Three things from our pod this week with National Review’s Noah Rothman:
If you understand environmentalism as a religion, and deprivation from useful things as articles of faith, your life will be much simpler.
The useful things many will lose in America — lawnmowers, gas grills, gas stoves, water heaters, etc, etc — have a negligible impact on the environment overall.
Many of the earth-saving “advances” advocated by the new enviro-puritans are little more than fads based on spurious science.
To paraphrase our guest this week, it’s only Republican nutjobs who believe there’s a federal and state effort to take your gas stove away. But you must give up your gas stove because it is a leading cause of asthma among minorities and the poor.
If you, like your podcast hosts, are flummoxed by this baffling contradiction, welcome to America. To summarize our discussion, in the future, you will not be allowed to have certain things like gas lawnmowers and grills, plastic straws, gas cars, plastic bags, and pretty much anything else that makes your life convenient, run smoothly, or is integral to your business. The reasons for this are (pick your code words): racial equity, minority health, turtles, the environment, the ozone layer, Greta Thunberg.
If you, like us, are inclined to have deference to the same regulators who saved us from lead paint, made us wear seatbelts, stopped us from driving at 88 with a bellyful of beer and more, then… stop. Because these aren’t the good guy regulators and activists that made America a safer place to live. These are the idiots who saw a TikTok about a sad turtle with straws in its nose (a terrible thing), and thought all straws should be banned. These are the idiots who read one study that suggested that if you seal yourself into a room with plastic, it might be bad if you turned on your gas stove, and then started banning gas stoves.
This is through the looking-glass stuff. It appears that we need to relearn the lessons of the 20th century about the evils of socialism: a small group of elites telling the rest of the country how to live, rather than trusting the common sense wisdom of the American people to choose for themselves.
None of this is to suggest that the environment is an issue that deserves disdain, or that things should not be done to adapt to or mitigate changes in the climate. Not in the least. Rather, it is to suggest that there are an insufficient number of serious adults who work in this space and who actually are able to weigh the costs and benefits to the, er, environment of various measures. Windmills use rare earths. Batteries use toxic metals. Electric cars are made out of, wait for it, plastics. Plastics are… petroleum products. Does that mean that windmills are worse than coal plants? Of course not. But neither it is a slam dunk case.
The problem (as we’ve said ad nauseam) is that environmentalism has become a religion, replete with articles of faith, a creed, indulgences, and other evidence of the things that religion tried to work through in the Reformation. And the most important thing that you can do if you really, truly believe is to give up on the things in your life that work in exchange for… well, they’ll let you know later.
HIGHLIGHTS
Give us the details on the war on things that work?
NR: At the local level, municipal level, and at the state level in some states, there's an effort to retire the two-stroke combustion engine, which you find in a lot of lawn care equipment. In exchange, they would substitute electric equipment, which is efficient if you are trying to cover a half-acre plot or so. But if you sit on a little bit more land than that, you're going to find that anything that isn't corded or gas powered isn't going to get job done. It's going to demand a lot more money from you, a lot more time. You can see this in efficiency standards in dishwashers, the efforts to remove from the consumer's hands disposable plastic bags that you would get at a big box shop, for example. All of this is done in the name of environmental protection, but its effects on the environment are minimal, negligible, barely register when you actually look at the data. The effect primarily is to make your life a little bit less convenient, a little bit more expensive.
If it doesn’t help the environment, what’s it about?
NR: Ultimately it boils down to, my conclusion, that a particular segment of the technocratic left is attempting to impose on you a lifestyle brand, one to which they subscribe but you may not, but you're not going to be allowed to have to have any choice in this matter. This is something that's going to be done to you for your own good and for the benefit of the planet, ostensibly. But in general it's just a way to make your life a little bit more difficult in the name of an idea that's promulgated on the left that has very little substance to it.
What else are we going to lose?
NR: So you said your water heater and gas stove, for example, but yeah, also your furnace, we talked about your AC. What they want to replace that with are something called heat pumps, which are effective, in that they do what they're supposed to do. Although if you live in a colder climate, you're going to have to use a conventional furnace to supplement your heat. However, they're going to require a lot more maintenance and a lot more repair, and usually faster replacement times, in part because they don't get a season off. They're running constantly all year long. You could say much the same for, as you said, dishwashers, which is just, they apply new efficiency standards. Efficiency, by the way, has become a euphemism for using fewer inputs, water, air, fuel, oil, what have you, rather than doing the job efficiently.
In fact, they don't do the job efficiently. Efficiency no longer means efficiency. It just means you get to use fewer inputs. All the two-stroke equipment that you have, for example, in places like Marin County, where in particular there is an attack on leaf blowers. Leaf blowers as a quality of life issue has become something of a fixation in the progressive dominated suburbs. And maybe what works in Marin County works in Marin County, but it doesn't necessarily work in any of the places that are outside the exurban radius around major metropolitan areas in which contributors to USA Today and the New York Times reside.
So a lot of these prescriptions are little more than fads?
NR: My particular favorite is the dissolving prescriptions around plastic straws. The plastic straw ban was conceived as, and I kid you not, conceived as a result of a viral video that a Texas A&M University researcher published of a sea turtle, sad sea turtle with a plastic straw lodged in its nostril. And that was a very sad video, but public policy should not be made on the basis of very sad videos. It took off.
It took off as a result of this video, and it became a cause celebre to replace these things with paper straws, which do not work. They dissolve into a cloud of particulate in your drink and your mouth and make life just a little bit more annoying. They're subsequently disappearing slowly. You can see it perceptibly though, but only as a result of this failed experiment that you were drafted into participating in. A lot of people could have foreseen this had any thought been applied to it, but it wasn't a thoughtful enterprise. It was a knee-jerk response to an emotional aspect. And you see this across the spectrum when it comes to the efforts to prescribe a lot of access to these tools, that consumer preference should have no play in the matter.
What about the growing bans on gas leaf blowers and lawnmowers?
NR: One of the people that I quote in this piece, Michael Shapiro, who authored a op-ed for the Press Democrat Southern California, presented himself as a savior of migrant workers. 'Cause these things, they operate just inches from their lungs and their ears, and they're kicking up dust and mold and fecal matter, and it's really bad for the poor, marginalized migrant workers who do this labor, which is an admission against interest on his part.
But if you scratch a little bit deeper, and he goes into this in the piece, what he's really after is the quality of life in his neighborhood, where he wants to "Hear ourselves think and listen to birds sing and enjoy the sound of neighbors playing Mozart." His concern is not for the poor migrant workers. He's using them as a tool, an avatar to advance a narrative that would provide him with a better quality of life even at the expense of theirs.
And the widening bans on gas stoves?
NR: One of the authors of the study [that “documented” harms from gas stoves], at least the manager of the institute that produced it, the Rocky Mountain Institute admitted to the Washington Examiner that this is a summary of past studies and it, "Does not assume or estimate a causal relationship." About banning natural gas hookups nationally, that suggested that it was unhelpful to use a gas range in an, "Airtight room with clear plastic sheets sealing it." So yeah, if you sealed up your room to do some, I don't know, home renovation, don't cook in there. Good advice. Not something you need the progressive technocrats to hold your hand and walk you through. The deployment of, as you say, emotional blackmail to justify this, suggesting that minorities and people with disabilities and at-risk health defects, they'll be hardest hit by this thing that affects all people universally according to their own estimates.
But can our grid handle the electrification of everything?
NR: When it comes to the grid, it seems as though generally the grid has become a secondary consideration for a particular sort that's advocating the electrification of anything. Yes, most of our energy mix comes from the combustion of fossil fuels, which by the way is also where most of our heat trapping emissions comes from.
The attack on household appliances is designed to rid, based on EPA estimates, the 13% of emissions that contribute to the United States' total overall emissions picture. It's a fraction of a fraction of the problem that environmental activists say they're attempting to address. And all of it pales in comparison to what we see abroad, places like China and India and other countries that are industrializing at a rapid rate and are combusting fossil fuels in order to generate the power that they need to industrialize. It's not justified by the statistics, it's not justified by the outputs that we can generate in this country, in this country alone, or even in the West. So you're left with, what you have to concede is something that looks a lot more like the promotion of a certain type of lifestyle. Certain preferences, certain habits, certain behaviors that progressive technocratic activists would like to see in the public and just doesn't see enough of and wants to cajole you into doing, to emulate them, to behave more like them, which they regard as virtuous behavior.
How were the reactions to your piece?
NR: The reaction that I got was generally, and I mean nine out of 10, was sometimes even in the same sentence: "This isn't happening, and also it's good that it's happening." It is simultaneously a figment of your imagination, a bizarre, paranoid, conspiratorial fantasy about progressive technocrats trying to come into your home and remove the gas power range from your house, and also climate change is an existential threat, and we have to get rid of the gas power range in your house. This thought exists in the same person's head and in the same sentence that they express. They do not see the contradiction in it because it is not a thoughtful exercise. It is purely an expression of faith and conviction, and an expression of faith and conviction in public to which other people must be privy, because it's all part of the justification of the phrase that I borrow from the Puritans book, "Their visible sainthood," the sacrifices that they have made along the way to become full congregants, full members of this social covenant of which we should all be a part, whether you want to or not.
But if Taylor Swift and Leo DiCaprio want these things, isn’t that good?
NR: These individuals who are gallivanting around the planet in private planes in order to proselytize for economic or environmental solutions to the climate problem, I think they would perceive themselves as the vanguard of a particular movement and a moment in history and they have earned themselves indulgences that allow them to use these tools in order to take those tools out as many hands as possible. So I don't think they perceive themselves as villains in the story. They would probably see themselves more as the executors of policies that will produce a better and brighter future.
How do we rid ourselves of these hypocritical know-nothings?
NR: Well, I wish I had a silver bullet to offer you. At the close of the particular article that we're talking about, I do recommend going out and voting in your interest. But the only solution that I can offer, and that I offer in this particular piece and in my book, The Rise of the New Puritans, is to laugh at these people, is to make mockery of it, to make fun of them. They are so self-serious that they cannot accept the idea that their policy preferences have made them into fastidious busy bodies, caricatures that deserve to be mocked.
There is no industry dedicated to doing it. There's no comedic enterprise out there that is lampooning these people who make fools of themselves on a semi-regular basis, because they're so sensitive to it, but that leaves a lot of comedy fodder on the table. There's a lot of untapped veins of humor in our progressive politics that somebody should be taking the reins on. I do my best, I'm not a professional, but I do my best to illustrate some of the absurdity here and give you permission to laugh at it.
Full transcript here.
SHOWNOTES
The War on Things That Work (National Review, May 25, 2023)
The Crusade against Things That Work Is Coming for Your AC (National Review, May 3 2023)
The Rise of the New Puritans: Fighting Back Against Progressives’ War on Fun (Noah Rothman)
The New Puritans (National Review, July 12 2022)
The Slow Death of AM Radio (National Review, May 15 2023)
With summer power grid reliability in question, EPA rule could intensify challenges (The Hill, June 1 2023)
Consumer Safety Commission Walks Back Gas-Stove Threat amid Backlash (National Review, January 11, 2023)
Democrats’ Letter to CPSC Chair (December 21, 2022)
AOC fires back at ‘Republican meltdown’ over gas stoves: ‘There is very concerning evidence’ (Fox, January 13, 2023)
· Gas stove exception for celebrity chef José Andrés rankles local restaurant owners: ‘California is crazy’ (Fox, May 2023)
The government is coming for gas stoves, it’s just not the federal government (Fast Company, January 14, 2023)
California set to ban gas heaters (Gizmodo, September 26, 2022)
N.Y.C.’s Gas Ban Takes Fight Against Climate Change to the Kitchen (NYT, December 15, 2021)
State and local government decarbonization efforts (Building Decarb Coalition)
States that outlaw gas bans account for 31% of US residential/commercial gas use (S&P Global, June 9 2022)
17 other states consider adopting California’s ban on new gas vehicle sales (CBT News, September 7 2023)
Biden Regulators Are Coming for Your Furnace (National Review, October 20, 2022)
The Gas Industry Is Paying Instagram Influencers to Gush Over Gas Stoves (Mother Jones, June 17, 2020)
How big a deal is the Inflation Reduction Act? (The Economist, August 12, 2022)
AGA Statement on the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health Report (AGA, January 10, 2023)
RELEASE: RMI admits their report does not demonstrate relationship between gas stoves and asthma (AGA, January 13, 2023)
What to know about the study behind the push to ban gas stoves (Washington Examiner, January 20, 2023)
We need to talk about your gas stove, your health and climate change (NPR, October 7, 2021)
Quotes
FERC Commissioner Mark Christie on EPA rule: “one nameplate megawatt of wind or solar is simply not equal to one nameplate megawatt of gas, coal or nuclear”
FERC Commissioner James Danly: “as the wholesale markets’ process are distorted by subsidies, the generation assets with the attributes required for system stability will retire and system stability will be imperiled.”
AOC: "I do think it’s funny the absolute, utter Republican meltdown where they're like ‘you can take my gas stove from my cold dead hands,’ or, ‘how dare you talk about gas stoves, you have a gas stove.’"
John Heilemann on MSNBC: And I think -- but that is the sugar high, you know, political parties get addicted to sugar highs," he said. "It just happens that the sugar high that the Republican Party is addicted to is like bad bathtub meth. It's like they're high on that sugar… it’s rotting their ability to be competitive outside this very narrow piece of the electorate that’s willing to believe this bulls***"
MSNBC host Joe Scarborough: Oh, my god. Oh, my god. This is an issue that you look, and you want to see how politics gets crazy. One side gets like a small kernel of something. And they put it in the ground, and they water it, water it, try to get it to grow, and so this gas stove thing, it gets some bureaucrats saying something that has no power, and then suddenly, you have Ron DeSantis, ‘I’m going to protect your gas stoves.’ Everybody talking about gas stoves. It’s so stupid”
Mehdi Hasan on MSNBC: “A made-up ban on gas stoves illustrates just how much contempt the right has for its base. No one disrespects red state America more than the red state politicians who treat their voters like idiots”