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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.
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 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.
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.
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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).
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