The goal here isn’t to win an argument but to salve wounded egos.
Readers who can recall events from only one year ago might remember the passionate national debate sparked by the Biden administration’s effort to drag the country, kicking and screaming, into a carbon-neutral future.
One of the prongs in this multiaxial assault on the existing social compact featured an attack on indoor natural-gas-powered appliances. The administration and its allies lost that debate, but you wouldn’t know it from the triumphalism they have adopted in defeat.
“Joe Biden is not coming for your gas stove,” read a Monday headline via CNN. From the headline’s tone, it’s reasonable to conclude that “coming for your gas stove” was never anyone’s intention. Of course, it was, but the attempt was a failure.
In February of last year, the Department of Energy proposed new energy efficiency standards for natural-gas-powered appliances that would have prohibited the sale of units that consume over 1,204 thousand British thermal units (kBtu) average — a regulation that would have affected roughly half of all existing models. This week, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm’s agency scaled that back. New regulations will ban the sale of stoves that consume 1,770 kBtu, a standard that applies to only 3 percent of current models.
To hear CNN tell it, this was no retreat at all. “Your gas stove is safe,” reporter Ramishah Maruf wrote of the reprieve your beneficent government has bestowed upon you. The Washington Post took a similar approach, mocking lawmakers such as Senator Joe Manchin for taking offense at the scale of this attempted overreach and attacking Republicans for overhyping what they alleged was a broader campaign of social engineering.
This is the same cynical approach that Biden’s allies took last year when the prospect of national restrictions on new gas stoves was a live issue. In venues dominated by like-minded progressives, getting rid of natural-gas appliances wasn’t just common sense — it was a vital imperative. But when those arguments encountered a skeptical audience outside their bubble, those same voices insisted that they had no such desire. Indeed, it was paranoid in the extreme to assume they did.
“Gas stoves have been found to be a bigger contributor to the climate crisis than previously believed,” the World Economic Forum mourned. National Public Radio confessed that the humble “gas stove has become a focal point in a fight over whether gas should even exist” in American homes. “If someone buys a gas stove today, that appliance is going to be in a person’s kitchen for the next several decades,” warned the co-author of one oft-cited study which found indoor gas cooking harmful if it was done in a room sealed off by “clear plastic sheets.” “Are gas stoves the new cigarettes?” asked Curbed’s Adriane Quinlan.
Amid this fervor, Joe Biden’s Consumer Product Safety Commission chief, Richard Trumka Jr., took up the cause. “This is a hidden hazard,” he bluntly told Bloomberg’s reporters. “Products that can’t be made safe can be banned.” And when that was a live possibility, CNN’s Maruf didn’t seem to see a problem in reporting that Trumka’s agency was “considering a ban on gas stoves.”
But when Americans who generally prioritize heat regulation while cooking got wind of the plan and objected to it, they were accused of conspiratorial thinking and cynical political manipulation.
“No, Biden Is Not Trying to Ban Gas Stoves,” the New York Times chided the American right. The prospect of a ban “fits nicely into readymade stories about government control or tyranny,” NPR’s Lisa Hagen observed of narratives that resonate with these strange primitives. Online click-farms that cater to the Left’s smug sense of moral and intellectual superiority cultivated “the dumbest reactions to the non-existent stove ban.” Axios deemed the right’s crusade the establishment of “a new culture war — and a “dumb culture war,” at that, according to MSNBC’s James Downie. The woefully misnamed fact-checking enterprise simply deemed the notion of a gas stove ban “false.”
Not only was a ban on new gas-powered appliances not happening, it was good and just that gas-powered appliance bans were happening. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this contradictory argument failed to convince a skeptical public.
Americans responded with hostility toward the CPSC’s proposed regulations. “The comment period closed May 8 and responses are filled with a mix of bombastic and often vulgar notes,” USA Today reporters wrote of the over 9,000 comments the CPSC received. “In all, 55 comments mentioned ‘freedom’ and more than 20 cited ‘liberty.’” The outrage was palpable. In the face of this backlash, Democratic federal lawmakers and the regulatory agencies in their control backed off.
Dark-blue states and municipalities are still proceeding with bans on new gas-powered appliances and natural-gas hookups in new construction with reckless abandon (where the courts haven’t intervened on consumers’ behalf). But in venues where they must contend with a meaningful number of Republicans, their preferred reform has failed.
It’s hard to say how much the Left’s effort to have this argument both ways — dare we call it an exercise in gaslighting? — contributed to the public’s frustrations, but that contribution is unlikely to be zero.
Democrats and their allies in media and advocacy organizations retailed their policy preferences with maximum contempt for the people they told themselves they were only trying to help. They insisted that restricting Americans’ access to these efficient tools was a noble and long-overdue enterprise, only to lash out at the rubes and paranoiacs who rejected their wisdom. They claimed that this vital reform safeguarded public health and the environment while maintaining that their opponents cared about neither. And when those dubious assumptions were challenged, exposing the hollowness of the conclusions fueling anti-gas hostility, they alleged that their critics were, in fact, the real know-nothings in this debate. This tactic is a proven loser, but they’re still doing it.
We can only assume, therefore, that it’s not a tactic at all. The goal here isn’t to win an argument but to salve wounded egos. Hopefully, this embarrassing display helps progressive meddlers process their emotions in defeat. It better. Otherwise, it’s hard to see the point.