The [ughh!] Magnolia Network is, this Saturday morning, running reruns of This Old House, season 41, originally broadcast in 2019-2020, a major, expensive, remodel of a home in Westerly, Washington County, Rhode Island. Westerly is a beach resort town which in the 2020 election gave 55.6% of its votes to Joe Biden; Washington County as a whole voted 58.57% to 39.20% for Mr Biden.

And what did the obviously wealthy homeowners, in liberal Rhode Island, in a show originally meant for the liberal Public Broadcasting System, choose for this project? One episode shows the installation of a 1,000 gallon underground propane tank, for their heating system, their water heater, their range, and their fireplace.

The homeowners chose comfort, the homeowners chose fossil fuels!

Now, it is entirely possible that Scott and Shayla Adams, the homeowners,^[1]The homeowners’ names were given on both the show and the website, so I am not doxxing them. were among the smarter people in Westerly, and voted for President Trump; I have no way of knowing that. But in one of our more liberal states, in very blue New England, we’re seeing reasonably wealthy homeowners eschewing the calls of the global warming climate change activists to go all-electric, and choosing what they believe is the better choice for themselves.

I found this story on my Google reader feed on my iPad on Monday morning, and of course it caught my eye . . . because, due to what the Weather Channel called ‘Winter Storm Izzy,’ ice and heavy wet snow weighed down power lines and tree limbs, and we lost electricity at 8:04 PM EST on Sunday.

The campaign to ban gas stoves is heating up

Mike Bebernes · Senior Editor · Saturday, January 15, 2022 · 4:56 PM

Over the past three years, dozens of cities across the country have banned natural gas hookups in newly constructed buildings as part of a growing campaign to reduce carbon emissions from homes. The movement scored a major victory last month, when New York City’s outgoing Mayor Bill de Blasio signed into law a ban on gas hookups in new buildings.

Though new laws apply to the entire home, the policy debate often focuses on one room in particular: the kitchen. Gas stoves account for a relatively small share of the emissions released by a typical household, but they’ve become a proxy for a larger fight over how far efforts to curb at-home natural gas consumption in the name of fighting climate change should go.

Natural gas consumption accounts for 80 percent of fossil fuel emissions from residential and commercial buildings, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. One study estimated that New York’s ban on its own would create an emissions reduction comparable to taking 450,000 cars off the road. But the movement has met significant pushback. About 35 percent of U.S. homes use gas for cooking, and surveys show that many people are resistant to switching to an electric or induction range. The gas industry has also launched a massive lobbying campaign that has helped convince 19 Republican-led states to preemptively bar local governments from imposing bans on natural gas.

There’s more at the original.

I have previously noted that “it seems that everybody wants a gas range.”

We did, too. So when we remodeled our kitchen in 2018, we installed what Mrs Pico wanted, a gas — propane in our case, being out in the country beyond natural gas lines — range, replacing the old electric one that came with the house when we bought it.

We had other reasons, as well. Our house was all electric, and our first winter here was miserable. It got colder than usual for a winter in central/eastern Kentucky, and the electric heat pump just wouldn’t keep up very well. Then, when we lost electricity for 4½ days in an ice storm, it was decided: we would not depend just on sparktricity for heat, cooking and hot water. We added a propane fireplace and water heater as well, so if we lose electricity again — and we’re pretty much at the end of the service line, last ones to get service restored out here — we’ll still have heat and hot water and can cook.

Yes, my wife and I remodeled that kitchen all by ourselves, with help from my sisters and, occasionally, a nephew, but no ‘professionals’ were involved. The plumbing, the electrical, the drywall, the floor and backsplash time, the cabinet installation, the wallpaper, the window installation, everything you see — and you can click on the image to enlarge it — with the exception of the red quartz countertop installation was done by us.

Last March we had the floods, and while the flooding did not damage our house, it did trash the HVAC system. It was in the mid-forties in March, and, after a day getting the propane tank back in position — it had floated, but since I had tied it to a tree, didn’t float away — we had heat from our propane fireplace.

And the past few days? The electricity went out at 8:04 PM on Sunday, and wasn’t restored until 5:45 PM on Tuesday. While it got up to around 40º Tuesday afternoon, it was below freezing on Sunday, and on Sunday and Monday nights.

So, what did we have? We had heat, from the propane stove, and we had hot water, from the propane hot water heater, and we even had French toast for breakfast this morning, cooked on the propane stove.

Were it up to the climate activists, we’d have been cold, dirty, and hungry.

Climate change activists see gas bans as a powerful way to reduce the greenhouse gases created by buildings, which account for about 13 percent of total U.S. emissions. They argue that — unlike burgeoning technologies like a green power grid and electric vehicles — clean alternatives to gas heaters, appliances and stoves are readily available to most consumers. Critics of the bans, on the other hand, are skeptical of how much they’ll really reduce emissions, worry about increasing costs for homeowners and argue that market-based solutions will be most effective at promoting a transition to electrified homes.

Thing is, that’s not what people want! In it’s 2018 season, This Old House worked on it’s ‘Generation Next‘ house in Newton, Massachusetts, and the obviously well-to-do homeowners in very, very liberal Massachusetts, in Middlesex County, which gave 71.00% of its votes to Joe Biden, chose natural gas for heating, hot water, and cooking.

Perhaps the homeowners were among the 26.11% of Middlesex County voters who cast their ballots for President Trump!

For my family, gas was the logical choice. We live way out in the country, and when the power goes out, it can be out for a long time. For my older daughter, who bought a 1924 bungalow in Lexington, when her heating system had to be replaced — which was when she bought the place, and we knew it — the choice was also gas, though she didn’t update to a gas range. In the middle of the city, if the power goes out, it’s unlikely to be out for days at a time. A gas furnace can keep a home nice and warm even on the coldest of days, something heat-pump based HVAC systems have trouble achieving.

But if these choices were the logical ones for my family, they were choices the climate activists not only didn’t want us to take, but don’t even want us to have. They want their choices to be our choices, our only choices, because, well because they’re just better than us.

A few days ago, William Teach noted an article from The Business Standard:

What if democracy and climate mitigation are incompatible?

The COP framework is ill-matched to solving climate change in a timely fashion because it does not solve the international governance dilemma at its heart

by Cameron Abadi | Sunday, January 9, 2022 | 11:05 AM

In the past 14 months, the United States and Germany both held national elections that placed climate change policy squarely at the center of national debate. The fact that two of the world’s five largest economies committed to addressing the world’s most pressing crisis through public discourse followed by public voting was an unprecedented democratic experiment.

It did not work out as optimists hoped. On the one hand, the victorious parties in both countries vowed to achieve what was necessary to prevent the worst effects of climate change from occurring, in accordance with the international climate agreement unanimously approved in Paris in 2015.

But on the other hand, in neither country can the resulting policies be described as fulfilling that promise.

There’s a lot more at the original. But the two money paragraphs are further down:

Representatives from the US and German governments say their policies are the result of the necessary compromises demanded by the democratic process. But it is fair to wonder whether that is just another way of restating the problem. . . . .

Democracy works by compromise, but climate change is precisely the type of problem that seems not to allow for it. As the clock on those climate timelines continues to tick, this structural mismatch is becoming increasingly exposed.

Now comes Talking Points Memo:

This Supreme Court Case Could Make Or Break The Biden Presidency (And The Planet)

by Kate Riga | Thursday, January 13, 2022 | 10:29 AM EST

The Supreme Court will hear a case in February that could decide the future of the Biden presidency — and gut its ability to mitigate climate change in the face of congressional inaction.

The case, West Virginia v. EPA, centers on the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. Should the Court move to limit what the EPA can do, that, alone, would be incredibly significant.

But the Court, with its heavily conservative slant, could take the opportunity to go further, slashing the power of federal agencies across the board, a move that would hobble the Biden administration’s ability to enact its climate agenda as well as a long list of other priorities.

“There is a significant likelihood that how the Court handles this case will affect how much leeway agencies have to interpret authority statutes going forward,” Jonathan Adler, founding director of the Coleman P. Burke Center for Environmental Law at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law, told TPM.

On environmental policy in particular, Congress has been unable or unwilling to pass major legislation for about 30 years, a stasis that has continued even as the dire threat of climate change has become evident. That leaves agencies like the EPA as the only entities available to take up the slack, slowing climate change through their regulatory and rule-making abilities. If the Court limits the EPA’s power to regulate, there are no strong, dependable avenues left on the federal level to make environmental policy.

Here is the fundamental error that the left assume: that because Congress has not passed the legislation they want, Congress has somehow failed to act. No, by not changing the law, Congress have said, in effect, we are happy enough with the laws already on the books.

Fear of the Court’s potential for aggression here is not mere speculation. Last week’s arguments over a couple of Biden administration vaccine mandates gave the justices ample time to air their skepticism over the exercise of agency power, even in a case concerning health-care facilities where the agency’s congressionally-given authority is fairly explicit.

One thing is abundantly clear: Congress have given up far too much of their power to the executive branch, and mid-level bureaucrats who write ‘regulations’ which Congress would never pass if the members had to do something really radical like actually vote on them. If the President — any President — sometimes seems like a tinpot dictator, it’s because Congress have ceded to the executive too much authority in the first place.

But the Court could go further, using this case in its quest to limit agency power. One of the tools the conservative justices could use to achieve that is the major questions doctrine, which holds that some issues are of such economic and political significance that the Court will assume that Congress did not intend to delegate that power to the agency unless the statute is specific.

It’s squishy, and gives the justices significant power to smack down regulations: how do you determine levels of economic and political significance? How do you decide what statutory language is specific enough to count?

The conservative justices also showed a willingness to approach cases through the lens of this doctrine in the vaccine mandate case last week, many suggesting in their questioning that Congress needed to be much more specific in its conveyance of authority.

Heaven forfend! that the Supreme Court say that it should take an act of Congress, rather than a decree from OSHA, that people would have to accept an injection into their bodies, or lose their jobs!

Do we really want to give to bureaucrats the authority to require the acceptance of a vaccine the long-term effects of which have yet to be tested? Do we really want to give to bureaucrats the authority to completely alter our entire energy production and transportation systems? That’s what Talking Points Memo seems to want, for one simple reason: what they want government to do are things which 535 individual Representatives and Senators would never pass, because they are, in the end, responsible to their constituents, to the actual voters.

If the public don’t want it, it should not be forced on us by government.

One of the channels that’s on television with some frequency at the Pico household, especially when my daughters come to visit — which is almost every weekend — is the Food Network, Channel 231 on DirecTV, and one of the shows is Girl Meets Farm, starring Molly Yeh Hagen. She’s a very pretty and personable cook, working in what appears to be a small kitchen on the family farm with her husband Nick Hagen.

Unlike Joanna Gaines, and her imported $53,000+ La Cornue Chateau range, if you’ll look in the lower right hand corner of the photo, Mrs Hagen uses an old electric range. Not even one of the newer, glass-topped stoves, but one with the curlicue electric heating elements.

She’s also unlike most of the people that you see on the various house hunter and remodeling shows on HGTV, the DIY Network and others, in which it seems that everybody wants a gas range.

We did, too. So when we remodeled our kitchen in 2018, we installed what Mrs Pico wanted, a gas — propane in our case, being out in the country beyond natural gas lines — range, replacing the old electric one that came with the house when we bought it.

We had other reasons, as well. Our house was all electric, and our first winter here was miserable. It got colder than usual for a winter in central/eastern Kentucky, and the electric heat pump just wouldn’t keep up very well. Then, when we lost electricity for 4½ days in an ice storm, it was decided: we would not depend just on sparktricity for heat, cooking and hot water. We added a propane fireplace and water heater as well, so if we lose electricity again — and we’re pretty much at the end of the service line, last ones to get service restored out here — we’ll still have heat and hot water and can cook.

Yes, my wife and I remodeled that kitchen all by ourselves, with help from my sisters and, occasionally, a nephew, but no ‘professionals’ were involved. The plumbing, the electrical, the drywall, the floor and backsplash time, the cabinet installation, the wallpaper, the window installation, everything you see — and you can click on the image to enlarge it — with the exception of the quartz countertop installation was done by us. Pardon me while I pat myself on the back.  🙂

Well, we might like a gas range, and most homebuyers want gas ranges, but it seems like the climate change activists don’t think you should be allowed to have one. From National Review:

The Democrats’ War on Gas Stoves Is a Slap at Cooking Cultures

By Judson Berger | October 17, 2021 | 6:30 AM EDT

“No way in hell you are going to put a wok on an electric stove.”

That was Steven Lee, a San Francisco official and restaurant investor, as quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle last year after the city’s Board of Supervisors voted to outlaw natural gas in new buildings.

Nevertheless, they persisted. Per the Sierra Club, the quickening campaign to phase out natural gas recently notched its 50th city-level win in California alone. (Take a bow, Encinitas!) No. 50, as with some others, has “situational exemptions” for restaurants and the like, but the overall push to compel an all-electric design for homes and commercial buildings understandably has had chefs and home cooks worried, roughly for the reasons articulated by Steven Lee.

Berkeley was the pilot light of this movement. The city was the first to ban gas connections in new buildings in 2019, something the California Restaurant Association is still fighting in court. The speed at which other municipalities followed, from Seattle to New York to other cities across California, only underscores how the culture of lawmaking often is the culture of fads.

Berkeley was the “pilot light” of the movement?  Guffaws!

There’s more at the original, an no, it’s not hidden behind a paywall.

I wonder is self-proclaimed foodie Amanda Marcotte uses a gas range in her South Philadelphia apartment.

Chefs aired similar concerns in a Wall Street Journal piece published over the summer. The Journal detailed how some cities include carve-outs for gas stoves in their natural-gas restrictions (after all, it’s the heating of homes and water, not stoves, that gobbles up most natural gas around the house) but noted that advocates still see full electrification as the end goal.

That’s just it: gas for cooking is something of a luxury, a luxury that a lot of people want, but the heating of homes and water isn’t a luxury; it’s a necessity. Those 4½ days we were without electricity in January of 2018? Mrs Pico went to stay with our daughters in Lexington, where there was plenty of heat, but I had to stay here, to take care of the critters, and the plumbing. Staying in a house that got down to 38º F just before the power came back on wasn’t a whole lot of fun!

Of course, when the power did come back on, here in central/eastern Kentucky, it was coming from a fossil-fueled power plant!

As I noted in a tweet on Saturday, the show This Old House was featuring the remodeling of an 1879 home in Newton, Massachusetts. The homeowners, even in very liberal, very ‘blue’ state Massachusetts, has a natural gas fueled modern heating system installed, in a show first broadcast in 2018, and even “a wood-burning stove.” It seems that in cold, snowy New England, homeowners care less about climate change than they do about keeping warm in the winter.

The COVID-19 ‘pandemic’ has hastened a social change that was already happening. People were getting frustrated with the incredible urban density of our major cities, and the ever-increasing crime rates there, along with the problems of trying to bring up children in apartments with no outdoor space. It doesn’t matter how much money you have; bringing up children in your apartment in Central Park West still means that your kids have a long way to go to see things like actual grass and trees. From The Wall Street Journal:

The ‘Great Reshuffling’ Is Shifting Wealth to the Exurbs

The flow of white-collar workers to fringe outlying communities could reshape everything from transportation to real estate

By Laura Forman | Updated: June 25, 2021 | 2:51 PM ET

White collar workers are trading their expensive lives in the nation’s most densely populated areas for cheaper, greener pastures. Online real estate company Zillow Group calls it the “Great Reshuffling.”

These moves will reshape transportation, real estate and an emerging fixture of American life: the exurb.

Fringe outlying communities of major metropolitan regions were prized for their extreme privacy or more affordable housing before the pandemic, but were typically much less wealthy than the denser cities and affluent suburbs they surrounded.

I look at places like Hockessin, Delaware, where it was only a short commute, fewer than ten miles, from downtown Wilmington. While there was some gentrification going on in the city, out in Hockessin, when I lived there, 2000 to 2002, builders were building like mad in developments like Hockessin Green and Hockessin Chase, in part because New Castle County development ordinances restricted the number of homes which could be built on a 100-acre lot. This led to pricier homes built on larger lots, which meant larger lawns on which kids could play. These were things that the execs at MBNA and DuPont wanted.

With the restrictions brought on by COVID-19, telecommuting was put into practice where it could be, and as some urban professionals found that they could do their work from home, it became reasonable to continue that, at least for some days during the week, even as the restrictions were ending. Of course, with the recent surge, there’s more reason for corporations to allow more frequent telecommuting. Add to that reduced office costs, and there can be real reasons why companies which can have workers work from home to allow it to continue, at least for some days during the week.^[1]My younger daughter, an IT professional, worked from home for a few months during the shutdowns, and while she continued to be paid and worked, even she would admit that she was less productive while … Continue reading

The Great Reshuffling will likely make these far-flung exurbs richer and denser. The median household income across U.S. exurbs was $74,573 as of 2019, according to data from The American Communities Project. That likely ticked up over the last year as city dwellers in major job centers such as San Francisco and New York relocated to exurbs for the same or similar salaries. In 2019 the median household income in the San Francisco Bay Area was nearly $115,000 and in the New York metro area it was more than $83,000.

What can you get in New York City on an $83,000 income? Where I live now, you could get a house and acreage and grass and trees; in Manhattan, you’d get a shoebox apartment in a six-story walkup on 96^th Street!

A shift to the exurbs started years before the pandemic hit, according to data from the Brookings Institute, and the population of these more-remote places continued to swell with more white-collar workers even as the pandemic weakened. Why? These regions allow employees to be within commuting distance of cities as many firms ask workers to be back in the office for at least part of the work week. U.S. Postal Service data showed that between March and November of last year, 72% of those who filed for address changes in the Bay Area only moved as far as another Bay Area county.

Really? On February 20, 2020, 2305 Beasley Avenue in Antioch, California, sold for $360,000, and it’s just 1,174 ft², and wasn’t in good shape. It’s in Contra Costa County, the adjacent county to Oakland and Berkeley. I’m ‘familiar’ with the house because it was the one my parents bought when my father got back from Japan after the Korean war, and that’s where I lived up through the second grade.^[2]I tend to look up my past residences on real estate sites. Yes, I still recognize the place, even though I haven’t seen it since I was eight years old. The chain link fence is a new addition, … Continue reading It looks pretty rough in the photos, but those were from the site when it was for sale; perhaps the new owners have made some improvements.

The money stockpiled from leaving pricier areas, coupled with stimulus checks and enforced saving over the last year, are padding the bank accounts of these new movers. Rising credit scores are, in turn, enabling other major purchases such as cars. The new arrivals in the exurbs are finding they need their first or second automobile now that they are located in a more remote part of a metropolitan area. A January survey conducted by Engine Insights on behalf of Xperi DTS found 55% of millennials surveyed said car ownership was more important than ever.

But, but, but, the global warming climate change emergency activists want us to get away from personally owned vehicles, and commute by electric buses and trains. If the Journal story is correct, people are doing the opposite of that, moving into situations where cars are more important to them. Even if you commute by bus or train, odds are that you will need a car to get from your home to the commuter bus stop or train station. And now the ‘millennials,’ the group on which the global warming climate change emergency activists most heavily depend for political support are increasingly seeing personal vehicle ownership as important.

With a two car garage, I suppose the new owners of 2305 Beasley Avenue can install electric vehicle charging stations, and that’s what the urban professionals moving to the ‘exurbs’ are going to need.

But let’s face facts: what the global warming climate change emergency activists want is pretty much diametrically opposed to the American lifestyle and culture.