The Food Network’s Molly Yeh, the only TV cook I’ve seen who uses an electric range. Click to enlarge.
It was just yesterday that we noted how the global warming climate change emergency activists want to require new homes being built, and older homes to be retrofitted, with electric heat, primarily heat pump HVAC — heating, ventilation, and air conditioning — systems. That the power might fail in the middle of winter, well, that never seemed to be a serious concern to them, even though with home electricity being primarily delivered via overhead wires, our electric utilities are the ones most vulnerable to weather-related and other damage.
Well, now the Biden Administration is taking a different tack, not pushing global warming climate change emergency reasons, but your kids’ health. From the New York Post:
The Consumer Product Safety Commission is mulling the action after recent studies showed emissions from the devices can cause health and respiratory problems, Bloomberg reported Monday.
“This is a hidden hazard,” CPSC Commissioner Richard Trumka Jr. told the outlet. “Any option is on the table. Products that can’t be made safe can be banned.”
Reports by groups including the American Chemical Society and New York University Law School’s Institute for Policy Integrity found gas stoves — which are used in about 40% of US homes while the remainder use various forms of electric cookers — emit pollutants like nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide and fine matter at levels deemed unsafe by the Environmental Protection Agency and World Health Organization.
There’s more at the original, and, unlike so many newspapers, the Post’s stories are not hidden behind a paywall. And yeah, I’m proud of my craftsmanship, so I’m willing to use yet another excuse to show off the kitchen I remodeled. 🙂
But there’s more. Here’s a bit more detail from the linked Bloomberg article:
Natural gas stoves, which are used in about 40% of homes in the US, emit air pollutants such as nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide and fine particulate matter at levels the EPA and World Health Organization have said are unsafe and linked to respiratory illness, cardiovascular problems, cancer, and other health conditions, according to reports by groups such as the Institute for Policy Integrity and the American Chemical Society. Consumer Reports, in October, urged consumers planning to buy a new range to consider going electric after tests conducted by the group found high levels of nitrogen oxide gases from gas stoves.
Further down:
The Bethesda, Maryland-based Consumer Product Safety Commission, which has a staff of roughly 500, plans to open public comment on hazards posed by gas stoves later this winter. Besides barring the manufacture or import of gas stoves, options include setting standards on emissions from the appliances, Trumka said.
Lawmakers have weighed in, asking the commission to consider requiring warning labels, range hoods and performance standards. In a letter to the agency in December, lawmakers including Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey and Representative Don Beyer of Virginia, both Democrats, urged action and called gas-stove emissions a “cumulative burden” on Black, Latino and low-income households that disproportionately experience air pollution.
Well, of course the Distinguished Gentleman from New Jersey is going to find a racial angle in all of this!
If you don’t have an electric range, and want to install one, you’ll need a special circuit and receptacle for an electric range. Normally this will require a NEMA-14 receptacle, and a 240-volt, 30-amphere circuit. Do you have the knowledge, tools, and skills to install such a circuit? You do? Great! You don’t? Open your wallet again, and call an electrician.
As always, there’s more. As I noted in yesterday’s article, during our remodel we installed not just a propane — there’s no natural gas service out in the boondocks — range, but a propane water heater and propane fireplace. That fireplace has really helped, when the weather gets brutally cold and the heat pump that is our primary heating source couldn’t quite keep up, and when the electricity has gone out before. Propane fireplaces are as clean burning as an electric range top, and do not require a flue, but if the logic of the Consumer Product Safety Commission is held valid by federal regulators for gas ranges, then the same logic would apply to gas fireplaces.
And remember: the Environmental Protection Agency has already put in new regulations for wood stoves. The federal government have absolutely no reservations about imposing regulations on people’s homes.
I am not naïve enough to think that the calls of the global warming climate change emergency activists have had no impact on how the Consumer Product Safety Commission does its business; claims that this is just for our health will be magnified by claims that banning gas ranges is an environmental necessity. But the American people prefer gas ranges; that’s why you see even the wealthy, very blue state New Englanders installing gas ranges during home remodels on This Old House.
The Patricians have absolutely no problem telling the plebeians how to live their lives. If it was only a matter of them telling us what we should do, that would be an exercise in their freedom of speech. But the problem is that the Patricians in government want to exercise governmental power, and force people to do as they say, and that must be resisted, that must be fought.
It was early Monday morning, March 12, 2018, when we received five inches of heavy, wet snow at our farm in Estill County, Kentucky, and we lost electricity, in our all-electric home, sometime before 4:30 AM. No, I’m not relying on memory; I’m actually kind of obsessive about recording things in my At-A-Glance Daily Diary, and I have a whole shelf of them, dating back to 1986, missing only 2001’s, which was lost somehow.
Fortunately, it was 42º F and sunny outside by afternoon, which helped some, but it still got down to 52º F inside the house. My wife, having to work the following day, drove to Lexington to stay at our daughter’s apartment, so she could do something really radical like take a shower in the morning. There was just enough sort-of warm water in the water heater for me to take a quick shower on Tuesday morning. While my wife could leave, I had to stay at home to care for the critters.
To make a long story short, we finally got sparktricity back at 4:54 PM on Thursday, March 15th. It had gotten as cool as 37º F inside the house, though warmer in my bedroom, which I heated with sunshine through the window and my own body heat. The high for that day was 58º F, so that helped some. I wonder how bad things would have gotten if we had lost power for 4½ days in mid-January.
Thus, it was with somewhat of a jaundiced eye that I noticed a series of tweets:
Dan Walters: These power outages have me even more appreciative of having a gas-fired stove, so we can at least have hot food. Something to ponder as officialdom tries to make homes all-electric
panama bartholomy: By now we recognize that burning gas in buildings is one of our leading air polluters, more than cars and power plants combined, part of the reason we have terrible air in CA. We can’t clean up our air and continue to burn gas. We also cannot run a gas system just for cooking (1)
panama bartholomy: If we replaced all of our furnaces with amazing 400% efficient heat pumps (http://bit.ly/3CuNhOU) and water heaters with heat pump water heaters we could cut over 90% of gas use to buildings and have dramatically better air. (2)
The embedded link led to this OpEd in The Washington Post:
By Robert Gebelhoff, Assistant editor and Opinions contributor | January 4, 2023 | 2:43 PM EST
For anyone using fossil fuels to heat their homes, I have good and bad news.
The bad: You’re going to want to replace that system with heat pumps eventually, and it might be expensive. The good: The government can help you, and the change will have huge benefits for you and the world.
Oh, the government can help us? How will the government help us?
These heating and cooling systems, once considered useful only in warmer climates, have in the past few years become far more sophisticated. They are now the best chance we have to phase out fossil fuels as a means of heating and could set the stage for a climate policy revolution. . . . .
Americans are not yet as enthusiastic, but policymakers in many states recognize heat pumps’ potential. A New York commission recently approved a plan to require all new houses built in the state after 2025 to use electric systems rather than those running on natural gas, oil or propane. After 2030, it seeks to require homeowners to replace all fossil-fuel-burning systems with non-carbon-emitting ones once they give out.
New York’s approach is the most aggressive in the country, but it’s by no means alone. Fifteen states and more than 100 cities have plans to encourage heat pump installation. The federal government is in on the strategy, too. The Inflation Reduction Act provides generous rebates and tax incentives for those who install the devices, and the Energy Department has dedicated $250 million to increase their production.
Really? Generous rebates and tax incentives? In March of 2021, we had to replace our heat pump based HVAC — heating, ventilation and air conditioning — system due to the record-setting flooding on the Kentucky River. The rising waters destroyed the old system, but while they got into the crawl space, they did not get into our house itself. Replacing the old system was $6,100, $6,100 we didn’t want to spend. The price was lower for us in that the ductwork from the previous system was still in place and usable. Fortunately, we had the cash to do it, though I wonder just how many of my eastern Kentucky neighbors could say the same.
Can people in such close financial straits get the credit to have a new HVAC system installed when they don’t have the cash?
These efforts are well worth the expense. Consider that buildings consume about 40 percent of all energy in the United States. Residential buildings alone contribute to about 20 percent of U.S. carbon emissions, with half heated by burning fossil fuels.
This is where Robert Gebelhoff, an Assistant editor and Opinions contributor for The Washington Post, tells us just how much he doesn’t understand much of America. “These efforts,” he wrote, “are well worth the expense.” Well, perhaps to someone who has a relatively high position for one of our nation’s most famous and important newspapers, (probably) earns a decent salary — and no, I couldn’t find Mr Gebelhoff’s salary or net worth — and could, I assume, afford that expense. And never forger: Mr Gebelhoff once blithely wrote, “NASA’s latest gamble might not pay out, but it’s worth the $2 billion anyway“. But both my wife and I grew up poor, and if we’re not poor now, having retired back to Our Old Kentucky Home, we can and do see plenty of poorer people living around us.
Heat pumps, in contrast, simply move heat from the outside air or ground inside — even during frigid winter months.
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.
Us? We remodeled our kitchen — the whole house was a livable but nevertheless fixer-upper home when we bought it — in 2018, after the power-outage but still planned before it, and we added what my wife wanted, a gas, propane actually, since there’s no natural gas service in our rural area, range, a propane water heater — our electric one was on its last legs anyway, so we needed to replace it — and a propane fireplace. When it got down to -5º F over the Christmas holiday, and our heat-pump based HVAC really couldn’t keep up, that fireplace kept it nice and warm at home. When the floods of 2021 destroyed the old heat-pump HVAC system, the propane fireplace kept us warm.
We had, of course, learned our lesson in our previous home in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. We got fourteen inches of heavy, wet snow on Christmas Day of 2002, and yes, the power failed there as well. We had a heating oil fired steam boiler for our heating system, but it still required a 110-voly, 20-amphere electric circuit to activate the boiler and run the pump. The power was restored at around 6:30 PM . . . on December 26th. We subsequently added a woodstove, which was easy enough, because the previous owner had installed a hearth and chimney for one.[1]If we had to replace that system with a heat-pump based HVAC one, it would have been very expensive. Not only would it need to be a system with 50% more capacity than the one we have here, because … Continue reading
A cheery fire in our wood stove in Jim Thorpe, December 18, 2016.
Would it be superstitious of me to note that we never had a subse-quent power failure of more than a few hours since we installed the alternate heating systems? 🙂
Naturally, I haven’t quoted every word of Mr Gebelhoff’s original, but, further down is this:
This is why heat pumps often save energy costs in the long term, even though they can be expensive to install, especially when replacing existing systems. Cost estimates vary widely depending on the size and age of a house, ranging from as low as $3,000 to upwards of $20,000.
How blithely he wrote that! Yes, heat pumps “often save energy costs in the long run,” but it’s that “expensive to install” part that one of the Washington elite just doesn’t get: you have to have the money to install them in the first place, and that “upwards of $20,000” part isn’t always easy for people. When 49% of Americans, hit hard by inflation in 2022, can’t handle an unexpected $400 expense, how does Mr Gebelhoff expect them to write a check for ten or twenty grand?
One last paragraph from Mr Gebelhoff:
Naturally, efforts to push consumers to embrace heat pumps have generated much anxiety on the right. Republicans in New York have panned their state’s plan as “radical” and claimed it will leave residents “in the dark and in the cold.” But policymakers must not flinch. Yes, retrofitting homes can be expensive. The answer is to offset the costs with subsidies, as many states are already doing.
With this, the Post’s columnist was right there on the cusp, right at the point of realizing that yes, the power can go out, but if he did realize it, he never mentioned it; there isn’t a single word in his column telling us what people who are completely committed to all-electric heat would do in sub-freezing weather — something fairly common in the winter in New York state, when the electricity failed. When Buffalo and Watertown and the other areas in upstate New York get hammered by three or four feet of lake-effect snow, power outages are frequent. If they happened to be dependent upon the type of fuel-oil burner that my family had in Pennsylvania, or the gas furnace my daughter had installed in her home in Lexington when her heat-pump powered HVAC system failed, a simple, gasoline-powered generator that can be bought at Home Despot or Lowe’s can provide the current the 110-volt, 20-amp circuit such systems use to keep their homes warm. A heat pump? The system I have here is on two separate — one for the exterior condenser and one for the crawl space unit — 220-volt, 50-amp circuits. That’s going to require a much larger, much more expensive generator.
Mr Gebelhoff isn’t stupid; you don’t get hired by The Washington Post if you’re an idiot. But, living in the liberal Washington bubble, he is seemingly ignorant about how many Americans live. Not to pick solely on him — his OpEd column is simply a catalyst for mine — but this is a common problem amongst the climate change activists: they simply do not understand the problems that so many Americans work, and can be completely airy-fairy about suggesting policies which will make Americans poorer.
If we had to replace that system with a heat-pump based HVAC one, it would have been very expensive. Not only would it need to be a system with 50% more capacity than the one we have here, because the house was 50% larger, but since the system in Pennsylvania was used steam radiators rather than forced air ducts, we’d have had to have those installed as well, in a house built in 1890.
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.
Now we return to another This Old House project, the Seaside Victorian Cottage, in Narragansett, Rhode Island. According to Wikipedia, voters there gave 5,333 votes, 59.1% of the total to Joe Biden, and only 3,551, 39.3%, to President Trump in 2020. Now, I don’t know how the obviously well-to-do homeowners specifically voted; there’s always a chance that they were smarter than the majority of their neighbors and voted for Mr Trump.
This series was hard dated: the initial walk-through was just prior to the COVID panicdemic beginning, and ran through the summer and into the fall of 2020, as the Democrats were running on global warming climate change, and touting their proposals to fight it and dramatically reduce or eliminate the use of fossil fuels.
But one thing I noticed, and for which I specifically looked, was the energy source they planned. And there it was, in the second episode — season 42, episode 6 — the remodeling contractor said that there would be a 1,000 gallon propane tank installed in the back yard. Richard Trethewey, the plumber and HVAC expert for the show, showing us in a later episode, that a new, modulating gas furnace was installed.
Yup, once again, those wealthy New Englanders aren’t going for electric heat pumps, but warm, dependable gas heating for the cold, Rhode Island winters. Their HVAC system appears to allow the large, new exterior condensers to be used for heating as well, but the gas furnace is new and in place.
More, the homeowners had a new, fairly sizable gas fireplace installed, as you can see in the photo to the left. More, they had a gas fireplace installed outside, on their backyard patio.
The kitchen features an oversized Wolf gas range.
Episode 9 has Mr Trethewey telling us about the water heating system. The homeowners are going with a more efficient ‘instant’ hot water system, but, anticipating higher demand, they’ll have three instant hot water units, all gas fired, linked.
The final show of the series showed us, very briefly, that a new, large propane-powered generator had been installed in the back yard, so the homeowners wouldn’t have to worry about losing sparktricity in a New England nor’easter.
Now, I certainly don’t begrudge the homeowners for the opportunity they had, and the money they were able to put into a dilapidated home. I was unable to find a value on the house, but similar homes in the area are valued at over a million bucks. But the city of Narragansett, which has an historical commission very interested in keeping the exterior of the home in keeping with the neighborhood, and local city permit agencies, apparently had no objection to the extensive use of propane in the remodeled home.
One of the problems for the global warming climate change activists is that even those who support their causes and want to see far more renewable and non-carbon dioxide (CO2) emitting power sources seem to want those non-CO2 emitting power sources to burden other people’s lives, not their own. From a subscriber-only article in The Philadelphia Inquirer:
The plan to run an electric power transmission cable from 98 offshore wind turbines to land in Ocean City has drawn local opposition, but also supporters.
Miles of power cables already snake through Ocean City to power its 5,000 households and light its famed boardwalk.
But the plan to run one cable under the beach to bring electricity generated by 98 offshore wind turbines onshore has sparked controversy. City and Cape May County officials, as well as other communities and homeowners, have lined up against it; other homeowners, environmental groups, and unions support it.
Note that: the plan is to run the cable under the beach, not over it. Once built, it would never be seen, save for some necessary maintenance access points.
Emotion is high enough that a virtual public hearing this week on running the cable under public property drew 244 viewers and dozens of commenters.
The Danish wind power company Ørsted has state approvals to build the utility-scale Ocean Wind 1 wind farm and run one of two electric power transmission cables from it under the beach at 35th Street, across the city, and along the bay north of Roosevelt Boulevard Bridge. The line would ultimately connect to a substation at the former B.L. England coal-fired plant on the Great Egg Harbor River in Upper Township, Cape May County.
The cable would run under four parcels totaling little more than a half acre of city-owned property for which the company would pay $200,000 for the “diversion” of public land, which is 13 times its appraised value. A public hearing was required because the land, including the beach, is considered part of the state’s Green Acres program aimed at protecting open space.
Four parcels, totaling less than an acre of city-owned land. Further down:
The proposal has met resistance from some residents who not only object to the cable but to the 850-foot-high turbines they believe will be visible from shore. Some just want the project moved farther out to sea.
However, Suzanne Hornick, of Protect our Coast-NJ, said her group doesn’t want the wind farm “in any way, shape or form.”
NIMBY: Not In My Back Yard!
So, the environmentalists who are wanting us all to drive plug-in electric vehicles — assuming we will be allowed to have personal vehicles at all — and live generally poorer, and who support wind and solar electric generating facilities aren’t so happy when those, in this case, wind-generated power facility, might be built where they might spot the tops of the windmill blades on a clear day, or have any way to get the power generated by such a facility to shore.
TRUFANT, MI — Rural voters delivered a crushing blow to plans for a 375 megawatt wind farm in mid-Michigan, where several local renewable energy ordinances were defeated across three townships and multiple officials were thrown from office for supporting the project.
On Tuesday, Nov. 8, midterm voters resoundingly rejected ordinances enabling the Montcalm Wind project by Apex Clean Energy, a developer attempting to erect 75 turbines on farmland in Montcalm County northeast of Grand Rapids.
I don’t normally use photos from news articles, but this one falls under Fair Use guidelines, as the photo shows a sign which specifically says “Not in My backyard!
Zoning ordinances in Maple Valley, Douglass and Winfield townships were voted down by substantial margins amid growing animosity toward wind and solar energy projects among rural residents in Michigan who see them as a potential threat to health and property values.
A Belvidere Township solar energy ordinance also fell amid the wave of referendums.
Seven township officials in Montcalm County were recalled over their support for the $463 million wind project, which would have generated $118 million for leasing property owners and $80 million for local governments and schools over 30 years, according to an Upjohn Institute report.
Voters recalled Winfield Township supervisor Phyllis Larson, clerk Colleen Stebbins and trustee John Black. Douglass Township supervisor Terry Anderson, clerk Ronda Snyder and trustee Tom Jeppesen were recalled. Maple Valley Township supervisor John Schwandt was recalled.
Voters told the Greenville Daily News on Tuesday that turbines are an “eyesore” and several cited disputed claims about their impact on wildlife such as migrating birds.
There’s more at the original, and this one isn’t behind a paywall like the Inquirer article cited above.
Everybody wants cleaner energy sources, but it seems that most people don’t want to see or hear those cleaner energy sources. Just from where do they believe the electricity will come, fairy dust and unicorn farts? People want cleaner-running cars, but most people want other people to buy the Teslas and Chevy Dolts, not themselves. While electric car sales are increasing, the electric vehicle share of the US market is still just 4.6%. The environmentalists demand sacrifice, but it seems that they want Other People to sacrifice, not themselves!
My good friend and sometimes blog pinch-hitter William Teach pointed me to this article from Nicholas Goldberg in The Los Angeles Times, which can also be found on Yahoo! News to get around the Times paywall:
by Nicholas Goldberg | Thursday, September 22, 2022 | 6:00 AM PDT
Why is the greatest threat to the planet of so little concern to most Americans?
It’s shocking, frankly, that global warming ranks 24th on a list of 29 issues that voters say they’ll think about when deciding whom to vote for in November, according to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. Only 30% of voters say they are “very worried” about it and more than two-thirds say they “rarely” or “never” discuss the issue with family or friends.
Actually, some of us see the United States and democratic Europe so willing to engage in a proxy war with Russia, a nation with a strategic nuclear arsenal, with seemingly little thought as to what could happen, as “the greatest threat to the planet”.
How can people be so blithely unconcerned when the clear consensus of scientists is that climate disruption is reaching crisis levels and will result not only in more raging storms, droughts, wildfires and heat waves, but very possibly in famine, mass migration, collapsing economies and war?
Uhhh, with a year-over-year 8.3% inflation rate in August of 2022, on top of August 2021’s year-over-year inflation rate of 5.3%, perhaps Americans are more worried about “collapsing economies” today than they are about such “crisis levels” in fifty or eight years?
Sure, there are some obvious reasons for the apathy: High among them is that fossil fuel companies have spent decades pulling the wool over the eyes of Americans. And Republican politicians have been complicit.
Well, of course it’s all the fault of evil, reich-wing Republicans and greedy fossil fuel companies! But Mr Goldberg, an associate editor and OpEd columnist for the Los Angeles Times, as well as the formerly being the newspaper’s editorial page editor, then changes his theme, and goes strongly toward a more marketing approach to persuade people to get worried about global warming climate change emergency. After pointing out what he sees as the activists’ naïveté in ignoring marketing techniques, he tells us that the only way to sell the activists’ ideas is to consider those who are not already on their side that people are stupid:
Deliver simple messages, for one thing. In general, climate activists lean toward complexity and nuance because they don’t want to patronize or condescend or mislead by oversimplifying to their audiences.
Once you have a simple message, repeat it over and over. Did you know that consumers generally have to see an ad more than half a dozen times before they will be persuaded to buy a product?
Embed facts and data in what (David) Fenton calls “moral stories that tug at the emotions.” Anyone who has ever watched TV ads knows that strategy can make arguments far more powerful.
Talk about what people care about. There’s been too much talk about the effect of climate change on polar bears, and not enough on what it means for humans.
Use language people understand. Research shows, Fenton says, that many people don’t understand the phrases “existential threat” or “net zero” or “climate justice.” They understand what “pollution” is, but not what an “emission” is — which suggests that it might make more sense to use the former term.
That practically drips with condescension: Mr Goldberg is saying that those who aren’t already on the side of the global warming climate change emergency activists just can’t understand.
Still, at the end, he throws at least a little bit of concern that people will have to make “sacrifices”:
Is (Mr Fenton) right when he says the climate problem can be solved in a way that enhances economic prosperity? I hope so; that’d be great. But I worry — and this is just my opinion, not an expert’s analysis — that we’ve waited too long, and that to avoid the worst effects of climate change we are going to have to sacrifice, whether it sells or not. I take the gloomy approach.
Either way, we can all agree there’s an awful lot to be done. And Fenton is certainly right that you can’t mobilize people for war if they don’t know they’re under attack. Public education is obviously a missing piece of the puzzle.
Somehow we need to awaken a nation of sleeping, underinformed and insufficiently motivated citizens and persuade them to rise to the great challenge of modern times. To do that, the unmanipulation process needs to begin in earnest.
Apparently, for Mr Goldberg, those who do not support the global warming climate change emergency activists are victims of ‘manipulation’ by fossil-fuel companies and wicked conservatives, but it’s “unmanipulation” to market to people his ideas.
With a guesstimated annual salary of $88,663, and net worth of $845,000, and a wife, Amy Wilentz — who didn’t respect her husband enough to take his name — who earns a similar salary from The Nation as well as being an English Professor at the University of California at Irvine, perhaps the distinguished Mr Goldberg doesn’t truly understand that working-class Americans might be more concerned with paying the rent, keeping the electricity turned on, and food on the table now than they are in projections of doom fifty and eighty years in the future. With the high inflation rate, with which wage increases have not matched, Americans are poorer, in real terms, than they were two years ago.
Mr Goldberg wrote that he believes that “we are going to have to sacrifice,” but, with his wife’s and his resources, they are not going to have to sacrifice nearly as much as the average American. Whatever sacrifices they will have to make, perhaps fewer dinners at nice restaurants, or having to pay an electrician to install an at-home charging station for a Tesla, won’t be as stressful for them as the sacrifices made by the single mother with two kids left her by a deadbeat ex-boyfriend in Pittsburgh, or the family in eastern Kentucky trying to survive in a poor area in which the coal mines have all closed.
Mr Goldberg is not, like the “great princess” mention by Monsieur Rousseau, saying “Let them eat brioche,” but is suggesting that those who eat cake might occasionally have to eat bread instead. What he misses is that there are those who can only afford bread right now, and the policy proposals of the activists would take that away from them as well.
Those people are already sacrificing under the current economy, something today’s left just really don’t understand. Oh, they say that they are concerned, say that they know and understand, but they simply do not: you cannot understand people who are living paycheck-to-paycheck and concomitantly propose mandatory programs which will make them even poorer.
There has been much mockery of the California’s announcement that, beginning in 2035, only zero-emissions personal new vehicles could be sold in the Pyrite State, followed just a couple of days later by pleas that owners of plug-in electric vehicles not be recharged at home during peak energy use hours, and that was followed by the threat of rolling blackouts, to avoid a major collapse of the state’s power grid. If the power couldn’t be kept on during a heat wave, and people couldn’t recharge their Chevy Dolt’s when there just aren’t that many of them on the roads, how could things be handled if only plug-in electric vehicles could be sold come 2035?
Somehow, in all of that, what Patterico used to call the Los Angeles Dog Trainer managed to use 2,351 words to actually document what all of this means.
It was the sort of bold, climate-focused initiative that California has developed a reputation for — an effective ban on the sale of new gasoline-powered cars by 2035.
Now, as officials seek to fundamentally change California’s automotive culture — thereby reducing its largest source of planet-warming carbon emissions and air pollution — experts say those past initiatives may shed light on whether California’s nation-leading auto plan can work.
In Los Angeles, the dense smog that once smothered the city is regarded today as folklore. At its worst, between the 1950s and 1980s, the caustic haze was so thick that people could see only as far as a city block. It irritated people’s throats and lungs, and gave them bloodshot eyes. Back then, there were more than 200 days with unhealthy air annually, according to the Air Resources Board.
Since that time, there has been tremendous progress toward reducing smog and air pollution, much of it due to cleaner cars. The amount of smog-forming nitrogen oxides has been slashed by more than 50% in the last two decades, substantially improving public health.
But California’s progress in fighting air pollution has stagnated in recent decades, and the state is still home to the worst air pollution in the nation. The South Coast air basin — Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and part of San Bernardino counties — has yet to meet any federal health standards for ozone levels, including the oldest measure enacted in 1979.
“If you’re looking back 70 years, we’ve done a wonderful job,” said Joe Lyou, president of the Coalition for Clean Air. “If you’re looking back over the last decade or two, not so good. And if you’re looking at the legal standards that demand that we provide healthy air for people to breathe, we’re not doing well at all.”
Naturally, I have to cut a lot of the text, to avoid plagiarism and copyright violations, but what follows next is a brief history of the state’s efforts to reduce smog produced by exhaust pipe emissions. It notes that California was the first state to require catalytic converters. Then, in 2006, the silly cap-and-trade system was introduced.
It was in 2002 that I was part of a meeting in which a cap-and-trade proposal was made at the ready-mixed concrete company for which I worked. Because the company used flyash as a pozzolan, or partial cement replacement, it would have carbon ‘credits’ for the Portland cement that was not used. Those credits could be sold to a company which was supposed to reduce its CO2 emissions, but found itself unable or unwilling to spend the money to do so. I saw it for what it was: not the reduction in CO2 emissions, but simply the moving around of money.
One of California’s landmark climate programs, cap-and-trade was initially launched in 2006 with the aim of reducing the state’s greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. It exceeded expectations, and in fact reached the target four years ahead of time.
In 2017, the program was reauthorized with a much more ambitious goal: Slashing greenhouse gas emissions to 40% of 1990 levels by 2030. To get there, the program uses a system of pollution credits that essentially lets large carbon emitters buy and sell unused credits with the aim of keeping everyone at or below a certain total.
Experts say it only sort of worked. While the program has remained a key element of California’s climate strategy, emissions were down about 11% in 2020 — far from the 40% goal. What’s more, that number likely accounts for emissions reductions tied to the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
This was a point which covered only half the issue. Yes, the panicdemic — no, not a typo, but the word I intended to use, because the biggest effect of COVID-19 was panic — would up reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but only via the mechanism of throwing millions of people out of work.
Despite California’s green reputation, it remains the seventh-highest oil producing state in the nation, extracting about 358,000 barrels per day, according to state data.
However, oil production has been declining for decades, and the California Geologic Energy Management Division, or CalGEM, reported that “more permits have been issued to plug and permanently seal existing wells than to drill new ones since 2019.” The agency issued 564 new well permits in 2021, down from 1,917 in 2020 and 2,665 in 2019.
Some experts said that’s not aggressive enough.
“This transition can’t happen too slowly, because there is a climate crisis, and there are significant public health impacts on frontline communities,” said Bahram Fazeli, director of research and policy at Communities for a Better Environment.
Although there are ambitions to phase out California’s oil and gas production completely — most recently, Gov. Gavin Newsom set his sights on 2045 — there has yet to be an official deadline such as the one for the gas car ban.
Just like the panicdemic, reducing and eventually elimination petroleum production in California doesn’t mean that gasoline and diesel will not be used; it simply means that more of the state’s residents will be thrown out of work. Perhaps Governor Newsom thinks that all of the displaced workers will simply learn to code.
For example, reducing demand without supply could mean California ends up exporting its excess oil, Meng said, while reducing supply too quickly could leave communities that rely on the industry in bad shape. In Kern County, one of the state’s top producing regions, oil and gas extraction provide as much as 20% of the area’s property tax revenue.
A few silly paragraphs then follow concerning “equity,” or the notion that trying to meet the state’s goals must not disproportionately impact disadvantaged racial and ethnic groups.
Then comes the big part.
Although phasing out gas-powered cars is one of the state’s greatest priorities, that alone won’t be enough. Driving habits must change, too, if the state expects to achieve carbon neutrality.
The state climate plan depends on motorists driving at least 12% fewer miles by 2030, and no fewer than 22% by 2045.
How, I have to ask, can the state require people to drive less, when California is the poster child for suburban sprawl?
“Highway building and sprawl go hand in hand,” said Susan Handy, a researcher at UC Davis who has studied strategies to reduce automobile dependence. “That’s true in California, and it’s also true everywhere else. When we built highways, it made it possible to develop farther from city centers than ever before. And now we’re in a situation where we’ve got these sprawling development patterns and it makes it very hard to get around by means other than the car.”
As the state’s population has risen and more cars are on the road, state officials funded highway construction and expansion to ease congestion, which ironically fostered more driving.
The only major significant decreases in miles driven occur during economic downturns and, recently, with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 as more people have worked remotely. However, driving has rebounded to pre-pandemic levels.
There you have it: even the very liberal Los Angeles Times has admitted that driving is necessary for the state’s economic health. You cannot reduce the transportation abilities of the people without making people poorer.
The article continues to talk about changing people’s behavior, but let’s face it: that means making them poorer. Public transportation is cited as a replacement, but public transportation is a burden and an inconvenience. You have to leave your home and walk to or drive to, depending upon the distance and weather, the bus or train or subway stop, ride in a smelly, dirty and sometimes unsafe public conveyance to the bus or train or subway stop, hoping that isn’t like the SEPTA station on Allegheny Avenue, and then walk or taxi from that station to where you work. Hope it isn’t raining!
Of course, the state will need multiple thousands and thousands of public car charging stations, and
plans to construct at least 250,000 public vehicle charging stations by the middle of the decade; 10,000 of which should be fast chargers, according to the California Public Utilities Commission.
Uhhh, the “middle of the decade” is almost here! 2025 is less than 2½ years away.
If 240,000 of those public charging stations are not 480-volt “fast chargers”, that means that people would need eight hours to recharge their vehicles. Even the fast charging stations require 45 to 75 minutes to recharge fully a vehicle that is down to 25% of battery capacity.
The state also plans to require landlords of multifamily housing units to provide residents with a means to charge electric cars, though those details are still being worked out.
Really? Great! Now, how can that be done?
There are hundreds of thousands of apartment buildings which have no designated parking for residents; how can landlords get charging stations for such buildings? More, in those “multifamily housing units” which do have designated parking places, requiring landlords to provide electric car charging facilities costs money. The Pyrite State is already one of the most expensive places to live in the country, and half of the state’s 40 million people are renters. If landlords have to plow multiple thousands of dollars into car charging stations for their tenants, rents will have to be raised to cover that cost, and rents are already increasing significantly thanks to Joe’s Bidenflation.
So much of not just California’s, but the global warming activists’ plans nationwide show two very fundamental flaws: they don’t understand economics, and they don’t understand poor people and how they have to live. California has a huge homelessness problem, and major cities which can’t keep people from living and pooping in the streets are going to be impossibly pressed to provide the infrastructure to increase electricity supply and delivery by the amount needed to meet its goals. We have already noted how the Inflation Enhancement Reduction Act’s renewal of tax credit for electric car purchases has been met with electric vehicle prices rising, because economic forces trump the good intentions of liberal legislators. California’s legislators have already voted to keep Diablo Canyon, the state’s last remaining nuclear power plant, open several years longer, because as much as the left hate nuclear power, the state needs the sparktricity.
It doesn’t matter how good or noble or necessary the state’s liberal leaders believe their intentions to be; reality cannot be denied, and what they want California to become is simply not something which can be legislated into existence. Construction takes time, often lots of time, and it takes money, usually lots of money.
But more, they believe that they can change the culture of the state in ways people do not wish to change. Who wants to take the bus to the grocery store, and have to lug grocery bags back several blocks by hand?
California’s car culture emerged because that was what the people of the Pyrite State wanted. But, then again, the left have never really cared what other people want.
A bit hard to read, due to the glare from the sun, but this was the price at the station closest to my home, on Wednesday, July 20, 2022, $3.999 per gallon. It has been as high as $4.699 per gallon.
Just because you are having difficulty paying your bills doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have to pay more for gasoline!
Eduardo Porter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Latin America, US economic policy and immigration. He is the author of “American Poison: How Racial Hostility Destroyed Our Promise” and “The Price of Everything: Finding Method in the Madness of What Things Cost.” A prolific writer on economic matters, I have, sadly, been unable to find a link to his net worth, but it’s obvious that he’s reasonably well-to-do, with gigs with Bloomberg,The New York Times, and The Washington Post. It’s also obvious that he doesn’t really care about how people earning less than he does live.
There’s one bold move President Biden could make to curb climate change: Find a way to put a $5-a-gallon floor on gasoline prices.
by Eduardo Porter | Wednesday, July 20, 2022 | 10:10 AM EDT | Updated: July 20, 2022 | 11:34 AM EDT
When President Joe Biden visits the decommissioned coal-fired Brayton Point power plant in Somerset, Massachusetts, on Wednesday afternoon to lay out his planned executive actions on climate, his allies will be looking for bold initiatives. As Oregon’s Senator Jeff Merkley put it to the Washington Post, the impasse in the Senate created by Senator Joe Manchin’s blocking of his environmental agenda “unchains the president from waiting for Congress to act.”
Will Bunch, the long-time opinion columnist for what I sometimes call The Philadelphia Enquirer,[1]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt.describes himself as “the national columnist — with some strong opinions about what’s happening in America around social injustice, income inequality and the government.”
Well, yes, he does have some “strong opinions,” but that doesn’t necessarily make them smart ones.
As Europe swelters, a weak-looking Joe Biden is played by Joe Manchin at home and MBS in Saudi Arabia. It didn’t have to be this way.
by Will Bunch | Sunday, July 17, 2022
In England, the place that invented the railroad and mastered the subway with London’s majestic Underground, the government is telling folks to stay off trains in the capital for the next couple of days. That’s because they can’t guarantee that the rails won’t buckle or melt in an extreme heat wave — the worst ever recorded in the nation’s long history.
Melt? Melt? Railroad tracks are made of steel, the melting point of which, depending upon how it is alloyed, is between 2,500º and 2,800º Fahrenheit. Buckle? Steel, like virtually every material, expands and contracts as the temperature changes, and at temperatures in very hot summer weather, the expansion may exceed the width of the expansion joints, possibly pushing the rails out of proper alignment.
Now, I can see how the distinguished Mr Bunch got the word “melt” in mind. From The New York Times article he cited:
In a country unaccustomed to such heat, workers were spreading grit on the roads, fearing they would melt without protection.
That, too, is wrong: asphalt, often called tarmac or tarmacadam in the UK, isn’t going to melt, as in become a liquid, but the surface can soften and become a bit sticky when it reaches 113º F. Nevertheless, Mr Bunch did use the word from his source, so it’s not entirely his fault, but a responsible journalist should have at least questioned it.
Mr Bunch continues for several paragraphs to tell us how beastly hot it has been in Europe for the past several days, paragraphs I’ll skip here to get to the meat — if Spam® actually qualifies as ‘meat’ — of his column.
As Americans, the story we’ve always told ourselves in order to live is that the United States is the essential nation that always rises up to meet those global alarm bells, from World War II straight through to the current crisis in Ukraine. But our nation’s military and diplomatic might (for better or worse) looks nothing like America’s long-running addiction to oil, which is turning us into a pitiful helpless giant.
One might note here that all of Europe, far more politically liberal than we rebellious colonists, has proven to be just as dependent upon oil and natural gas, in particular Russian oil and natural gas. As we have previously noted, European energy companies have kowtowed to President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin’s payment demands, in a face-saving mechanism to allow the Europeans to state that they are paying un euros, while Russia’s Газпромбанк converts euros to rubles, so Vladimir Vladimirovich can say that his demand to be paid in rubles has been met . . . and the ruble propped up on world currency markets at the same time. And this is being done for the obvious reason: Europe needs Russian gas and oil. It’s July right now, but to quote Eddard “Ned” Stark would say in Game of Thrones, “Winter is coming.”[2]Most Americans don’t realize it, but significant portions of western Europe, including almost all of Germany, are north of 49º, the western portion of our border with Canada. Northen Europe … Continue reading
It all came to a head on Friday as President Biden pulled a rare “double Neville Chamberlain,” as his country’s need for an immediate fix of cheap, planet-destroying crude oil made America’s commander-in-chief look hopelessly weak in two places at once. That America just can’t quit fossil fuels caused POTUS 46 to kowtow to a murderous dictator in the Middle East, even as events in Washington showed the Biden administration is held back by shortsighted greed on Capitol Hill from doing much of anything to end our oil oligarchy at home.
As a U.S journalist who holds the press freedoms of the First Amendment sacred, I have never been as disappointed and demoralized by Biden as the moment Friday that he fist-bumped Saudi Arabia de facto ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), the vile monarch who personally ordered the violent death of a critical Washington Post columnist, Jamal Khashoggi, feared to have been dismembered with a bone saw after his body was never found.
One might more accurately call Mr Bunch a journolist. The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. Somehow, in a country in which seemingly no secrets can be kept — other than Ghislaine Maxwell’s client list — the majority of JournoList’s roughly 400 members has been kept unpublished, and Mr Bunch’s name is not on the Chatham Journal’s list of the 64 known members.
One of a number of reasons that Biden rallied just enough voters to oust Donald Trump in 2020 was his proper moral outrage over the killing of a U.S.-based journalist, as he branded the Saudis “a pariah” state. Apparently American morality is only valid when gas prices are under $4 a gallon, though. Biden’s flipflop — to travel halfway around the globe to hand a stone-cold killer a photo op to restore his global credibility — shows that America is still held hostage by Middle East dictators’ ability to manipulate world oil prices.
Ever since the 1970s, Americans have been warned about the political dangers of failing to end our dependence on foreign oil from unstable, antidemocratic regions like the Middle East. Biden’s willingness in 2022 to chuck the Bill of Rights out the window for an ounce of black gold was exactly what they were talking about. But while I believe Biden’s actions in the present are shortsighted, self-serving and will be judged badly by history, I also have to acknowledge that he’s playing the horrible hand he was dealt by a generation of faux leaders that came before him.
President Biden “chuck(ed) the Bill of Rights out the window”? Well, yeah, he pretty much did when it came to trying to impose mandatory COVID vaccinations, but that’s not to what Mr Bunch referred. The columnist apparently believes that because President Biden met with the de facto ruler of a sovereign nation, he has thrown the First Amendment’s protection of Freedom of the Press into the dumpster. Sorry, but the United States doesn’t control other nations.
It was just over 34 years ago — June 24, 1988, to be exact, in the last year of Ronald Reagan’s presidency — when the New York Times carried the front-page headline, “Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate.” That expert, the NASA climate scientist James Hansen, said at a Senate hearing that “[i]t is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.’’
Instead, there has been so much waffling.
Writing for the New Yorker on Saturday, the climate activist and writer Bill McKibben offered an excellent history of congressional cowardice and inaction on climate that long predates last week’s news that West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin — a multimillionaire from continued coal royalties — is so far using his veto power as the fulcrum of a 50-50 Senate to prevent any environmental legislation from passing in 2022.
The distinguished Mr Bunch apparently believes that, as a Democrat, Senator Joe Manchin must represent not the people of West Virginia who elected him, but the liberals of New York and San Francisco and Washington, DC.
In 2018, Senator Manchin had a ‘progressive’ opponent in the Democratic primary, Paula Jean Swearengin, and Mr Manchin defeated her, among a Democrat-only electorate, 112,658 (69.86%) to 48,594 (30.14%). It appears that the Mountain State’s Democrats heavily support Mr Manchin, whose politics were well known after eight years in the Senate. His general election victory, over Republican nominee Patrick Morrisey, was much closer, 290,510 (49.6%) to 271,113 (46.3%), as the people of West Virginia, while they like Senator Manchin, are moving heavily toward the Republican Party. In 2020, Mountain State voters gave 545,382 votes (68.62%) to President Trump, and only 235,984 (29.69%) to Joe Biden.
It would seem that Mr Manchin is doing something really radical like representing the views of his constituents!
McKibben reminds us that every single Republican and Democratic member of the Senate’s “millionaires’ club” voted 95-0 in 1997 to urge then-President Bill Clinton not to join the rest of the world in signing the Kyoto Protocols to reduce fossil-fuel pollution, and that Republicans cowed by the newly formed Tea Party (which got “Astroturf” funding from the oil billionaire Koch brothers) killed 2009′s “cap and trade” plan to curb pollution.
Perhaps, just perhaps, the 95 senators, Republicans and Democrats alike, didn’t think that the Kyoto Protocols were a good deal for the United States.
Whatever his reasons, while President Clinton sent Vice President Al Gore to Kyoto to sign the Protocols, he refused to submit the treaty to the Senate for ratification. Could those reasons be that he knew it would be rejected by the Senate?
Mr Bunch continued to trash the younger President Bush, as expected, but also President Obama, who “embraced fracking”, which greatly increased American production of petroleum and natural gas, meaning that we were sending fewer of American workers hard-earned dollars to Saudi Arabia!
Meanwhile, Manchin’s pro-polluter insurrection on Capitol Hill will be long remembered as the last stand of a dying regime determined to take all of us down with them. The irony is that — as you watch hundreds of Europeans drop inside their sweltering flats or succumb from heat stroke this week — Manchin’s legacy will probably involve causing even more deaths than the Butcher of Riyadh. The West Virginian’s pride and greed — the first two of the seven deadly sins — has made him a Maserati-driving multimillionaire while allegedly working as a public servant. But if the Bible that they glorify every Sunday in the hollers around Farmington, W.Va., is accurate, the senator’s sins will ultimately bring him to a place much, much hotter than 104 in the shade.
With his concluding paragraph, Mr Bunch, albeit barely, recognizes that Senator Manchin represents people who glorify the Bible every Sunday in the hollers of West Virginia. Trouble is, Mr Bunch doesn’t really approve of representative democracy, or the free choices of the voters, when those choices aren’t ones of which he approves.
RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt.
Most Americans don’t realize it, but significant portions of western Europe, including almost all of Germany, are north of 49º, the western portion of our border with Canada. Northen Europe sees some serious, serious winters.
This might be a post more suited for The Pirate’s Cove, and I did notify William Teach about the article, but with my nice, brilliantly green lawn, and the whole farm, I just had to write something!
Homeowners from Las Vegas to Sydney are swapping real grass for artificial turf as climate change forever alters what a normal yard looks and smells like.
By Brian Eckhouse and Siobhan Wagner | Friday, July 8, 2022
The lawn part of the farm. I planted all of the trees myself, and did the brick sidewalk as well.
Judy Dunn moved to her home in the Las Vegas suburbs from Washington state in late 1998, when there was little concern about water levels at nearby lakes. Dunn could nurture the verdant lawn of her dreams in a valley of cacti and sand that developers had recast as an oasis. But then a drought arrived and never left, and now local agencies are fining more residents for wasting water.
For Dunn, the final straw arrived last summer. Lake Mead, historically America’s largest reservoir, plunged to its lowest level since 1937 and the first-ever water cuts were ordered on a Colorado River system that benefits about 40 million people including Dunn. “If we don’t start saving water, we’re not going to have any,” says the 76-year-old.
So, Dunn opted to install an artificial lawn, a choice being made by more and more residents of Southern Nevada—one of the many places that’s getting drier as the planet warms. For some, it’s the cash-for-grass rebates being offered by local water agencies. For others, it’s the realization that the classic lawn is increasingly unsustainable in a time of megadrought. And then there are the residents coaxed into the shift by the water notices or fines.
Well, Las Vegas is in, you know, the desert, with average daily high temperatures reaching 95º F from June 3rd through September 16th, and 105º on July 13th. You move to Vegas, and you get the desert, and desert weather, and desert rainfall.
Beyond the drainage ditch and its too-high weeds is the corn field, another brilliant green part of the farm
For water suppliers worldwide, climate change is raising the stakes. Italy in July declared a state of emergency as water levels in its largest river dropped to the lowest in 70 years. The US Southwest is suffering through the worst drought in over a century. Within the next 30 years, droughts may impact three quarters of the world’s population. While plastic turf poses its own climate challenges, it’s increasingly seen as a viable alternative to real green yards that devour precious water. . . . .
A couple of decades ago, artificial turf was often a thin carpet atop a hard surface—rough on the knees as well as the eyes. Athletes playing on it complained that it wore their legs out. But as the product improved, so did homeowners’ interest. From the US to the UK, artificial grass retailers have seen sales tick up during pandemic lockdowns, when housebound property owners put their money toward home improvements. Indeed, Google Trends shows a worldwide surge in searches for “artificial grass” during the middle of 2020.
I don’t know if it’s still there, because the last time I saw it was the late 1980s, but Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company had, outside their public office, which was not inside the shipyard’s gates, some integrally-colored green concrete where grass would have been expected, by their normal sidewalks! Of course, Newport News got plenty of rain, but this way, the shipyard didn’t have to maintain the grass!
Me? I live in the Bluegrass State, and I’ve got to love all of the rain we get!
As always, there’s more. As I noted in yesterday’s article, during our remodel we installed not just a propane — there’s no natural gas service out in the boondocks — range, but a propane water heater and propane fireplace. That fireplace has really helped, when the weather gets brutally cold and the heat pump that is our primary heating source couldn’t quite keep up, and when the electricity has gone out before. Propane fireplaces are as clean burning as an electric range top, and do not require a flue, but if the logic of the Consumer Product Safety Commission is held valid by federal regulators for gas ranges, then the same logic would apply to gas fireplaces.
