Hot Air about Gas Stoves.

When a Range Rover meets a Roving Range.

A good article on the method used to spread fake news was printed by our "All the Fake News we deem fit to print" avatar, that ran an article claiming that Your Gas Stove Is Bad for You and the Planet. Fair enough. Of course, the real fact is that any stove is bad for you and the planet (that's redundant, actually, as if it's bad for the planet, it's automatically bad for you: no planet, no you) which I might perhaps comment in passing, is the first lie. The planet being, after all, just a planet. So whether anything is "good" for it or "bad" for it is decided only in relationship to whether or not it is conducive to supporting LIFE on said planet, something without which the planet itself goes right on existing regardless. In fact, from what we've witnessed so far, it would have a far easier time maintaining its equilibrium without any life on it at all. And human life in particular is disruptive to the extreme ... so there's that.

But the NYT is not interested in the truth. It's interested in selling newspapers, and that means pandering, in far worse manner than any politician, even the DJ, to those most inclined to purchase them: ie to their base. And their base is maniacally convinced that we have to "Save the Planet". But as we will see in this particular article, it amplifies the false rhetoric of policies that advocate wiping out vast tracts of rainforests and the ripping up of the only wild areas left in the farmbelt to produce fuels for CARS, the most atrocious insult to LIFE on this planet, yet ranks as a mere annoyance to the planet itself, which spins and spins and orbits around its star no matter what the intelligent life it fosters does to destroy everything that lives and breathes upon its surface. Those who are the most vocal about saving the planet just happen to be the same crowd that most vehemently pushes for policies that continue the rapacious march of destruction that the manufacture, deployment and powering of our ever-growing fleet of carbon-bons necessitates, whether they're fueled by gasoline, electricity, nitrogen or sugarcane.

So even if there were a danger to the planet itself, if the steps advocated by this next "Green" Revolution", the "Green" New Deal, were taken, it would, to judge by the success of its two greatest mind-boggling boondoggles, mono-cropping via intense usage of fossil fuels, and the manufacture of biofuels, do nothing whatsoever to ameliorate its peril, but would in all likelihood, continue to accelerate its environmental destruction. All while insisting they are "Saving the Planet".

The article starts with the specious statement that, "We have some good news that sounds like bad news: Your gas stove has to go." Which statement is followed by the startling revelation, even as it prints this piece of propaganda, that "the" industry is already issuing propaganda with gauzy pictures of blue flames". ("The" industry? Which one? "The" ad industry? (which the NYT has no problem with printing their propaganda, so a rag that will print any propaganda as long as it's paid to do so, isn't part of "the" industry? "The" fossil fuel industry? "The" Fracking industry? (largest producer of natural gas in the country?)) First red flag: vague reference as to who the villain in the piece actually is.  

Which is followed by the statement that your stove is a danger to the world’s climate ... ah, so we've advanced a little at least, now it's not the planet, but the climate of the planet that is in danger. Naturally the same arguments apply as to those stating that the planet itself being in danger. The climate exists ... and the climate changes. So the climate can be in danger of changing, as in relation to those it will thereby affect, but the climate itself isn't capable of being in danger, as it will always be here. There is a climate on Venus, and it is changing. It is not in any danger, as it's incapable of experiencing danger. Any life that exists on Venus might thereby be put into jeopardy, depending on just how the climate changed, but the climate would not be in danger, any more than it is in any danger here on Earth. 

This is all leading up to convincing the readers of our responsibility for stopping climate pollution (what does that even mean? Pollution may change the climate, but you can't pollute the climate any more than you can "pollute" the weather. You can, however, pollute the discussion of the difference between the climate and the weather by claiming so).

But not to worry:

"A new wave of ambition to address climate change is sweeping across state legislatures this year as more and more commit to 100 percent clean electricity or debate doing so."

Too bad all the gas expelled bloviating about (non-existent) 100% "clean" electricity, (the same adjective, btw, that both coal and natural gas like to associate with their own particular brand of energy-poison). The clearest way to see that electricity is not now nor ever can be whatever it is they mean by "clean" is to imagine that we, as in the inhuman race, were to tap into the only really natural source of electricity every man, woman and child is aware of: lightning. 

Lightening would need no solar panels or wind farms, nor would it need to convert one form of energy into another. Yet even with those advantages, if we were able to build dynamos with enough capacitance power to buffer them from the enormous power of that first strike and then power the grid by disseminating the resultant power surge throughout the interconnected system it would be insufficient as a reliable source of electricity, as lightening doesn't strike all the time. And the same can be said for both solar and wind, and, more and more, for hydro, as drought strikes nation after nation reducing their ability to generate sufficient electricity to meet growing demand.

But somehow the article's author considers State legislatures simply discussing the impossible as progress:

"But despite this progress, the Rhodium Group estimates that climate-altering emissions in the United States increased 3.4 percent last year from the year before, one of the biggest jumps in decades." (With that kind of progress, our orb'll be a flaming firebrand by the end of the next decade: IT'll be that little blue flame they use to represent "clean-burning gas" ... I had to stop typing for a sec, 'til I stopped laughing).

Why? Well, Burning gas is now a bigger source of such pollution than burning coal, and nearly a third of that gas is burned in homes and commercial buildings.

Well, first of all, if you replace coal-burning power plants, which the author himself states we are doing, with gas-burning power plants, it would indeed be a brave new world if burning gas didn't at some point in the conversion not become a bigger source of CO2 than coal combustion.

 And as he states, "stoves actually use very little energy", unless, of course, they're electric stoves. Ah but now there's Progress:

"The perceived advantage of gas stoves is pinpoint control of heat, but induction cooktops are more precise." 

I'm sure it's merely accidental that Gillis conflates stoves with cooktops: they are not, however, synonymous. An electric range is not an electric oven, by any stretch of the imagination, yet Gillis completely sidesteps the question as to how does the actual stove, if there even is one, works. This despite the fact that the article's title specifically references Stoves!

As always as from anyone who dreams that technology will "come to the rescue", Gillis (he is after all being published in the NYT, the #1 purveyor in the country of fake news by omission) somehow neglects to mention the fact that in order to actually use this technology you must throw out all your current cookware. Now, I've had mine essentially for my entire life (much of it used when I got it), but to save energy I now have to jettison it and buy completely different cookware:

Induction cookware must be made of a magnetic-based material, such as cast iron or magnetic stainless steel. (The intensive energy use in the manufacture of this entirely new array of products, is, like the manufacture of EV's, completely ignored by the little Green men who seem to have invaded from another planet).

That's from Amazon, btw, Gillis doesn't deign to mention this tiny detail.

He goes on to insist that Heat pumps are going to save us: never mind that they don't work in environments that need them the most, they are, to bring the concept back down to earth, nothing more than electrified swamp coolers (which have been in use for more than 20 years now) that people in such desert climes as Phoenix are hip to because in extremely dry climates, evaporative cooling of air has the added benefit of conditioning the air with more moisture for the comfort of building occupants. Not surprisingly, they likewise, in extremely humid climates, have the added inconvenience of conditioning the air with more moisture than the comfort of building occupants can tolerate, necessitating their procuring and running a dehumidifier simultaneously.

Yet Gillis acts  as though this is some whiz-bang new technology that'll, yes, that's right, "Save the Planet."

 Nowhere in the article does Gillis see fit to mention that the main contributor to the rise in CO2 emissions he begins the article with, is most egregiously being caused by the specialized burning of gas commonly referred to as flaring: burning gas with NO purpose: just burning it up. 

But that's because Mr. Gillis, like anyone else jumping on the bandwagon of turning Climate Change into their own little money tree, is an author, one working on a book about how to solve global warming (Lol ... if this moronic article is any indication, I can see why he has to print his ad, which is all this article is (Oh, as a PS, despite it's paucity of any real objective data, it got printed because the dobie Gillis that wrote it was a one-time employee of the paper)).

Like Robert Scribbler, who has become little more than a shill for the Tesla Corponation, Gillis is the spokesperson for a range (now you know I wouldn't purposely use such a horrible pun, right?) of (let's shamelessly refer to them as "Green") products that bespeak of Progress. What that progress is, is a progression of ever-more disastrous steps to eliminate the use of fossil fuels with the substitution of them by a blend of renewable fuels that will never be able to produce the requisite Power (it's ultimately about power, not just energy) to feed an increasingly voracious appetite of the OECD nations and their acolytes for electrifying everything everywhere and excluding anyone unable to pay their power bills from the conversation (Speaking of conversations, to see what they have in store for the future, note the almost complete absence of any public/pay phone system, despite our once having one that was the envy of the (developed!) world: it was ripped apart, and then sold piece by piece back to the original owner, transforming AT&T's regulated monopoly into an unregulated monopoly, thereby depriving the even marginally destitute among us from being able to make a phone call with one thin dime ever again: this is what that dobie, Gillis, and all the little green men who will lap up his propaganda as if it were Holy Writ, considers "Progress"). 

If only it were. But like all such solutions, and they are easily identified by the rush to pour yet more billions of dollars into the coffers of the Corponationals before a single action is taken, they leverage the fantasy of a free lunch: the desire to have our yellow cake and eat it too. Just make them believe it and they will come, fully loaded with the conviction they are doing something "For the Planet".