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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31065 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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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.

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