They Are Coming for Your Gas Stove

They Are Coming for Your Gas Stove
A kitchen gas stove burner in a file photo. Joel Carrett/AAP Image
Jeffrey A. Tucker
Updated:
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Commentary

Are you catching on yet? There are people out there who want to dismantle civilization just for the heck of it.

The latest thing on the chopping block is the gas stove. The Biden administration’s Consumer Product Safety Commission has floated the idea of a national ban on them, based on some cockamamie study that they cause health and respiratory problems.

You say that they can never get away with it? Think again. These regulators are unbearably powerful. They have every intention of carrying out their wishes, and are enjoying every minute of it. They have disdain for Congress and scoff at your protests. They believe they alone are in charge and you have nothing to say about it.

Think of all the stuff they have already wrecked. Look around at your household appliances. Energy-use and water restrictions have degraded washing machines, refrigerators, freezers, dishwashers, the shower, the toilet, clothes dryers, steamers and irons, and so much more.

Even refrigerators are shrinking in size, all in the interest of institutionalizing austerity. Not even laundry detergent works like it once did because they forced the removal of phosphates so savvy consumers now have to add the cleaning product TSP from the paint section of the hardware store separately.

Clothes washers no longer use enough water to get things clean; the result is that our clothing is dull and dirty compared only to a generation ago. You can add all the liquids you want and it still won’t work. Sure, you can add bleach but that only wrecks the fabric.

When was the last time you saw sheets that were truly bright white? There’s a reason for that. It’s all deliberate, and results from the overregulation of appliances. Really clean absolutely requires roiling hot water and lots of it, plus phosphates to whisk the soap away. Without that, you get what you have today: dull and dirty everything.

Remember the lightbulb fiasco? Someone in D.C. decided that incandescents put out more light than heat, obvious to the humane warmth we once enjoyed. Their idea was to force us to live under fluorescents, like in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” We suffered that fate for a few years until LEDs came along that at least mimicked the look and feel of the Edison bulb.

All this should be a clue about what’s going on. There are sadists in charge of the regulatory apparatus. It isn’t really about saving water and energy. Even if it were, that alone would be objectionable. The whole point of energy and water is to serve the human experience, not to impose privation on the planet.

Then there’s the attack on the gasoline-powered car, which allows us to drive long distances even in cold weather and fully control the machine. The electric vehicle is another matter. It makes us wholly dependent on the grid and limits our mobility. In cold weather, it’s worse. You end up having to stop every few hours to beg for a charge and wait another hour if you are lucky enough to find a working machine. After a while, demoralization sets in and you decide that it isn’t worth it.

Sure, there are things you can do to outsmart this imposed impoverishment, such as hacking your showerhead with a corkscrew to remove the flow stopper. But there is no fixing the toilet, the dishwasher (which now runs for hours just to leave spots), or the refrigerator (which will break in five years anyway).

In time, they want now to get rid of your ability to cook with fire, thus removing from our lives a crucial primal connection to our roots and innate desire to be around it. Ever sat by a bonfire? Everyone stares for hours because it meets an inner need. No one stands around an induction stove. They are downright creepy.

The only technology these people approve of is a thoroughly censored smartphone. They want everything to work like that: centralized, anodyne, and feeding you nonstop propaganda.

I’m sure many commentators will take the bait and respond to the supposed science and try to prove that a gas stove isn’t actually bad for our health, but I’m not going for it. By now, we know exactly what is going on. They are trying to take away everything that makes our lives work well.

The very notion that an electric stove is better than a gas one would be disputed by any competent chef in the entire world. Instead of cultivating instincts based on what you see in the flames, you must trust some digital display to know the temperature, which is absurd. I can’t prove it but the heat itself seems different, like the difference between incandescence and fluorescence. One seems real, the other fake.

I’ve cooked on both and absolutely dread electric stoves. There are loads of dishes that require real fire, all of which would be impossible to make otherwise. I was just in a Mexican restaurant that put their chefs on display using stoves with flames that lap up 14 inches over the air and sear the fresh-made pasta as it’s swished around in the pan. There’s simply no way to do this otherwise.

Cooking isn’t just about a hot surface. It is about real flames that you can see and that genuinely fire the surface. They should seem dangerous and they should burn blue and red like the fire that they are. There is simply no other choice for a civilized kitchen.

I also don’t believe electric stoves are truly safer. I was a guest at a house recently and called to do some cooking. Smoke began to rise up from under the coils. I was puzzled and so I lifted up the top layer only to find a half-inch of grease underneath simply because it hadn’t been cleaned in 10 years. Had I left the house with the coils lit, the entire apparatus would have lit up in a roiling disaster. This is the sort of thing regulators don’t consider.

Fine, if you want some new tech, great. Go for it. But don’t pretend that you are really cooking. You are buying into the baloney. Also, I’ve met very few people who have used both gas and electric who would honestly choose electric. But if they do, again, fine. But don’t force that choice on everyone else.

That regulators say it’s bad for our health tells all that you need to know about them. They want us living in a fully sanitized, boring, and unworkable environment in which we never have contact with anything real. Above all else, they are somehow out to demonize fossil fuels, as if electricity doesn’t use coal too and the trucks that transport and deliver goods don’t use gas.

They have even degraded the basic gas can so that it no longer works properly. Oh, we should also mention that gas itself now includes an additive made from corn or other plant material, which is sticky, wrecks engines, and causes the gas itself to degrade over time.

Do you see what’s happening here? It’s all deliberate. All the things we love and that make life grand are being taken away from us. The larger truth here is that this war on civilization has been going on for decades. History is supposed to move forward with ever-higher living standards. That progress has completely stopped!

The trajectory must end now. Decades of regulations need to be repealed. The whole population needs to rise up and say no to the forced austerity and rule by the elite cadre of techno-primitivists. They have driven down the standard of living by force and are far from done with us yet.

Take this one seriously, my friends. They are coming for your gas stove. Believe it and resist with all your might.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Jeffrey A. Tucker
Jeffrey A. Tucker
Author
Jeffrey A. Tucker is the founder and president of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press, as well as 10 books in five languages, most recently “Liberty or Lockdown.” He is also the editor of “The Best of Ludwig von Mises.” He writes a daily column on economics for The Epoch Times and speaks widely on the topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.
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