We're on the tail end of a news cycle that featured conservative "alpha males" complaining that "these female M&M's are a slap in the face to men everywhere," among other hot take atrocities, but the great gas stove freakout of 2023 looks like it will be with us for some time yet. It's got everything needed to be the next Lightbulb Offensive or Low Flow Toilet Assault.
You remember that last one, right? Donald Trump spent his entire presidency wailing about needing to flush White House toilets five, or a dozen, or a bajillion times after doing his business; it turned out the major portion of the problem was probably not his diet, but his habit of clogging White House bowls with government documents he intended to destroy.
The Great Gas Stovepocalypse began, as these things often do, with the release of yet another major scientific study suggesting that piping toxic gas into American kitchens for the purposes of lighting it on fire is actually probably really bad for you, medically speaking, and that gas stove emissions are likely to be responsible for about 13% of childhood asthma among Americans. Asthma is, as you may or may not know, a potentially deadly and often lifelong illness that can severely limit physical activity and lead to a lifelong loss of lung capacity, so yet another study signaling gas stove emissions as a major contributor counts as something of a big deal.
Not because the United States of America gives a particular damn about the welfare of its children, mind you. It's because it now looks like agencies responsible for the welfare of American children are going to have to at least contemplate whether or not the news that a major home appliance is probably killing people means we need to reevaluate how ubiquitous that home appliance ought to be, and even threatening to ask that question got some people absolutely flipping their lids.
Aaaaaaagh, so that's how this is going to go, then. Of course it is. Quick, everybody, light up the toxic gas machines and make weird threats about what you're gonna do if somebody tries to stop you.
Nobody's going to catch me, a Republican lawmaker credibly accused of a pattern of sex crimes, giving a damn about the welfare of children!
From state governors to the full-on troll account that now counts as Elon Musk's personal conscience, the talking points quickly emerged. This was now the new hill to make our kids die on. This is bigger than battles over implied candy genitalia; this is the very soul of America we're talking about.
There's real "I am going to huff this paint, and neither you nor the entire cast of Space Jam can stop me" vibes to that one. Okay, buddy, we're just gonna watch from the other side of the street, then. You do you.
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Jeebus, dude.
I realize Jim Jordan is pretty much the Republican exemplar of not caring about child welfare, which is the whole reason the party of Dennis Hastert took a shine to him to begin with, but take it down a notch.
You will note, dear readers, that at no point did any of this threaten to break out into reasoned debate. There was somewhere between zero and negative political interest in whether or not pumping toxic gas into often poorly ventilated kitchens really is responsible for a measurable chunk of lung disease among American children. The resounding conservative refrain was far less nuanced: F--k the children; this is about mah cooking freedom.
In other words, it was of the caliber of every other response by reactionaries learning something that previous generations didn't know or didn't ask.
"Lawn darts is an American lawn tradition passed down from George Washinglawn himself! Maybe kids these days just need thicker skulls and less stabbable arteries!"
"But without lead paint, how will I get my teeth their whitest?"
"America. Apple pie. Asbestos."
There's no quicker way to upset great swaths of the American public than to hint, in even the quietest of voices, that some random barely thought-of scrap of their modern lives turns out to be more dangerous than we once thought it was. It's upsetting to think that something we might have grown up with (my childhood consisted not only of those gas stoves but person-high wall-mounted gas heaters that reeked of leaking gas whether they were on or off, and yes I was in the hospital quite frequently thank you for asking!) might have caused real harm.
Or you could just not contemplate any of those uncomfortable questions, instead choosing to believe that any new information you receive after the age of 12 is all a conspiracy meant to make you, personally, feel bad.
There are two somewhat bizarre addendums to this. The first is that we actually have the stomach to regulate out quite a lot of danger, depending on where the danger is coming from.
If all washing machines came with optional robot-arm attachments that would spontaneously rip the livers out of a small percentage of passing toddlers, we'd regulate those washers pretty darn quick. Robotic vacuums cannot be shipped with optional spinning knife attachments just because it would look cool. You can no longer put cocaine in your old-timey bottled cough syrup even if it does really perk your patients up, because reasons. There are some things we're good at regulating, and some things we're not.
The "not" parts tend to coincide with very particular lobbying efforts, for what it's worth. Tobacco had and has very good lobbyists, and so we cancered American lungs into charcoal before doing anything about it; fossil fuel industries can reshape the atmosphere of the entire planet and can ship Greenland's ice sheet onto New York streets gallon by gallon and you'll have lawmakers shoving multiple flags in their orifices for their speeches defending the companies from woke science-knowers.
This one? This one has all the makings of a top-dollar bout. Putting real numbers on the health dangers of indoor gas appliances might even turn out to be a rough replay of our past reliance on leaded gasoline, and that one was a doozy.
Discovery: Leaded gasoline makes our cars work better! Discovery Two: Oops, but it's also causing widespread brain damage, heart disease, cancer, and other medical conditions. But it really does make the cars work better! What a dilemma! Maybe Americans should just take one on the chin this time around, agreeing to swim through clouds of neurotoxins so that our cars can get make better vrooms?
That one was a tough fight, and one that didn't get finally settled until 1996—the same year the movie Titanic came out. The need for automotive vroomies was worth knocking points off the national IQ for decades; that's how difficult it is to get American consumers and industry both to agree to not expose their children to known organ-damaging toxic gases for the sake of ego or mild convenience.
The second of our addendums is that if we're going to be honest about this, spitting conservatives like Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, and Gov. Bongwater are catering to a crowd that very much believes mundane aspects of our modern American life are causing nationwide illness and death.
That's their thing. It's their whole personality, in fact. They just believe the dangers are always coming from the opposite direction of whatever our nation's top experts are currently warning about.
The COVID-19 pandemic that killed over 1 million Americans is, to them, not considered to be dangerous. The vaccine that's been keeping the death counts in check even as society reopens, though—what if that causes spontaneous cranial magnetism? How can we take such a risk, as Americans who are forever surrounded by coins and spoons?
Opposition to every new broadband infrastructure upgrade is considered to be possibly satanic by the people still waiting for dead presidents to reappear in public parks. It might change your DNA, or activate the secret microchips. But pumping a gas so toxic that regulators require rotten-egg stink compound mercaptan to be added to the mix so that homeowners know when a leak is serious enough that they should evacuate? Bah! Allow me to go onto the internets with this video of me lovingly tonguing the shutoff valve! I love this gas stove with a nearly sexual passion; bear uncomfortable witness, all of you, as yet another thing I never once mentioned before becomes a new and intrinsic part of my identity!
So yes, this is going to be a thing. And whether or not gas stoves have actually been killing people is not going to be a part of the debate, because between December 2022 and this week American conservatives have discovered that gas stoves are what Jesus personally used to cook meals for Abraham Lincoln and only a full-on communist would have a problem with that.
