Remember back in January when the Consumer Product Safety Commission decided that gas stoves were suddenly under consideration for regulation under the Clean Air Act? “Any option is on the table,” CPSC commissioner Richard Trumka Jr. said at the time. “Products that can’t be made safe can be banned.”
Of course, what followed was a few weeks of the Democrats and their allies in the mainstream press gaslighting all of us for thinking that the plain language of what Trumka, the CPSC, and Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm were saying wasn’t anything like what they meant. “What the right’s gas stove freakout was really about,” read a headline in Politico, as if it was conservatives that had started this conversation. “Regulators have no plans to ban gas stoves,” the Washington Post quickly assured its readers.
But, as Noah Rothman writes in the new cover story of National Review magazine, the Left wasn’t going to let its war on gas stoves — or anything else that you might find useful — go without a fight.
“Armed with unchecked self-confidence and possessed of an abiding faith in the idea that you must be coerced into altruism,” Noah writes, “the activists seem to be coming for almost everything you own. In the process, they are waging a crusade against convenience, an assault on comparative advantage, and a war on things that work.”
Securing the fossil-fuel-free future that President Joe Biden imagines for us sometime in the 2030s will not be a pain-free proposition — at least that appears to be the conceit of the more radical wing of the environmentalist Left. The scale of the challenge, as they see it, demands sacrifice from us all. One of their most controversial moves is to give up natural-gas-powered appliances, your gas kitchen range foremost among them.
As we go to press, “California had announced its own ban, to begin in the next decade, on the sale of new natural-gas-powered appliances, and New York State was set to follow suit.”
“And it’s not just about how you cook your food or stay warm,” Noah continues. Regulators and environmentalists are after your gas-powered lawn equipment, your light bulbs, reliable HVAC systems, and your dishwasher, among other consumer goods that make life in the modern world work. And, of course, if you’re annoyed by any of this, you’re the problem.
Read the whole essay in the new June 12, 2023, issue of National Review magazine. I’m proud to present this issue, which includes amazing articles and features including:
- Andrew C. McCarthy’s detailed reporting on the Biden family’s decades of influence-peddling in “How the Bidens Got Rich“
- Maddy Kearns’s debunking of progressive pieties and assumptions on transgenderism in “The U.S. Is an Outlier in ‘Gender-Affirming Care’ for Minors“
- John McCormack’s careful and forceful rebuttal of Donald Trump’s 2020 election-fraud claims
- And, in “Pay Teachers, Not Administrators,” education scholar Frederick Hess’s ideas on how American states can raise teachers’ salaries without raising taxes
You’ll find all this and more — Ross Douthat’s film reviews, Rob Long’s gonzo satire, literary criticism, and the world-famous “The Week” section — in each issue of National Review magazine. If you’re already a subscriber, thank you. If you’re still thinking about joining up, today you can get a print-magazine-only subscription for just $24. That’s less than $1 per issue and 60 percent off the cover price.
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Join us today, get 60 percent savings, and join the fight to keep America free and the Left’s hands off our gas stoves!