s causing asthma, we should be hearing about a huge wave of asthma sweeping across the country; since we’re not, this can be considered scientifically debunked.

80% bet: I give it two weeks for the media to journal highly detailed sob anecdotes about childhood asthma that include memories of open flame stoves.

For me the issue isn't so much gas, induction, incandescent bulbs, CFLs, or any of that. I have an issue with this idea that the government should be able to tell people what to do for their own good. That pisses me off. I try to make good choices for myself, of course, but I'm a grown man. If I decide that I would rather bear whatever health risks from having a gas stove, that's my right. I don't need or want a nanny state going "oh no you can't do that because that would be bad for you".

I first encountered induction stoves maybe in the... 1990s? I thought it was a fantastic idea (and kind of a bit sci-fi) so I was stunned to learn that they were first introduced in the 1930s--but have simply been too expensive to really take off. In the 1990s, maybe early 2000s they were reasonably affordable (I no longer recall precisely, but I think they were not even twice as expensive as a similar electric range) but around that same time, "cooking with gas" became quite a meme. I think it was perhaps 2000 or 2001 when I first noticed young people bragging that "real chefs cook on high" or somesuch, and being snobby about cooking over gas flame. Wikipedia tells me the "Food Network" launched in the early 1990s, so I have my guesses about how that particular meme wormed its way into people's minds.

However in trying to source some of my own memories on appliance trends, I was intrigued to find this year-old article about the "bitter breakup with gas stoves" on our collective horizon. So I'm not really sure this particular culture war issue has been any more bizarre (or out-of-nowhere) than any other--a Biden appointee really did suggest a gas stove ban, and legacy news media did more or less immediately castigate Republicans for pouncing on that.

I do not presently have an induction stove. But I would like one. Maybe someday!

First time I'm hearing that induction stoves are expensive!

I had one in India during my student days, I believe it cost about $200, and it did all I could ask of it. I don't think I even used it above the 1000 watt setting, though I believe it went up to 2000.

First time I'm hearing that induction stoves are expensive!

Well, they used to be a lot more expensive. However--

I had one in India during my student days, I believe it cost about $200, and it did all I could ask of it.

Are you referring to a simple hot plate style burner? Because you can get those in the United States today for under $50. I don't know how long ago you were a student, but even today in the United States, $200 would be a lot for a student to pay for such an appliance (Amazon has single-burner hot plates for under $20). But if you're talking about a drop-in countertop range with multiple burners, or even a complete range/oven combo, then yeah, $200 was probably "not expensive."

I love my induction range/top and am eternally regretfull that I didn't buy a double over the single one I have. The only downside as the OP mentioned is the need for specific cooking ware (having to carry a magnet when shopping is a little onerous) but the advantages clearly outpace that little downside.

Matt Bruenig has been on a trollish one-man crusade against gas stoves for a long time now. Amusingly some right-wingers have now accused him of "supporting the current thing" or whatever, when he was basically literally the only man caring about the "current thing" before it became current.

The whole debate is rather esoteric for me since the only place in Finland where you might find gas stoves (outside of restaurant contexts) would be some ancient summer cabins. It's electric or induction everywhere - though, of course, one might argue that the triangulatory option is not even the induction stove but something else entirely.

Can't wait to cook some fried rice, then some pasta, then some beef stew, all in my brand-new air fryer (mini oven), which will inevitably get stored inside of my actual oven.

I'm not even sure if that was supposed to be sarcastic, but you can cook all those in the air fryer.

I just want to give a shout-out to the person who reported this post with the complaint "bad food."

I'm being sarcastic. I'd rather be caught dead that make those things on an air fryer.

LEDs ended up just being simply superior to both in every way. Progress ended the culture war.

I still find the light quality and dimming ability of LEDs to be significantly worse, so I buy mostly incandescent bulbs for my home. I was puzzled by talk about the "ban" because I can still buy incandescent. But wait ... now that I look it up there is a new rule going to effect in August 2023 that does effectively ban most remaining incandescent bulbs -- https://insights.regencylighting.com/was-there-actually-an-incandescent-light-bulb-ban That is bad -- why isn't there more outrage about this new rule? Maybe I am weird and most people are happy with LED's, or maybe the government has just done a "good" job at boiling the frog slowly enough that the defense got worn away. First you pass the law that allows for the ban but doesn't actually implement ban, so the incandescent fans are assuaged. Then you gradually ramp up the ban through arcane bureaucratic process and rule-making that is very hard for populist politics to defend against.

One big issue is some people with autism and similar sensory disorders can see flicker in both LED and CFL bulbs. But we’re not a loud enough lobby.

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Does the ban apply to car headlights? LEDs in cars are horrendously awful for all the other drivers on the road.

the light quality

Look for high-CRI bulbs if you're interested in this. For physical art in particular it's great to be able to find (more expensive) LED bulbs that combine a relatively full color spectrum with a high color temperature, something you could previously only have during daylight hours.

In the US gas stoves are mainly a blue-state / higher-end restaurant phenomenon, so I found the conservative media response to be a bit baffling because it's not really their fortress under assault here.

State-level maps are a poor tool for looking at this. Upper middle-class white Americans generally enjoy nice stoves, smokers, and grills, regardless of their political leanings.

I'm going to find it incredibly depressing that this is likely to become an identity topic in which left-leaning Americans collectively decide that they always knew that gas stoves were causing health issues. I should not be able to discern someone's politics from whether they have a gas stove or not, but I'll probably be able to do so in the coming years. Tip of the cap to AOC for staking out the "everyone knows that gas stoves are for stupid people" position.

Gas stoves are the perfect meme for our place in the culture war, akin to paper straws a few years ago. The blues get to broadcast virtue without painful honest signals like commuting by bike, going vegetarian, or not flying to vacations. The reds get to clutch pearls about the absurdity of the modern progressive hivemind without it being twisted into them looking heartless or X-ist.

Politics are a hobby like any other. This is two NFL fans arguing whether low QBR is a good stat for evaluating Kirk Cousins; the Vikings fan says no, the Packers fan says yes.

I didn't realize there was culture war over paper straws. I just avoid restaurants that use them because they suck ass at being straws.

Agreed, I've never gotten the slightest pushback from anyone when I say that paper straws are the worst invention to come into common use this century. Even people that want to ban plastic straws agree that paper is just an awful solution.

Infuriatingly there are great non-plastic straws that exist out there. I'm sure they're another order of magnitude more expensive, but paper straws are a crime against humanity.

I bought some glass straws for my house and later replaced them with plastic because they were too hard to clean, but the glass straws were much nicer. They feel better to eat with, like the difference between a metal fork and a plastic one. The rounded end of a glass straw felt nice on my tongue.

Tried some made of agave (don't recall what restaurant this was at) and while the texture was strange it worked well and didn't turn into a soggy mess. No idea how much they cost vs. plastic though.

Edit: I'm sure wholesale prices are different but I can find plastic straws for 2 cents per on Amazon (and potentially cheaper if I looked harder) while the cheapest agave straws I saw on Amazon were 10 cents per, so not completely terrible.

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