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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ‘Great Reshuffling’ Is Shifting Wealth to the Exurbs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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