This isn’t the first time right-wing media have freaked out about so-called consumer choice and electrification. They responded similarly to legislation in New York City and California banning the sale of various new gas-powered appliances such as heaters and water boilers, and to the ban on the sale of new gas-powered cars in California. In those instances as well, consumers are not being forced to immediately switch their cars and appliances.
On the January 11 segment of The Ingraham Angle, host Laura Ingraham attacked gas bans in cities across the country: “The federal government may back down this whole natural gas banning for the time being, but not these fanatics. … How much suffering will California and New York and Massachusetts and New Jersey, how much will they have to go through?” she said.
Lee Zeldin, a former Republican candidate for New York governor, told Ingraham that the economic consequences of a gas ban “are dire.” He continued, “These people are beholden to the environmental crazies.”
In February, Fox News recruited celebrity chef Andrew Gruel to lead the fight against electric stoves. At that time, Gruel made the case that not only would shifting to gas stoves “change the face of cooking – we’re going to be microwaving absolutely everything,” but also that doing so would be a “tax on the lower class” because of the cost “to retrofit and rip a lot of these ethnic kitchens apart that rely on things like the wok.”
On January 10, Gruel appeared on the network almost a year later to argue “they’re using our kids as fodder and bait for their insanity” and claiming that it was “written by an environmental think tank … whose financial incentive is to reduce greenhouse emissions.” He then accused the study of “trying to cherry-pick as much statistical analysis as they can to even put together an argument supporting this idea that asthma can be connected, and it’s not.”
On Twitter, Gruel vowed to tape himself to a gas stove until the idea for a ban “is completely eliminated from everybody’s minds.” In another tweet, he claimed, “We have used gas stoves for hundreds of years. There is no correlation between an increase in childhood asthma and their use.”
Even if there were unlimited reliable evidence on the harm that gas stoves pose to human health, the right would not support electrification. And even if gas stoves did not harm children, the fact that methane emissions from natural gas are rapidly warming the climate should be enough to encourage a transition toward electric appliances. The right is attempting to reinforce natural gas as a clean and safe fuel when scientists agree that it isn’t. They are also making accusations about politicizing health issues, but that is precisely what they are doing.
