Joanna Gaines’ kitchen set, with its $60,000 range.
My daughters — when they’re here — and my wife tend to watch cooking shows like The Kitchen, The Pioneer Woman, and Giada in Italy, though, admittedly, Giada in Italy is watched as much for the Italian scenery as anything else. Joanna Gaines has just started her own cooking show, Magnolia Table, and she has the ultimate, a La Cornue Chateau range, a hand-crafted gas appliance that starts at $60,300, not including shipping and delivery. It’s simply the most expensive version of what it seems that every cooking show has, and every cook wants: a gas stove.
Molly Yeh in her set kitchen; note the old style electric range.
While I don’t spend an inordinate time in front of the boob tube, I do like to watch the various house hunting shows like Living Alaska, Restoring Galveston, and Building of the Grid. And one frequently noted request of the prospective homeowners is a gas range. Gas is on instantly, and is much more easily adjustable.
But that’s not what the global warming climate change activists think you should have . . . or be allowed to have! From The Washington Post:
The battle over climate change is boiling over on the home front
Municipalities want new buildings to go all electric, spurning gas-fired stoves and heating systems. The gas industry disagrees
By Steven Mufson | February 23, 2021 | 7:00 AM EST
A new front has opened in the battle over climate change: The kitchen.
Cities and towns across the country are rewriting local building codes so that new homes and offices would be blocked from using natural gas, a fossil fuel that when burned emits carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. New laws would force builders to install heat pumps instead of gas furnaces and electric kitchen stoves instead of gas burners.
When we moved to our retirement fixer-upper in July of 2017, it was total electric. In January of 2018, a snow and ice storm hit, and knocked out the electricity. Since we’re out in the country, at pretty much the far end of Jackson Electric Cooperative’s service area, we’re among the last people to get power back, and it took 4½ days. My wife went to Lexington, and stayed at our daughter’s apartment, but I had to stay here, to care for the critters, and the plumbing.
It got down to 38º F in the house.
Gas fireplace in my computer room/den.
Without that fossil fuel, the place would become a not-very-much-fun place in the winter when the electricity goes out.
Local leaders say reducing the carbon and methane pollution associated with buildings, the source of 12.3 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, is the only way they can meet their 2050 zero-emission goals to curb climate change.
But the American Gas Association, a trade group, and its members are campaigning in statehouses across the country to prohibit the new local ordinances. Four states last year adopted such laws, and this year similar legislation has been introduced in 12 more.
“Logically the natural gas industry does not want to see its business end, so it’s doing what it can to keep natural gas in the utility grid mix,” said Marta Schantz, senior vice president of the Urban Land Institute’s Center for Building Performance. “But long term, if cities are serious about their climate goals, electric buildings are inevitable.”
What people want is what the climate control activists do not want people to have.
Of course, the timing of this article is interesting, considering the electricity outages due to the severe cold snap in the Lone Star State. The problems have been serious there, in part because of Texas’ large population, and because the state is simply not used to temperatures near 0º Fahrenheit. That the state has solidly Republican leadership has simply added to the impetus of the credentialed media to place blame.
But here in the Bluegrass State, we’ve had similar problems, just ones which haven’t gotten as much national media attention. From the Lexington Herald-Leader:
KY couple without electricity after ice, snow storm apparently froze to death
By Bill Estep | February 22, 2021 | 5:04 PM ESTA couple found dead in Laurel County Sunday apparently froze to death, Sheriff John Root said in a news release.
Autopsies conducted Monday on James Duff, 62, and his wife Dinah Duff, 63, of Laurel County determined their apparent cause of death as hypothermia, according to the release.
A person who knew the couple found them Sunday about 10:30 a.m. and called police. Officers from the sheriff’s office responded.
James Duff was lying in the yard of his home on Pine Hill — Brock Road, about five miles east of London. Dinah Duff was inside the house, according to a news release.
The house had no electricity for some period before the couple was found because of damage to power lines from ice and snow that hit the area earlier in the week, said Deputy Gilbert Acciardo, spokesman for Root’s office.
Tens of thousands of people in Kentucky lost power recently after trees and limbs weighted by ice fell and knocked down lines.
Mr and Mrs Duff had apparently attempted to build a fire in their fireplace, but the home had no secondary heating source. The article does not tell us what the primary heat source for the house was, but it was apparently dependent upon electricity to run.
Our house in Jim Thorpe.
Our house in Jim Thorpe had steam radiators powered by a heating oil boiler, but the boiler required electricity to start and run. By the time the sparktricity came back on, at about 6:00 PM on the 26th, it was around 50º F inside.
Because the house did have a chimney for a wood stove installed by the previous owner, we later bought a wood stove, but never went through another prolonged power outage there again.
An anecdote? Perhaps, though, despite the protests of some, the plural of anecdote really is data! That episode pointed out to me that Mr and Mrs Duff could have had a primary heating source that wasn’t electric, but it still depended upon electricity to run.
A cheery fire in our wood stove in Jim Thorpe, December 18, 2016.
But, as noted above, because we have a secondary heat source of which the Patricians disapprove, if it had gone out, we wouldn’t have suffered Mr and Mrs Duff’s fate.
The socialist nature of the argument comes from the Post article originally cited:
“The average American likes choice and doesn’t want to be told what kind of fuel to use in their homes,” said Karen Harbert, chief executive of the American Gas Association. “Municipalities cannot take away that choice.”
“The natural gas industry frames it as a choice issue; we frame it as a choice issue,” said Johanna Neumann, a senior director at Environment America, an environmental group. “The industry frames it as a choice for people who want to use natural gas. We see it as a choice for a community to decide its energy future.”
One group want to leave your choices up to you; the other want to have the “community” dictate your “choice” to you. Of course, for the longest time the left have been pro-choice on exactly one thing.
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