U.S. Politics January 2023: Kevin McCarthy's Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Life

I love our induction stove. It is very efficient--water boils in a couple of minutes.

it's less about energy usage and more about indoor air pollution, right?

I love gas cooking, but apparently the amount of particulate air pollution it puts into your home is horrifying.

xp oops

yes this is about emissions from the range. also this is about not allowing gas in new construction going forward, not taking it away from anywhere it currently is (I have a gas range that we just bought a year ago, in Berkeley, which outlawed gas some time ago).

I love our gas range but I also recognize the indoor air pollution issues. Whenever we move from this house, I doubt we'd take the gas stove with us.

Anything to feed the perpetual outrage machine.

What did you just say about the outrage machine?! SAY IT TO MY FACE

remember Trump's riffing on low-flow shower heads? this is the same thing

Ten-flush toilets

Energy efficient light bulbs

I am not wishing pollution on anyone, especially children, but cooking on an electric range is awful.

eh fuck, many xposts

It takes about three times as much energy to produce and deliver electricity to an electric range as a gas range. There's data on this *everywhere*.

i really, really don't want to get into this shit, but it's more complicated than that with stovetops and ovens. yes, you can google it and you will find data everywhere saying that gas ranges are 3 times as efficient as electric. but that's referring only to the source energy, which is only one part of the equation (and also depends on your utility's fuel mix). with oven ranges, you also have to consider the cooking efficiency - how efficiently the heat is transferred from the source to what is being cooked. electric ranges are far more efficient in this regard. there is also a difference when considering stovetop cooking vs inside the oven. in both cases, the cooking efficiency is better with electric. and both options are less efficient than induction.

a big factor is also what kind of source fuels your electric utility uses. that's a big reason why a blanket statement that gas is 3x more efficient than electric is misleading. it depends on where you live, and it also depends on how frequently you use the stove.

when you're using the oven, the most important energy decision you can make, by far, is what you're cooking on it - meat or veggies.

i'm not even going to get into the methane and NOx leakage and asthma stuff.

so, i'm just trying to point out that there are actually a lot of tradeoffs and that it's not simple at all. i guess it is simple, if you can afford to get an induction stove.

https://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/article/efficient-cooking
https://grist.org/buildings/your-gas-stove-is-warming-the-climate-even-when-its-turned-off/
https://www.vox.com/2022/1/27/22902490/gas-stoves-methane-climate-pollution-health-off

a big factor is also what kind of source fuels your electric utility uses. that's a big reason why a blanket statement that gas is 3x more efficient than electric is misleading. it depends on where you live, and it also depends on how frequently you use the stove.

yeah I thought this was the idea behind phasing these out. theoretically you could switch an electric grid to renewable energy sources (everything is electric where I live because of heavy investment in hydro power), but you can't use anything other than gas for gas

also I've used both, and the idea that electric ranges are somehow *vastly* inferior to gas is silly—have the people saying this never used a newer one? not the old coil ones (those really are shit), the flat ones that are also easier to clean than gas ranges. granted, they're slower to heat things, but you can adjust I promise

I finally got an electic kettle, racked with guilt for using natural gas to boil water

I got my mom an induction cooktop, awkward for anything where you have to shake a pan or pick it up to flip but she got used to it pretty quick. Aside from speed, not wasting any heat is pretty nice in the summer.

Whenever we move from this house, I doubt we'd take the gas stove with us.

who takes the stove with them when they sell a house anyway?

the people who sold me my house

Republicans know their most natural constituency is old people who hate change.

a new challenger has entered the arena

Rep. Barbara Lee has told her fellow lawmakers she’s running for Senate in California, according to two sources familiar with the situation.

She informed her colleagues in a closed-door Congressional Black Caucus meeting on Wednesday.

Asked later Wednesday about her plans, Lee said in a brief interview she’d officially announce “when it’s appropriate.”

as opposed to the leak

would suck to lose my representative but would be happy to see her in the senate.

That Ted Cruz hard seltzer-throwing incident just took an even more embarrassing turn

https://www.queerty.com/ted-cruz-hard-seltzer-throwing-incident-just-took-even-embarrassing-turn-20230110

Omg this is George Santos’s résumé. Insanity. Just pure lies and not even believable ones. pic.twitter.com/gffXl9twW9

— Kaivan Shroff (@KaivanShroff) January 11, 2023

KM, i frankly don’t give a fuck— cooking on an electric stove sucks ass, as a majority of cooks will tell you, and all of those articles are part of a continuous effort to shift the blame of industrial pollution and climate change onto normal people who don’t and can’t actually have much effect on these things.

Electric range is good if you are in a dorm freshman year and need a hotplate. After that, fuck no.

"if you have to cook on electric, you might as well go out to eat" - quote from a bougie kitchen magazine 20 years ago, still true

and yes, hard agree that personal choices are not the problem here, at all, ever

Electric is fine, you just can't crank it to high and expect to cut heat immediately so you have to plan ahead (except for induction, where you can control heat much finer than gas).

I've never lived anywhere with a useful vent-a-hood so high heat cooking is pretty much irrelevant anyway. When I had a gas stove I bought a plug-in induction burner that I used 99% of the time anyway.

Well, this thread took a turn.

I have an electric range. I live in an building about 45 years old.

As for indoor air pollution, I can understand concerns about it for some individuals and families, but frankly I just think that the pervasive desire to get rid of every harmful thing in our environments has led to anxiety, fear, and a culture of paranoia. For most people, a gas stove isn’t going to kill them. Shit, these boomers keep staying alive and they grew up in a world where everyone smoked indoors, constantly!

I’ve got a very “cold dead hands” attitude towards gas stoves myself

i have a gas stove and it’s good but gas ovens are terrible ime. they only have a bottom element ime wtf (to get heat from above you have to use “the broiler” drawer?!)

but like, i would be fine with switching to an electric stove. i’ve cooked on them before. like…. whatever. and if you’re really concerned with getting your pan immediately hot (do you work in a restaurant?) get a carbon steel pan or gtfo, that heavy tefal aluminum with a dementia-tastic coating takes twice as long to heat up

these boomers keep staying alive

To swerve again:

interesting and scary article about Montana, seems like a blueprint that is happening in a lot of places. This shouldn’t be paywalled, gift article so to speak:

”If you want to live here, be a Christian “

Quite possibly the cigarette smoking indoors led them to vote for Reagan, Bush, Trump, etc.

As I understand the reporting, the greatest harm of gas stoves is increasing asthma rates in children? Obv if you're an adult in your own home do what you want. The salient fact, to me, is how long fossil fuel/natural gas interests have suppressed this info, which has apparently been "known" for like 30 years??

interesting and scary article about Montana, seems like a blueprint that is happening in a lot of places. This shouldn’t be paywalled, gift article so to speak:

”If you want to live here, be a Christian “

― Goose Bigelow, Fowl Gigolo (the table is the table)

I read a poignant response to that article this afternoon.

lol not to derail further but the ability to suddenly reduce pan heat from full blast to low is a key component of gas burners, and yeah it is pretty much needed for a fair amount of foodie recipes/tricks/sauces/desserts/etc

I'm sure I would work around this if I was using electric, have another burner standing by on low and switch, but still

In related news, apparently FIREPLACES in the home are HORRIBLE for air quality for children and adults and everyone around you who might possibly smell it and thereby inhale dangerous particles.

my childhood, ruined

THANKS IO (j/k nice to see u)

the entire time I was growing up we heated with a wood stove

Sorry, pal.

I had plenty of family that leaked methane all the time. Probably explains some things as it was definitely not good for air quality.

The spiritual succor of splitting a stack of wood and building a fire in a stove and getting a good coal going absolutely outweighs any negative physical effects from being near that stove, afaic. The thing I hate most about living in the city is actually that we don’t and can’t have a wood burning stove.

I had plenty of family that leaked methane all the time.

did you try telling them to stop eating beans?

a wood burning stove and an open fireplace are pretty different

i mean smoke from like wood burning is obviously not good for you. at least it kinda smells good though? gas pollution a little iffy i guess but idk whatever. car pollution is the absolute worst though. we knew that many decades ago and yes it's somewhat better with low emission vehicles but my personal crank opinion is that whatever is coming out of low emission vehicles is as toxic as ever. though not electric vehicles tbf. i live in a place where a weird weather phenomenon called an inversion makes it so that 'normal' car pollution is amplified like 100x during the winter. it's all compressed in one layer near the ground where it builds up for weeks on end. to me it feels like you're breathing in sublimated plastic-bag. it feels incredibly incredibly shitty. the only real solution to all of this is to reduce car dependency afaict, but that is politically not even comprehensible here, like basically unutterable, because socialism and the car industry, but every year we get a lot of messaging from local gov about programs to switch your wood-burning stove for gas or electric heating. always feels like a big red herring - how many people still use wood burning stoves? smoke from a few fires is not really a problem here. unless we're talking about wildfires lol.

Suing you guys for the damage to my thumb from having to scroll past all this stove talk

it's the hot stove league of american politics

NPR got desperate after Car Talk had to end.

Is it better than experiencing the tree and its roots? Sometimes pain has to be endured and becomes bittersweet even if you are responsible.