Familiarity breeds contempt, and there was something both familiar and contemptible about the brouhaha last week over a possible federal ban on gas stoves. The firestorm was ignited by Richard Trumka Jr., a member of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, who told Bloomberg that his agency was considering all options to address increasing concerns about the emissions produced by the devices, including an outright ban.
No sooner was the trial balloon aloft than critics stampeded to blast it from the sky.
NATURAL GAS IS ABOUT TO BECOME THE WORLD’S BIGGEST GREEN ENERGY SOURCE
You can pry my gas stove “from my cold dead hands,” erupted Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-TX). Republicans on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce scorched the proposal. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) proclaimed that “the last thing that would ever leave my house is the gas stove that we cook on.”
The White House moved quickly to extinguish the nascent controversy, issuing a statement that President Joe Biden doesn’t support such a ban. The head of the CPSC insisted his agency was taking no steps to outlaw gas stoves. And Trumka tweeted that any new regulations would only apply to new stoves, not those already in homes.
But Trumka’s initial statement hadn’t come out of nowhere. States and municipalities across the country have banned new gas hookups. Berkeley did so in 2019, as did New York in 2021. California plans to phase them out by 2030, while Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY) introduced legislation for her state to follow suit.
Yet for the media, the real story was not the barmy idea of banning gas stoves but the outrage it provoked, outrage that as ever was worse than the idea itself because it was Republicans who were expressing it. Characteristic was the Washington Post, which charged that Republicans had “thrust gas stoves, Biden’s green agenda into the culture wars.” Other outlets quickly adopted the Washington Post’s formula. Wired, the Guardian, Yahoo News, Axios, and Politico were just a few that bundled logs onto the culture war pyre. After all, isn’t it usually the arsonist who sounds the alarm?
Remember the brush fire over flatulent cows in the Green New Deal? The pattern is repeating. Now as then, what matters is that conservatives are “pouncing,” “racing,” “seizing,” and “thrusting.” But as Commentary’s Noah Rothman pointed out, focusing on Republicans’ reaction to distract from Democrats’ discomfort “serves only to highlight their discomfort.” That “the wrong sorts of people may become aware of it” cannot change the underlying reality. The reality here, confirmed yet again by a Democratic functionary, is that when it comes to fighting climate change, attacking citizens’ lifestyles is still the Left’s preferred solution.
Take meat. The United Nations was pushing the world to adopt a meat- and dairy-free diet as early as 2010. A major study in 2018 and another U.N. report in 2019 both determined that severe restrictions on meat-eating are necessary to mitigate the threat of climate catastrophe. One way to achieve that is by taxing meat to drive up its price. That means beef especially. Emily Atkin of the New Republic admitted as much: “Any comprehensive climate plan must take cows into account, with one obvious solution being to reduce their population. That doesn’t mean taking away people’s hamburgers, but it does mean making it a rarer, and thus more expensive, product.” When climate activists say “no one” wants to ban meat-eating, they mean it the same way Odysseus did when he said “No One” had blinded Polyphemus.
Air conditioning is an enduring target of liberal busybodies for its environmental impact but also because, as the Boston Globe’s Leon Neyfakh argued, it prevents our return to a more natural, innocent, and pristine way of life. “A global greenhouse ration,” Stan Cox, author of a book on air conditioning, contended a decade ago, “would push us into distinguishing between absolute necessities like food or water and manufactured necessities like a houseful of refrigerated air.” Never mind that the refrigerated air can be the difference between life and death.
If the likes of Cox had their way, they’d ration driving, too. Critics have long decried what the California writer Edward Humes called the automobile’s “absurd primacy” in the U.S. The rise of autonomous vehicles would kill two birds with one stone: Energy-efficient, self-driving cars making fewer trips would aid the battle against climate change while simultaneously boosting the effort to reengineer suburbia to bring it into closer alignment with progressives’ urbanist social vision. “It is time to drive the car out of our lives,” declared George Monbiot, the Guardian’s commissarlike environmental columnist. Banning cars may not be possible. But banning their gas-guzzling, carbon-spewing incarnation might be. Hence California’s decision to forbid sales of new cars with internal combustion engines starting in 2035. Other states and the federal government are eyeing similar prohibitions. As the Washington Examiner’s Nick Clairmont wrote recently, there are doubts about whether this transition is technologically feasible or democratically practicable. Nor are all environmentalists pleased with the transition to electric automobiles because the shift could further entrench “car culture,” which is the true malady.
So no more cross-country road trips. But at least you can still hop on that plane, right? Alas, you’ve been grounded. “Flying is bad for the planet,” the New York Times announced a few years ago. Even worse than cars, given how much carbon a single flight is responsible for. The European Union and Australia have considered forbidding short-haul plane trips. A phenomenon known as “flight shaming,” inspired by Greta Thunberg, has emerged to convince people to limit or forgo airline travel due to its environmental impact. Several campaigners have taken this step themselves. Even tourism has found itself in the dock, so reliant is it on transportation, almost all modes of which produce carbon. A New York Times reporter asked, “If Seeing the World Helps Ruin It, Should We Stay Home?” More people are answering in the affirmative, such as the English travel writer Henry Wismayer, who dismissed holidays as “a luxury, an extravagant add-on to life that we could live without.”
Luxuries we could live without. That attitude is shared by a vast swath of the climate movement, perhaps even most of it. For activists, those things they demand we sacrifice are luxuries. That is why they can be sacrificed. Or rather, why they want everyone else to sacrifice them, even though cars and air conditioning and planes have become fundamental to modern life. Perhaps barbecues and lawns, toward both of which climate hawks have turned their jaundiced eyes, are extravagances that can be done without.
Yet such extravagances are what give the world its flavor, make life worth living. The green world is an impoverished world. Nowhere is this truer than in the most controversial remedy for global warming, one that’s gained in popularity over the last decade: having fewer children or even none at all.
The ethicist Travis Rieder is the most prominent exponent of this view. Having children “imposes high emissions on the world,” he claimed. Therefore, as “with any high-cost luxury, we should limit our indulgence.” Rieder wants rich nations to impose tax penalties on new parents, at least those at the upper end of the income scale. Rieder exploded onto the scene with his incendiary thesis in 2016. Since then, the debate over whether people should have children in the face of climate change has flared up regularly in the mainstream press. To cite two recent examples, the New York Times ran a long article asking “To Breed or Not to Breed?” in late 2021, while the Washington Post’s “climate zeitgeist reporter” pondered, “Should you not have kids because of climate change?” just last month.
60 Minutes’s New Year’s Day exhumation of Paul Ehrlich should be seen in this light. The predictions Ehrlich made in The Population Bomb, his notorious 1968 tract that asserted that overpopulation is the gravest threat facing the planet, have repeatedly proved wrong. He is, not to put too fine a point on it, a discredited crank. Yet here was CBS News trotting him out in 2023 as a credible voice regarding the dangers of climate change. Why? Because climate alarmism has made Malthusianism de rigueur again, and Ehrlich is the most celebrated Malthusian around.
But Ehrlich is not merely wrong. He is a monster. The word is well chosen for someone who once advocated, the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson reminded on Twitter, letting people in India starve to mitigate the threat of overpopulation. From this perspective, Ehrlich is the ideal face for the environmental movement as 60 years later he remains the avatar of the profoundly malevolent, inhumane current that has always flowed within it.
Deny it all they want, climate activists want to make everyone’s lives harder, more inconvenient, less comfortable — whether we like it or not. Naturally, therefore, the actual culprit is capitalism. The leftist writer Naomi Klein has been targeting it for years. But overthrowing capitalism won’t be enough. The real cure, the only cure, is degrowth — that is, shrinking the economy. “The climate science recognizes a clear degrowth imperative,” averred Jason Hickel, a champion of degrowth. His is a minority viewpoint, but one that has gained a foothold in the climate change dialogue.
Proscribing gas stoves might in itself be an innocuous initiative, even a valid one on health and other grounds. Yet the neuralgic reaction was not unreasonable considering the symbolism it came freighted with, a Pelion on top of the Ossa of things people have already been told they must give up to create a better world. As if a better world could ever be purchased at the price of making those who live in it worse off. Which is just what many climate activists want us to be — and what we would be if the activists got their way. A world bereft of cars and planes and lawns and barbecues and children is simply a world bereft.
Decarbonization and net-zero emissions may be achievable one day. If so, they will only happen with massive technological change. Trying to bring them about before the technology “is scalable, reliable, and available” will only degrade “the Western middle class’s quality of life, providing yet more fuel to the establishment’s populist and conservative rivals,” the Capital Research Center’s Michael Watson astutely observed. Whether climate activists have the discipline to wait until their goals become palatable to the mass of mankind remains to be seen. So far, the signs aren’t encouraging. A doomsday cult peddling socialism is the reputation climate activists have forged for themselves. It is, moreover, an image a fair number of them want to cultivate.
Climate change is a genuine problem. But it will only be fixed by adapting solutions to the way people live, not by making altering the way people live the solution. As long as the climate movement regards humans and how they live as the planet’s greatest ill, it will not gain much traction in the political arena. Nor should it.
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Polls show voters increasingly regard climate change as a serious issue. Yet polls also reveal that people have little inclination to alter their own behavior or accept higher costs to combat it. One 2019 survey, for example, found only 28% of respondents were willing to pay a $10 a month carbon tax on fossil fuels, while according to another, only 47% were in favor of a $2 monthly surcharge on electric bills.
That’s why Democrats and the media play the “Republicans pounce” card whenever the latest bit of liberal climate insanity hits the news. They need someone to blame, and they can’t blame voters. Even though ultimately that’s who’s at fault. For however much their betters already have, people are in no rush to leap on the Left’s green agenda themselves.
Varad Mehta is a writer and historian. He lives in the Philadelphia area. Find him on Twitter @varadmehta.
