News flash from the culture wars: they’re coming to take our gas stoves!
Well, actually, “they” are not, but the kind of people
who got alarmed about it are a threat to our health, and to theirs.
Credit: Shutterstock
The gas stove furor started with a Bloomberg
News interview that Richard Trumka,
Jr, a Consumer Product Safety Commission commissioner. “This is a hidden
hazard,” he said. “Any option is on the table. Products that can’t be made safe
can be banned.”
He was referring to the well known but little acknowledged fact that gas stoves emit various pollutants, especially nitrogen dioxide. Last year the AMA adopted resolutions about the risks of gas stoves, and urged migration efforts to electric stoves. Shelly Miller, a University of Colorado, Boulder, environmental engineer has said:
Cooking is the No. 1 way you’re polluting your home. It is causing respiratory and cardiovascular health problems; it can exacerbate flu and asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in children...you’re basically living in this toxic soup.
So one can see why the CPSC might be concerned. But the outcry about Mr. Trumka’s comments were immediate and vociferous. “I’ll NEVER give up my gas stove. If the maniacs in the White House come for my stove, they can pry it from my cold dead hands. COME AND TAKE IT!!” Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-TX) tweeted. The Atlantic further reported:
Governor Ron DeSantis tweeted a cartoon of two autographed—yes autographed—gas stoves. Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio declared simply, “God. Guns. Gas stoves.” Naturally, Tucker Carlson got involved. “I would counsel mass disobedience in the face of tyranny in this case,” he told a guest on his Fox News show.
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| Ron DeSantis' stoves |
Wrong. House
Republicans have already introduced
a bill to block such a ban; 20 states, mostly Republican-controlled, have
already passed such bans. It has
become, as Slate put it, “the culture war of the week.”
It joins, for example, masking, vaccines,
abortion and climate change as issues that become political divides not on their
merits but on the statement they make.
As Brady
Seals, a renewable energy expert at the Rocky Mountain Institute, told
Jacob Stern of The Atlantic, “I don’t know if
this discourse that we’re seeing now could have happened five years ago.”
It doesn’t matter that gas stoves may be bad for the
health of people in your house; it doesn’t matter that they’re bad for climate
change either, with one
study equating them to emissions of a half a million gas-powered cars. Natural gas is good for the U.S. economy,
proponents argue, and, in any event, if people want to use gas stoves, they have
the right to do so. Senator Joe Manchin,
a Democrat but from a deeply Red state, tweeted: “The federal government has no
business telling American families how to cook their dinner. I can tell you the
last thing that would ever leave my house is the gas stove that we cook on.
Huh?
It’s similar to the arguments about regulating guns;
demonstrably, they’re dangerous for the households
they’re in and for the general public,
but individuals’ supposed rights to them supersede rational discussion about
the risks. Or abortion; for all the impassioned
talk about the sanctity of the life of the fetus, states with more restrictive
abortion laws do
worse for moms and young kids.
The culture wars about masking, shutdowns, social
distancing, and vaccines had real consequences; COVID death rates were
higher among Republicans, at the county, state, and national level. It probably impacted
the recent mid-term elections, blunting the expected Red Wave. Similarly, no one should be surprised that
childhood vaccination rates are
falling. We’re already seeing
measles outbreaks and we can expect others.
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| Credit: Politico illustration; photos: Getty, AP |
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My “favorite” other recent example of health-related
culture wars comes from climate change.
For all the denialism from the fossil fuel industry and the politicians
who enable it, a new
study found that not only did Exxon know about the risks of global warming
for the past 50 years, its scientists had extremely precise predictions about
exactly what that impact would be.
Lead author Geoffrey Supran charged:
This is the nail-in-the-coffin of ExxonMobil’s claims that it has been falsely accused of climate malfeasance…Our analysis shows that ExxonMobil’s own data contradicted its public statements, which included exaggerating uncertainties, criticizing climate models, mythologizing global cooling, and feigning ignorance about when — or if — human-caused global warming would be measurable, all while staying silent on the threat of stranded fossil fuel assets.
The study’s authors concluded: “ExxonMobil understood as much about
climate change as did academic and government scientists…Yet, whereas
academic and government scientists worked to communicate what they knew to the
public, ExxonMobil worked to deny it.” One has to wonder how many other climate change deniers the same would be
true of. Fighting a culture war against
climate change trumps the very real, and apparently widely known, risks of
it.
Exxon, of course, denies these
latest findings too.
Credit: Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images
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America knows how to
react when attacked by other countries (e.g., Pearl Harbor) or terrorists
(e.g., 9/11), but we’re pretty terrible about more insidious risks. The current pandemic would qualify as a
national crisis, but aside from vaccine development and throwing lots of money
at it, we’ve handled it pretty badly.
Our public health system is in
a shambles a every level, our hospitals and healthcare workers are
overwhelmed, and whatever warp speed our COVID vaccine development was at
in 2020 is now more like impulse drive.
And House
Republicans and Republican Presidential candidates like Florida
Governor Ron DeSantis appear more interested in fighting the culture war
aspects of COVID than in, you know, fighting COVID. It’s not our health they’re
focused on.
Add up the health risks
from all the culture wars and it’d be a pretty scary number. Culture wars may make
great Twitter, but they make bad health policy.
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