Tag Archives: #ClimateActivists

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The wealthy love them some fossil fuels!

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 remodeled kitchen; note the gas range. Click to enlarge.

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.

References

References
↑1 The homeowners’ names were given on both the show and the website, so I am not doxxing them.
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The climate activists don’t want you to have a choice! The truth is simple: the American left are pro-choice on exactly one thing

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.

Our remodeled kitchen, including the propane range! All of the work except the red quartz countertops was done by my family and me. Click to enlarge.

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.

Range from the Generation Next house, Newton, MA. Click to enlarge.

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!

Also see: William Teach, Your Fridge Is An Agent Of Climate Catastrophe Or Something

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.

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The left love them some authoritarian government . . . when they are in power

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.

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Weathering the storm

My good friend William Teach noted, ten days ago, an article by Saul Griffith, in which he claimed that, to save Mother Gaia, there was one thing that we absolutely had to do:

    Now, finally, much of the world has become convinced, first-hand, that global warming is not only real but heating up more rapidly than we expected, unleashing irreversible impacts. Many people feel despair and helplessness in the face of doomsday predictions already in evidence. And yet, I’m optimistic that we can solve this problem in time to keep our planet livable for future generations.

    I have to be optimistic. I’m the father of young children and I want them to not only survive what humanity has done to our planet, but experience the awe of the natural world that I enjoyed as a child. But I’m also a scientist, and I approach the problem like an engineer. What do we need to build to fight global warming? Can we do it in time to keep the planet under the 1.5-2.0 degrees centigrade warming that can avoid a tipping point toward climate disaster?

    Squinting at the data, I see a way forward, but the urgency can’t be underestimated. The answer is actually quite simple and requires no miracle technology: we must electrify everything, fast. That means not just the supply-side sources of energy; we’ve got to electrify everything on the demand-side—the things we use in our households and small businesses every day, including cars, furnaces, stoves, water heaters, and dryers. I’m optimistic because over the last two decades the advances and cost reductions in electric vehicles, solar cells, batteries, heat pumps, and induction cooking mean that what we need can now be purchased at roughly price parity with the fossil fuelled incumbent.

Mr Griffith doesn’t bother to tell us just how poorer Westerners, much less poorer people in the rest of the world, can simply afford to go out and replace working gas ranges with electric induction cooktops, or gas or heating oil furnaces with electric ones. Even the environmentally-conscious show, “This Old House,” showed remodeling of a house, in cold Massachusetts, adding a new gas-fired furnace, in 2018, because gas heat is simply more reliable and efficient in New England. I did have to replace my electric HVAC system last spring, as the old one was destroyed in the record flooding last March.[1]The river gauge jammed at 28.18 feet, so the flooding crest was guesstimated, but it was the historic crest, topping the previous record of 39.37 feet. The flooding got into the crawl space … Continue reading That was $5,896.00, and fortunately we had the money, but a lot of people around here did not.

In January of 2018, our first winter here, an ice storm knocked out the electricity for 4½ days . . . and our house was ell-electric. Electric heat pump for heating and cooling, electric range for cooking, and an electric water heater for hot water. My wife headed to our daughters’ apartment in Lexington and stayed there, nice and comfortably, but I had to stay at home, to take care of the critters, and make sure the plumbing didn’t freeze. I was able to get a lukewarm shower the second morning, as the water in the tank had cooled but wasn’t cold, but that was the extent of it.

By the time the sparktricity was restored, it was down to 38º F inside the house. Fortunately, the weather outside was in the upper twenties to mid thirties that week; had it been down in the teens or lower, it could have been a much worse problem.

Now, our house is a fixer-upper, which we knew when we bought the place. One thing my darling bride (of 42 years, 5 months and 27 days) wanted was a gas range; almost everybody wants a gas range! But, after that first winter, and 4½ days without electricity, and a farm which is at the end of the line as far as Jackson Energy Cooperative is concerned for restoring power, we decided: a gas — propane in our case — water heater and fireplace for backup heating would be a very wise thing.

Our propane fireplace. Click to enlarge.

Yesterday evening, they came into play! A serious storm knocked out power not just to us, but much of the county. It was raining hard, and was very windy. But that propane fireplace did its job, keeping the house warm.

Mrs Pico was not at home at the moment; a hospital nurse, she wouldn’t get off until 7:30 PM, so supper hadn’t been cooked when the electricity failed. It was when she arrived home that she told us how widespread the power outage was. But, with that gas range, supper was no problem.[2]The electric pilot didn’t work, but the caps could be easily lit with a match. The oven will not work without electricity. It wasn’t the supper we had planned, hot wings, because we cook those with an electric air fryer, but my younger daughter — our daughters were visiting for the weekend — whipped up bacon and eggs on the range top.

Oil lamp and candles on the kitchen counter.

Of course, it was dark in the house, but candles, and a oil lamp — more fossil fuel there! — provided illumination.

Had Saul Griffith had his way, the house would have cooled down uncomfortably, and there’s have been no cooked meal for us. Morning showers? He’d not have wanted us to be able to take them.

As it happened, the sparktricity came back on a few hours later, but I remembered January of 2018; since Mrs Pico was had volunteered for an extra shift this morning, a shower was necessary for her.

Still, to quote Game of Thrones, winter is coming. My closest neighbor has told me that the power has been out here for as long as two weeks in the past, when bad snow and ice storms have brought down power lines. We are now prepared, though Mr Griffith doesn’t want us to be.

References

References
↑1 The river gauge jammed at 28.18 feet, so the flooding crest was guesstimated, but it was the historic crest, topping the previous record of 39.37 feet. The flooding got into the crawl space underneath our house, but stopped one concrete block, about 7½ inches, below the wooden structure. Our house was saved, but the HVAC system was lost.

Flood insurance is expensive. One woman I know had flood insurance, but to keep the expense manageable, she had a $10,000 deductible, and her losses were slightly under $10,000.

↑2 The electric pilot didn’t work, but the caps could be easily lit with a match. The oven will not work without electricity.
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Fear is the mind-killer!

William Teach noted New York Times columnist Tom Friedman’s paean to fear:

    When you see how hard it’s been for governments to get their citizens to just put on a mask in stores, or to get vaccinated, to protect themselves, their neighbors and their grandparents from being harmed or killed by Covid-19, how in the world are we going to get big majorities to work together globally and make the lifestyle sacrifices needed to dampen the increasingly destructive effects of global warming — for which there are treatments but no vaccine?

Perhaps, just perhaps, when the plebeians see the patricians taking 118 private jets to the ‘climate summit’ COP26, they simply aren’t convinced that global warming climate change emergency is all that much of an emergency. Whether Mr Friedman took a private jet or, gasp!, flew commercial I do not know, but we do know that he’s been flying all over the globe to attend these things, telling us that he has “been to most of the climate summits since Bali in 2007”.

Yeah, if I could get the Times to pay for a vacation in Bali, I’d go, too!

But Mr Friedman hit upon the instrument of control the government, at all levels, have been trying to use: fear! When he complains that some people are not cooperating with the message that COVID-19 could harm or kill people’s grandparents, neighbors, and themselves, he frets that people, free people, are just not going to go along with the “lifestyle sacrifices” the patricians demand of others, though seemingly not of themselves.

But he needn’t worry: there have been plenty of people who were filled with fear, and are still filled with fear. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

    The catharsis of attending my first concert of the COVID-19 era | Opinion

    I didn’t realize how profoundly being home with only myself and my boyfriend for company had affected me until we started venturing out into the larger world.

    by Rachel Kramer Bussel, For The Inquirer | November 5, 2021

    “Is this your first time?” a stranger asked me in an elevator at the Met as we tried to find our seats at the St. Vincent concert a few weeks ago.

    Stunned, I stared back at her, trying to form an answer. How did she know? Did I look stricken by the nerves I’d felt bouncing around for weeks as I tried to decide if attending a public event was finally safe? I eventually nodded.

    “You have two masks, just like me. It’s my first too,” she said. We both knew she meant it wasn’t our first concert ever, but our first pandemic outing.

    I didn’t realize how profoundly being home with only myself and my boyfriend for company had affected me until we started venturing out into the larger world. For the last few months, we’d been going to a local grocery store to supplement our Instacart deliveries, but beyond that and work interactions, we hadn’t been close to such a large group of people since before the mid-March 2020 lockdown.

There’s a sadness in that: Miss Bussel has just told us that her boyfriend and she had virtually shut down their social lives for nineteen months. For the “last few months” they’d worked up the nerve to venture out to go to the grocery store, apparently when they’d missed putting something on their Instacart order. Of course, they were willing to put other people at whatever risk they were afraid to take themselves, because Instacart requires living human beings to put together the grocery order, and living human beings to drive through Egg Harbor Township[1]Miss Bussel noted in her original that her home is in Egg Harbor, so my noting it does not constitute ‘doxxing.’ to deliver the orders. The stressful social situations Her boyfriend and Miss Bussel avoided themselves they thought little of putting on other people.

    I was expecting to enjoy hearing St. Vincent perform for the first time, but I wasn’t prepared for the sense of catharsis the communal experience would be. I looked around at my fellow concertgoers, at the dazzling chandelier, at the dancers and musicians onstage, and felt deeply grateful that I’d said yes to attending. In August, I’d reluctantly had my boyfriend sell our long-awaited tickets to see Sleater-Kinney and Wilco at the Mann Center, even though that was an outdoor show. The risks felt too great.

    But having received my Pfizer booster shot two days before the St. Vincent show, and knowing the Met requires a COVID-19 vaccination or a recent negative test, I felt that was a risk worth taking.

Uhhh, if Miss Bussel got her COVID-19 booster shot two days prior to attending the concert, it hadn’t had time to work yet![2]“At least 12 days after receipt of the third dose, the SARS-CoV-2 infection rate was 11.3 times lower in the booster group than in the control group (95% confidence interval [CI], 10.4 to … Continue reading

Of course, she was reassured by the fact that other concert goers had to show their papers! Wir müssen Ihre Dokumente sehen![3]Full disclosure: I received my initial dose of the Moderna vaccine on April Fool’s day, and the second on Cinco de Mayo. I’d really liked to have gotten the booster on Veterans’ … Continue reading

The author continued to tell us how she is now facing decisions about what her boyfriend and she can and cannot, should or should not, do to return to a normal life, but I have to wonder: after nineteen months of seemingly abject fear, is it reasonable to think she ever can just turn it off? The ‘experts’ are now telling us that SARS-CoV-2 will be with us forever, though it will become endemic and not be classified as a panicdemic pandemic. Miss Bussel revealed that she has asthma, which could mean that, if she became infected, the disease could be worse for her. Nevertheless, at least to judge from the photo she supplied to the Inquirer, as well as on her website, she’s a fairly young woman, and younger people, while still susceptible, tend to have far less serious outcomes.

Life is full of risks, and COVID-19 is but one of them. Miss Bussel was in about as much danger driving to that concert from a traffic accident as she was of contracting the virus. And since we know that even those who have been vaccinated can contract and spread the virus, going to that concert did not reduce her risk of contracting the virus to zero.

What government, governments at all levels, have done, is to spread fear through our society, fear of contracting a disease which can be deadly, and is deadly in a small percentage of cases, to the extent that it has crippled our society. The American Automobile Association has reported that Thanksgiving travel plans appear to be near pre-pandemic levels, despite Joe Biden’s soaring gasoline prices, but that simply tells us just how much restrictions and fear disrupted Americans’ lives in 2020. Many Governor’s, including Kentucky’s Andy Beshear, issued orders restricting how many people, and from how many households, people could have in their own homes for Thanksgiving last year, orders that I am proud to say the Pico family ignored. For government to have tried to virtually cancel Thanksgiving is something that only induced fear could accomplish.

We must not fear! As Frank Herbert wrote, fear is the mind-killer, but fear is also the freedom killer, the liberty killer! We allowed fear to get people to obey unconstitutional orders from state governors, orders restricting our freedom of religion and freedom of peaceable assembly. When we let fear get us to go along meekly with government diktats that infringe on our individual rights, we enable governments to keep doing so. They only need to instill the next subject of terror and fear to be able to do so.

References

References
↑1 Miss Bussel noted in her original that her home is in Egg Harbor, so my noting it does not constitute ‘doxxing.’
↑2 “At least 12 days after receipt of the third dose, the SARS-CoV-2 infection rate was 11.3 times lower in the booster group than in the control group (95% confidence interval [CI], 10.4 to 12.3), for an absolute difference of 86.6 infections per 100,000 person-days.”
↑3 Full disclosure: I received my initial dose of the Moderna vaccine on April Fool’s day, and the second on Cinco de Mayo. I’d really liked to have gotten the booster on Veterans’ Day, but the county health department would have been closed for the holiday, so I got it on the 9th. It was my choice — well, actually, my wife, a hospital nurse, asked me to do so, because she says she puts me at risk, since she treats COVID patients — but I absotively, posilutely refuse to carry around the vaccination records. I will not comply with “Ve need to see your papers!”
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The #ClimateActivists don’t care what you want, or need, they just want to impose their will

Molly Yeh Hagen, from the Food Network’s Girl Meets Farm. Click to enlarge.

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.

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The Wall Street Journal notes that professionals who can are leaving cities and moving to the ‘exurbs’ What will this mean for the climate emergency activists who want us all to live in cities with mass transit?

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.

I’ve had years of cramped up city life, living like a duck in a pen.
All I know that it’s a pity life can’t be simple again.

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 96th Street!

2305 Beasley Avenue, Antioch, California.

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.

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↑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 working from home. Too many distractions like puppies and cats and sunshine — her computer was set up on the screened in, northwest facing porch — led to perhaps not as much concentration.
↑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, and the windows on the left of the house go to what used to be my bedroom. The old, roll out windows in metal frames have been replaced since I lived there.
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Don’t chill out so much!

I responded to William Teach’s article Rolling Stone: We’re In An Air Conditioned Nightmare Or Something by noting:

A couple of months ago, on the Weather Channel’s AMHQ, Stephanie Abrams went a bit off script and called Jen Carfagno over to the side of the screen. The camera caught her, in the middle of the show, as having pulled on her puffy coat when she was supposed to be off-camera. I found it amusing.

Of course, the on-camera women on the Weather Channel almost always wear dresses or skirts, and women’s ridiculous shoes, and it seems that bare arms are pretty much called for, not just in the summer, but other seasons as well.

Women working in offices have long complained that office air conditioning is set too low, and there are valid scientific reasons for them to think that, reasons which go beyond the differences in the way men and women dress.

Well, today I saw this amusing retweet by Mrs Carfagno:

Of course, while Mr Wooten is wearing long pants, a shirt, suit coat, socks and men’s dress shoes, Mrs Carfagno is wearing what her network seems to assign as appropriate dress for female anchors. I have noted that the women on the Weather Channel are always dressed up, while many of the men appear with rolled up sleeves, often eschewing a tie, but, of course there’s no sexism involved in any of that! 🙂

Office air conditioning is too cold, women think, and science says they’re right

A new study says that office air conditioning may be biased against women, with temperatures more suitable to the average male of the 1960s.

Aug. 4, 2015, 11:25 AM EDT / Updated July 5, 2017, 12:40 PM EDT / Source: TODAY
By Scott Stump

To all the women bundled in sweaters and blankets in your office air conditioning even though it’s 100 degrees outside: A recent study says that it’s not all in your head. It really IS cold.

As many women bundle up against the arctic air conditioning, their male counterparts one cubicle over have no idea what all the fuss is about. It turns out that science says the office A/C may be biased toward temperatures that more comfortable for men — thanks to a formula from more than 50 years ago.

A 2016 study in the journal Nature Climate Change notes that the temperatures in many office buildings are based on a formula developed in the 1960s that employs the resting metabolic rate of 154-pound, 40-year-old man.

Wait, what? A 40-year-old man weighing just 154 lb, and they thought that was average?

More than half a century later, the workforce is much different, but the thermostat isn’t. Half of the workforce is now female, and many of them are wrapping themselves up in blankets to be able to type without shivering. The new study finds that females prefer the average temperature at home and in the office to be 77 degrees, compared to 71.6 degrees for men.

“Women tend to have lower basal metabolic rates, so they tend to burn off energy a lot slower,” Dr. Devi Nampiaparampil of NYU School of Medicine told TODAY. “They actually give off less heat than men, so they tend to be colder.”

Much of the rest of the article is about different office wear for men and women.

Rolling Stone said:

But long before that, the most obvious impact of extreme heat is that it pushes people to turn on – and turn up – their air-conditioning. With cool air, you can feel the chaos within you subsiding. But it comes at a cost: AC sucks up huge amounts of electricity, which strains the grid and increases the risk of blackouts. More electricity also means burning fossil fuels, which means more CO2 pollution (President Biden has promised a 100 percent clean electricity grid by 2035, but that’s still a long way off). In addition, hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), the human-made chemicals inside of air-conditioners used to cool the air, are super greenhouse gases, up to 3,000 times more potent than CO2 at trapping heat in the atmosphere. What it comes down to is this: By cooling ourselves off, we risk cooking ourselves to death.

But this poses an interesting question for the global warming climate change emergency activists: since setting the thermostat higher during the summer will save electricity, and the fossil fuels burned to produce it, the activists should be all for it! Hey, ditch those coats and ties for shorts and flip flops!

Not sure how that’ll work out in the C Suite.

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The urban #ClimateChange activists cannot see outside their own little worlds.

I do not watch a lot of network television. My go to networks for TV are the various Discovery Channel networks, primarily HGTV, DIY Network, and Great American Country, and I watch a lot of the home building and home search shows.

Of course, all of the house hunters have their wish lists, but one thing is very consistent: people want gas ranges in their kitchens.[1]If you watch the cooking shows on the Food Channel, as my wife and daughters do, you’ll see that all of them, with the exception of Molly Yeh’s Girl Meets Farm, use gas ranges. But what people want is not what the left want to allow them to have. From The Wall Street Journal:

Battle Brews Over Banning Natural Gas to Homes

Cities are considering measures to phase out gas hookups amid climate concerns, spurring some states to outlaw such prohibitions

passed the first such prohibition in the U.S. in 2019.

The bans in turn have led Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Kansas and Louisiana to enact laws outlawing such municipal prohibitions in their states before they can spread, arguing that they are overly restrictive and costly. Ohio is considering a similar measure.

The outcome of the battle, largely among Democratic-led cities and Republican-run states, has the potential to reshape the future of the utility industry, and demand for natural gas, which the U.S. produces more of than any other country.

Proponents of phasing out natural gas say their aim is to reduce planet-warming emissions over time by fully electrifying new homes and buildings as wind and solar farms proliferate throughout the country, making the power grid cleaner.

There’s more at the original. What people in general want, the left say is bad, bad, bad! for us. One wonders what the municipal government leaders pondering these measures have in their own homes.

My wife and I live in the country; the nearest town is four miles away, and there are no natural gas lines out this far. When we moved in, in July of 2017, the house was total electric: electric heat pump for HVAC, electric water heater, and an electric range.

Come December of 2017, it got unusually cold in the Bluegrass State, with nighttime lows a few degrees below zero, and daytime highs in the teens. Our poor heat pump was running all the time, and the house was still cooler then we would have liked.

In January of 2018 came what the Weather Channel called Winter Storm Hunter, an ice storm which knocked out the power. Where we live, practically at the end of Jackson Energy Cooperative’s service area, it was 4½ days before the sparktricity was restored.

Mrs Pico went to stay with our daughters, who had a nice, warm apartment in Lexington. Me? I had to stay at the farm, to take care of the critters and the water pipes. Fortunately, it was warmed than it had been the previous month, but, by the time we got power back, it was down to 38º F in the house. I spent a lot of time in bed, under the covers and comforter.

Our remodeled kitchen, including the propane range! All of the work except the red quartz countertops was done by my family and me. Click to enlarge.

Our house is a fixer-upper, and we knew that when we bought it. The kitchen was going to be the first remodel project, and my wife wanted, like everyone else, a gas range. Out in the boonies, that meant propane. With the problems of the previous winter, we decided to replace the very old electric water heater with a propane model, and we added a propane fireplace as well.[2]I wanted a wood stove, but my wife vetoed that; too much of a mess, she said. If the power goes out for 4½ days again — and a somewhat nearby neighbor has told me that her power has been out for over a week before — we’ll be warm, able to cook, and have hot water.

Fast forward to early March of this year, and the flooding in eastern Kentucky. The flooding was so bad that the river gauge at Ravenna, the closest one to me, jammed at 38.4 feet, but the level was estimated to have crested at 41.00 ft, topping the worst previous flood, on February 4, 1939, which saw a crest of 39.37 feet. We were more fortunate than some people, in that we did not lose our house,[3]A lot of people around here did lose their homes, so we count ourselves as fortunate. but it was a very near thing: the HVAC system, which is in the crawl space under the house, was flooded and destroyed.

That meant, in early March, no heat.

But, after I stabilized the propane tank, which floated but I had tied in place so it didn’t float down the Kentucky River, as a lot of other people’s tanks had done, I was able to turn the propane back on, and once again, we had heat. The electricity never went out, but the electric HVAC system was totaled.

Were the left to have their way, we’d have suffered through early March without heat.

The left seem unable to think outside of their own comfort zones. When the electricity goes out, the power companies work to restore service in cities first, to get the largest number of people back into service fastest. The city dwellers in San Francisco and Seattle aren’t on the far ends of power lines, and don’t quite see that electric service in rural areas is dependent on long lines, stretched out over poles subject to the weather. They don’t understand how what they want imposes significant burdens on other people.

References

References
↑1 If you watch the cooking shows on the Food Channel, as my wife and daughters do, you’ll see that all of them, with the exception of Molly Yeh’s Girl Meets Farm, use gas ranges.
↑2 I wanted a wood stove, but my wife vetoed that; too much of a mess, she said.
↑3 A lot of people around here did lose their homes, so we count ourselves as fortunate.