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

You'll have to take gas from my hot, charred fingers ...

thanking god the last word was what it was

My partner recently read Electrify by Saul Griffith - and found his model of a clean energy future quite compelling (if I understand the thesis correctly, it is that converting households to all-electric ASAP is the quickest and most palatable way to wean society off fossil fuels).

She went straight out and bought a small induction cooktop for about $60 Australian and uses that in preference to our gas stove (we have solar and our oven is electric already - per the hybrid model above). She is a keen cook and finds it better in many ways.

Obviously, there are plenty of passions in this thread! But personally, I see it as one of those situations where consumers might have to put up with some small differences/inconveniences while infrastructure gets to grips with lowering emissions.

Naturally I am prepared to be torn to pieces for my unsolicited thoughts here.

(*wean society off fossil fuels in this usage = excluding heavy industry, manufacturing etc, for which he proposes other alternatives)

that's what I said now

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

afaics, the infrastructure that discovers, pumps and pipes "natural gas" to hundreds of millions of homes globally is industrial in scale. leakage at well heads and in transport applies just as much no matter who the eventual user is and what matters isn't how small each individual customer is but the cumulative amount of CO2 generated in aggregate. I would agree that a single customer deciding to forego a gas appliance makes no real difference, but actions taken at the scale of government regulation DO make a difference and claiming that government regulation of individual use is no different than individual choice is pure rationalization, because you like to cook with gas and don't want to change.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FmPBNMeXEAA5kIB?format=jpg&name=large

I’d be curious to see this for Europe pic.twitter.com/rlVdfYDNNE

— DEI coordinator for sinaloa cartel (@Forever_Wario) January 11, 2023

guess you’re lucky to live in a LIBERAL OASIS with your CHEF-STYLE GAS STOVE

just kidding this is all very dumb

i think gas stoves should be banned if only because it would annoy the worst utility i have to give me money to

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2021/06/how-the-fossil-fuel-industry-convinced-americans-to-love-gas-stoves/

Unbeknownst to both, Truong wasn’t their neighbor at all, but an account manager for Imprenta Communications Group. Among the public relations firm’s clients was Californians for Balanced Energy Solutions, a front for the nation’s largest gas utility, SoCalGas, which aims to thwart state and local initiatives restricting the use of fossil fuels in new buildings. c4bes had tasked Imprenta with exploring how platforms such as Nextdoor could be used to engineer community support for natural gas. Imprenta assured me that Truong’s post was an isolated affair, but c4bes displays it alongside two other anonymous Nextdoor comments on its website as evidence of its advocacy in action.

btw the usual proposal is to ban gas hookups in new construction for the same reason we ban new lead paint. it's not to send the IRS into your home to take away your stove and strip the existing lead paint from your wall. if you like them you can keep them.

Aimless, again, I don’t care whether you consider my correct opinion rationalization or not. The proposal is government overreach. It’s refusing to address the massive amounts of pollution and waste made by industrial actors and the MIC, and instead legislating how people can live— because yes, for some of us, cooking and food are actually important parts of the fabric of our lives, and not just obligations or afterthoughts.

Here's a thought: cooking and food may be an important part of life for people with electric stoves as well.

That’s true, and I bet that a lot of those people would be better cooks and make better food with a gas range. Every person I know with an electric range wishes they had gas.

not me, and i have had a gas range before

no one is taking your gas stove away from you!

I thought maybe the thread was having a spirited discussion about the classified papers found in Biden’s office(s) but in retrospect, that was a silly assumption to make

not me, and i have had a gas range before

Finally I said something we can all agree on

I thought maybe the thread was having a spirited discussion about the classified papers found in Biden’s office(s) but in retrospect, that was a silly assumption to make

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJRQo5aawho

lmao my dad literally just texted me an article about this, I guess this really is the issue of the day

Love to roast peppers on the reassuring glow of an electric range.

Dude... do you think that people with electric appliances just don't know how to do this stuff? The responses on here are super weird and elitist compared to pretty much every other topic that comes up on here.

imma let you answer tabes but here’s a question. you know those old-fashioned wood burning stoves with hot plates on top, that you could remove with an implement (and see down into the fire through the holes left behind)? why were those hot plates removable? why not just have the whole top surface hot and that’s enough??

the u.s. is screwed until it can turn outrage into a renewable energy source

they terk ahr sterves

Dude... do you think that people with electric appliances just don't know how to do this stuff?

I've never seen a recipe that said you can roast peppers/eggplant on an electric range. If that's a thing, then I'm the one that didn't know how to do this stuff.

I've roasted peppers on an electric range.

Put it in the oven! I'm not even trying to say that gas stoves aren't better in absolute terms. But this idea that you just can't cook with electric appliances or that surely you treat food as an afterthought is crazy times.

I've made them more often in the often, though.

xpost lol

Here’s an actual argument: certain types of cuisine are almost impossible to cook properly on an electric range. I will give that most things are adaptable, even if I believe the results will be inferior.

But take a lot of Chinese cooking, which requires a wok. You simply cannot get heat distributed properly on a wok through an electric stove, which is why so many Chinese families who live in places with electric ranges have separate butane stoves or other small gas implements for wok cooking. (My husband is Chinese, and yes, when we rented in places with electric ranges, we had a separate wok stove)

Tracer, my understanding was that many older cooking vessels were not flat-bottomed, so that if one was using such a vessel, one could fit it into the hole on the wood stove top.

Idk, I love cooking Chinese dishes on my electric stove. Am I doing it properly? Maybe, maybe not. But I can make food that is pleasing to me and to the people I cook for. I'm just trying to get you to imagine the fact that it isn't some kind of stunted anti-food existence.

The funniest part of this is that most people just move into a place and if it has electric it has electric and if it has gas it has gas and they just kinda take what they get it's not some big decision

Also most people can’t cook for shit

Exactly! I use an electric range because that's what was in the house when I bought it and there isn't a practical way to change it, and it's fine! I cook on it A LOT! I surely can conceive of better, but I can also imagine having a nicer car or owning limitless amounts of top end music gear or whatever. There's always something nicer that will make life a bit easier or more enjoyable or just make a task better. It's extremely strange to me that stoves are the one dealbreaker on here.

xp

y’all need to learn more about propane and propane accessories. like a nice gas grill

(I’m drowned out by a mob who believes I’ve committed a heresy against charcoal)

But whatever, I’m not going to keep this going because it’s like silby said, “cold dead hands.” Those who get it, get it.

I have never seriously cooked on an electric range -- I can count on one hand the number of times I've used one, and it was mostly just to like heat up a tea kettle in an Airbnb. So I can't personally speak to their effectiveness. But I will be considering electric when it's time to replace the gas stove in my condo, which is frankly not very good.

Also:

as i’ve said on this website before, you don’t have to believe that burning fossil fuel in your home is bad for your health to want to switch to an induction range. the reason to do it is that it is objectively superior to cooking with gas. higher heat with more precise control.

— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) January 11, 2023

has anyone asked how we’re lighting our cigarettes without a gas stove yet

Moodles, when we looked for houses, we asked pointedly whether they were hooked up for gas or electric cooking, and didn’t look at any houses that were hooked up for gas. I’m 100 percent serious.

This gas stove thing is politics on twitter in miniature. First the Right makes up a fake war on gas stoves to undermine the climate change portions of the IRA, then folks like AOC take the bait, now people on both sides who don’t realize the entire thing is BS posture madly.

— Isaac Butler (@parabasis) January 12, 2023

reverse that, apologies— we didn’t look at any that were hooked up for electric.

Many xps

People have all sorts of skill sets. There are also some people who absolutely suck at reading social queues or having empathy for people who live fractionally different lives from their own.

has anyone asked how we’re lighting our cigarettes without a gas stove yet

― mh,

Reminds me of that moment when a pickled Kevin Bacon tries lighting a cigarette on an unconnected electric stove in Diner.

xxp

What is your point? You were very clear that you absolutely can't live without a gas stove and can't conceive of how anyone else could.

some serious underestimation of the utility of an electric range (repost, I know)

hell yeah benihana up in this bitch pic.twitter.com/nWwt471dJO

— phil (@warmfourloko) April 27, 2020

Many xps

People have all sorts of skill sets. There are also some people who absolutely suck at reading social queues or having empathy for people who live fractionally different lives from their own.

I just use a magnifying glass and sunshine for everything.

Takes a while, especially on cloudy days, but I retain my moral integrity. Namaste.