CPSC Withdraws Proposal to Ban Gas Stoves;
Left Wing Goes From Claiming The Right Is Crazy To Oppose Banning These Racist, Climate Destroying Stoves, To Claiming the Right Wing Is Crazy To Claim the Left Ever Wanted to Ban Them

Via Jazz Shaw at Hot Air, Richard Trumpka, Jr.'s trial balloon about banning gas stoves in the name of Racial Justice -- really about climate "justice" -- went over like a lead balloon, further convincing the country that the Biden Administration and the Democrats would not stop until they had poked every single American citizen in the eye.

And so they issued a "clarifying statement" that they were just totally kidding when they said they were considering banning gas stoves.

It was a pun. No not a pun, the other one, the one that says the same thing when you spell it backwards.

"Over the past several days, there has been a lot of attention paid to gas stove emissions and to the Consumer Product Safety Commission," Hoehn-Saric wrote in an official statement released Wednesday. "To be clear, I am not looking to ban gas stoves and the CPSC has no proceeding to do so."

Commissioner Richard Trumka Jr. had originally told Bloomberg News that fears over air quality caused by gas stoves was creating "a hidden hazard."

"Any option is on the table. Products that can't be made safe can be banned," Trumka Jr. insisted.

The comments came following Senator Cory Booker (D., N.J.) and Representative Don Beyer (D., Va.) urging the federal agency to investigate the issue due to its allegedly disproportionate impact on black, Latino, and low-income households.

Gas stoves fell into the Consumer Product Safety Commission's crosshairs following an academic journal article published in December 2022, finding that 12.7 percent of childhood asthma cases were linked to its usage in households. The paper went on to parallel the "childhood asthma burden" produced by gas stoves being equivalent to secondhand smoke exposure.

Again via Jazz Shaw, the White House had to dispatch its most credible, authoritative voice to squelch any notion that Biden supported this plan.

"The president does not support banning gas stoves," White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at Wednesday's briefing. "And the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which is independent, is not banning gas stoves. I just want to be very clear on that."

Karine always just wants to be clear, and is eternally frustrated to be misunderstood by her intellectual inferiors.

John Hayward found some black comedy in this.

The left attempted to interfere with and attack the normies, yet again. The right -- and the non-right normies -- objected.

The left immediately attempted to frame The Right as "starting a new culture war" over gas stoves, as if we were the aggressors and first movers in all of this. Here's the Washington Post, turning the left's aggression into the right's freak-out:

John Sexton wrote about this today. The Washington Post has been especially aggressive in attempting to claim that the Republicans are just inventing a new culture war boogeyman about the banning of gas stoves -- downplaying or even omitting entirely the fact that Biden's head of the Consumer Protection Safety Commission literally said he was "considering" doing just that.

Where necessary, they stealth-edited prior articles to remove references to the CPSC's proposed "ban" on gas stoves.

[T]he most interesting part of this news cycle was what happened after the CPSC chairman made it clear yesterday that no such ban was going to happen. Suddenly, the media shifted from promoting the idea of a gas stove ban to ridiculing conservatives for even suggesting the idea that a ban was a possibility. So here's that same Washington Post story after it was rewritten yesterday. The new headline which removes the word "ban" is "U.S. agency examines secret pollution source in 40 million homes: Gas stoves."

...

So the story was stealth corrected Wednesday and the same day the Post published another story titled "How the humble gas stove became the latest flash point in the culture wars." This one turned the focus a bit toward the GOP reaction.

Republicans and allies of fossil fuels are rallying behind the humble gas stove, a staple in millions of U.S. kitchens that has emerged as a flash point in the nation's ongoing culture wars and a source of conservative resistance to President Biden's environmental agenda.

The controversy was ignited when a member of the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), an agency charged with protecting the public from dangerous household products, said in mid-December that the commission will consider regulating indoor air pollution from gas stoves. On Monday, Commissioner Richard L. Trumka Jr., a Democrat, said in an interview that he had not ruled out a ban on the appliances, prompting the agency to pivot Wednesday and clarify it was not planning a ban...

By raising fears of a ban on gas stoves, Republicans are in some ways taking a page from former president Donald Trump, who often complained about energy-efficiency standards for household appliances -- including lightbulbs that make you "look orange," toilets that "don't get any water," showers that lack a "full shower flow" and "worthless" dishwashers.

That story's attempt to connect all of this to Trump is pretty weak but it least it does include what Trumka said to prompt the reaction early on in the story. Today the Post has another story up titled "GOP thrusts gas stoves, Biden's green agenda into the culture wars" which seems to have turned a corner into gaslighting. Here's how it opens.

Republican lawmakers are claiming that the Consumer Product Safety Commission wants to take away people's gas stoves, in what they say is the latest example of the Biden administration's regulatory overreach, Maxine reports.

In reality, the commission is not going to snatch anyone's stove. It is merely considering regulations that would seek to curb pollution from new gas stoves on the market, rather than existing appliances inside people's homes.

Yet the gas stove furor is emblematic of Republicans' broader efforts to thrust President Biden's environmental agenda into the nation's ongoing culture wars....

If you keep reading the story does eventually explain that this all started with Trumka but the focus has changed from his comments to a GOP plot to oppose Biden's green agenda. Other outlets have published similar stories today. This one by Axios doesn't even make sense as written. It's headlined: "Right's new fight: Gas stoves."

I'll direct you to the link to read Axios' senseless entry, in which they posit that the right is just fighting against a ban that was never proposed in the first place.

Below, Doc_Zero's commentary on the left's Immaculate Conception culture warring: The culture war is always aborning, and yet they're always denying their paternity, saying "That culture war baby isn't mine, it's the other guy's."

But the left has always been made up of very Jerry Springer type people, hasn't it?

John Hayward @Doc_0

You had lefty blowhards on Twitter in the middle of shouting their new War on Stoves talking points yesterday when the Biden administration suddenly backed down. It's like pulling the chip out of a Terminator while it's in the middle of emptying a magazine at Sarah Connor.

Look at how prominent dingbats like AOC played it, with classic Orwellian "we have always been at war with Eastasia" full-steam ahead gusto: We have ALWAYS known gas stoves were dangerous. Everybody knows this. It has ALWAYS been an urgent crisis.

This started a few days ago with a single Biden apparatchik floating a ban based on a fraudulent "study" from a whack-job activist group, but they were told to believe it was some longstanding consensus and THANK GOD SOMEONE IS FINALLY THINKING ABOUT THE CHILDREN.

The only way to salvage that half-downloaded program still bubbling in the heads of so many lefty robots is to concoct a new narrative that says the opponents, the resisters, ATTACKED and are OBSESSED and were probably organized by paid stooges of Big Stove and Big Gas.

It's the same tedious, but far too effective, playbook they use with every social issue, a totalitarian method of shifting the political landscape by claiming every bit of ground you aggressively seize has been yours forever, and those trying to take it back are the attackers.

It's why they worked so hard to successfully bully conservatives away from "social issues" post-Reagan. EVERYTHING is a social issue to the Left, and they're always on blitzkrieg attack. They always paint the resistance as "obsessives" and "reactionaries" fighting "culture wars."

The trial balloon exploding yesterday wasn't the end of it. That's not how totalitarians think. They'll whine about a sneak attack by sinister reactionary forces until they try again. This idea that "everything we think is dangerous can be banned" is too valuable to let go. /end

posted by Ace at 02:30 PM

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