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Notes -
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.
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"
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.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'.
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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.
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