Tag Archives: #ClimateActivists

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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.