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.