There has been a clamoring not heard since the Buchanan era for stove hot takes (or hot stove takes). Given the scale of National Review’s calescent reporting on the subject, here be the breadth of our writing on the matter, with some of the toastiest lines from each article.
Humor
- GOP Thrusts Biden’s Boiling-Children-in-Oil Plan into the Culture Wars (Charles C. W. Cooke)
Emboldened congressional Republicans escalated the nation’s ongoing culture war Thursday when they pushed back against a plan outlined by the Department of Energy to mandate that all families boil their second child in oil.
- Last Will and Testament of a Gas-Stove Owner (Luther Ray Abel)
David and I sent the children to Jehoshaphat, our Amish friend, just in time; it’s too late for us, though. If only we hadn’t renovated the kitchen. Joanna Gaines has killed us all with her painted shiplap and brass potfillers installed above those . . . those stovetops. The blue flames — they were so comforting. We should have known they were will-o’-the-wisps in the bog, leading us to doom.
- ‘Republicans Thrust’ (Luther Ray Abel)
Leave it to writers to conjure new ways to say the same incorrect thing (present company occasionally excepted). The Washington Post’s Dave Clarke has a piece today [“GOP Thrusts gas stove, Biden’s green agenda into the culture war”] that would be riotously funny were it not a variant of the tired media claim of Republicans “pouncing.” . . . Dear Left, please stop making me repost [Republicans Pounce: An Investigative Report], and please never use “thrust” in a headline. We’re not mature enough, and synonyms for false claims are just as stupid as the original.
News
- Biden Administration Considers Banning Gas Stoves over Health Concerns (Brittany Bernstein)
A federal agency may look to ban gas stoves over concern about the release of pollutants that can cause health and respiratory problems, according to a new report.
The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission is set to open public comment on the dangers of gas stoves sometime this winter. The commission could set standards on emissions from the gas stoves, or even look to ban the manufacture or import of the appliances, commissioner Richard Trumka Jr. told Bloomberg News.
“This is a hidden hazard,” Trumka told the outlet. “Any option is on the table. Products that can’t be made safe can be banned.”
Similar sentiments were echoed by West Virginia’s Democratic senator Joe Manchin on Twitter midday Wednesday.
“This is a recipe for disaster. The federal government has no business telling American families how to cook their dinner. I can tell you the last thing that would ever leave my house is the gas stove that we cook on,” Manchin wrote.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D., N.Y.) belief that exposure to gas stoves “is linked to reduced cognitive performance” hasn’t stopped her from using one regularly in her home.
Multiple videos and images recorded in the New York Democrat’s kitchen and posted to social media show that she has a standard gas range in her apartment.
In one video posted to Instagram, Ocasio-Cortez can be seen bending over to dunk her face in a bowl of ice water with a gas stove clearly visible behind her.
- House Energy Committee Republicans Blast Biden Administration for Floating ‘Nanny State’ Gas-Stove Ban (Brittany Bernstein)
Republicans on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce sent President Biden a letter on Friday expressing “strong opposition” to any potential ban on gas stoves.
The letter, obtained by Fox News, comes in response to comments by U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission commissioner Richard Trumka Jr. to Bloomberg News suggesting the commission was set to open public comment on the dangers of gas stoves sometime this winter. He said the commission could set standards on emissions from the gas stoves, or even look to ban the manufacture or import of the appliances over health concerns. However, the commission’s chairman later disputed these claims.
Opinion
- The Only Proper Response to a National Gas-Stove Ban (Charles C. W. Cooke)
George Orwell believed that to picture the future, one needed only to imagine “a boot stamping on a human face forever,” but, as it turned out, this was far too dramatic an augury. In 2023, the federal government doesn’t so much trample us to death as bore us into the grave. The nagging is endless. “Don’t say that!” “Don’t drink this!” “Don’t eat that!” “Don’t drive!” “I wonder if you know that your swimming pool is dangerous?”
- Ban Electric Ranges! A Progressive Freakout from an Alternative Universe (Charles C. W. Cooke)
The NFPA notes that “it is sometimes less obvious that an electric burner is turned on or is still hot than it is with gas burners,” and that “in addition, once turned off, it takes time for an electric burner to cool.” If the same people were trying to ban electric burners, that — and not whatever stats they can find about gas stoves — would be plastered all over everyone’s mentions on social media. The whole thing is a game. The only appropriate response is: Bugger off.
- ‘Gas Panic’ (Charles C. W. Cooke)
[On his podcast, Charlie] discussed the alarming sight of politicians and activists discussing issues they’d never considered until yesterday as if they’d been working on them for 50 years straight, and suggested that you should be deeply suspicious of anyone who picks up a cause, and, ten minutes later, sounds as if it is the only thing standing between them and absolute happiness.
- Biden’s War on Gas Stoves (The Editors)
Democrats have long said they don’t want government in the bedroom, but they never said anything about the kitchen, and their appetite for regulatory overreach is insatiable. If this instantiation of the government-savior complex makes stoves into a political issue, conservatives should be confident about standing for sanity and stove choice. And when they eventually reassume control of the executive branch, they should not hesitate to reduce the power of administrative agencies that act as though they can ban any product that a few days’ worth of media coverage portrays as “unsafe.”
- Buckley’s Corner: Stoves and Serious Unseriousness (Luther Ray Abel)
January 6 and the summer of 2020 would have nothing on the resounding thwacks of chanclas, house slippers, and belts of the Grandmothers’ Political Alliance (GPA) on the rear ends of Congress and the CPSC should a nana’s ability to feed grandbabies as she sees fit be affected.
When explained plainly, Biden’s regulatory agenda is a political loser with a public that is just not buying climate change as a serious enough problem to warrant any significant sacrifice.
- Capital Matters Warned You about Gas-Stove Hysteria (Dominic Pino)
With the news that the Biden administration is considering stricter regulation of gas stoves over health and environmental concerns, it’s worth remembering this Capital Matters piece from Paul Gessing in August 2021:
Just because most of us may not think about natural gas, however, doesn’t mean that the climate warriors do likewise. They think about it constantly. That includes New Mexico’s senior U.S. Senator Martin Heinrich (D.), who recently wrote in the New York Times that “working to electrify our vehicles, homes and businesses is a critical part of achieving economy wide net-zero emissions.”
- Cooking with Gas (Michael Brendan Dougherty)
New York is eschewing cheap and abundant sources of energy (nuclear and gas) and demanding that we undertake expensive home upgrades without ensuring that the power to run them will be as cheap or abundant. I keep hearing from progressive pundits about switching to an agenda of “abundance” rather than a climate policy of universal austerity: When will that translate to state action and legislation?
- CNN Climate Reporter Falsely Claims Gas Stoves as Dangerous as Parking a Car Indoors with Engine Running (Philip Klein)
Two minutes of warming up a car indoors releases nearly 17 times more carbon monoxide than exists in a home operating a gas stove that has not been properly adjusted.
It’s no wonder that we don’t see many movies in which a star government witness decides to take his own life by cooking himself some scrambled eggs.
- It’s Only a ‘Culture War’ When Conservatives Do It (Nate Hochman)
A Washington Post headline declared: “GOP thrusts gas stoves, Biden’s green agenda into the culture wars.” The Guardian announced: “Republicans turn up the heat on a new culture war target: gas stoves.”
This is a textbook case of what some right-wingers describe as the “celebration parallax” — a tendency in progressive press coverage summed up by the line: “That’s not happening and it’s good that it is.”
- Biden’s Commissioner (Dominic Pino)
In addition to Nate’s excellent summary of the gas-stove imbroglio, there’s the question of the independence of the Consumer Product Safety Commission. A White House spokesman told CNN, “The President does not support banning gas stoves — and the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which is independent, is not banning gas stoves.”
It is true that the CPSC is an independent agency, but the attempt to distance the White House from its actions is a bit of a stretch. Commissioners retain their partisan affiliations while in office, and three out of four commissioners are Democrats appointed by Biden. The commissioner whose comments sparked the controversy, Richard Trumka Jr., is the son of longtime AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka, who was very close to Biden for much of his political career.
- Grab Your Spatulas, This Fight Isn’t Over (Judson Berger)
Regulation, like time, only ever moves in one direction. The administrative state, what David French called “the progressive movement’s great instrument,” gains ground with each act of rulemaking. And despite the Supreme Court in the last term circumscribing the power of agencies, they remain vampiric in their appetites.