If you bought something and it didn't work, you probably wouldn't buy it again the next year, or the year after, or every year for the foreseeable future. The fossil fuel industry is no different—if it wasn't seeing a return on its annual investment in disinformation, it wouldn't keep spending billions of dollars on climate disinformation campaigns.
The explosion of support for gas stoves in Republican circles is the latest example of how the fossil fuel industry's near-century of public relations expenditures has created a surround-sound media machine to manufacture backlash against even the barest hint of a pending regulation.
In a disinfo-free world, Republicans eager to show their support for rural and working-class communities wouldn't be so quick to lend their support to gas stoves because they're primarily used in urban areas, where Democratic voters are concentrated. Furthermore, gas stoves are often promoted by home renovation shows as a luxury good for the fanciest of kitchens. So, since new gas stoves are either a prized feature of lavish, elite kitchens or a common fixture in the poor Black and Hispanic communities that the GOP spends more time attacking than defending, the Republican gaslighting on gas stoves seems to make little sense.
The fervent worship of gas stoves seems especially nonsensical since Consumer Reports finds that the innovative alternatives to gas stoves are so much better in every conceivable way: “Induction ranges and cooktops in particular often heat the fastest, simmer steadily, and provide quicker temperature changes when you adjust a burner.” (They also won't melt plastic measuring cups when you turn on the wrong burner…)
But this pro-gas hullabaloo begins to make sense when you consider the fact that the fossil fuel industry has been lying about methane gas for nearly a hundred years, as Rebecca Leber explained in Mother Jones. In the 1930s, "the industry embraced the term 'natural gas,' which gave the impression that its product was cleaner than any other fossil fuel" and promoted the now-ubiquitous catchphrase "cooking with gas."
The methane gas industry has been at it ever since. As recent reporting at the New York Times exposed, the industry is sponsoring TV shows to promote gas stoves, part of the hundreds of millions the industry has spent on disinfo organizations and the billions that it has spent on trade associations and public relations.
So when a federal regulator suggested looking into gas stove regulations, especially given the latest study showing that gas stoves cause as much asthma in children as second-hand smoke, the fossil-funded Republicans snapped into action, and the industry barely even needed to misrepresent past studies and activate its faux-media outlets and propagandists — though it still did.
The Wall Street Journal's opinion page, the crown jewel of climate disinformation media, was true to form with its "Biden is Coming for Your Gas Stove" editorial, falsely ginning up fears that jackbooted Big Government agents were on their way to your kitchen. Professional PR people like Alex Epstein also sent talking points, but that was little more than an opening of the other barn door after the horses had already run all around the farm. The Daily Caller discovered a so-called 'conflict of interest' and did a story attempting to make the fact that the study was funded by an advocacy group into a controversy, which is an interesting frame for an organization funded to be a conservative advocacy group posing as a media outlet.
Overall, the Right generated plenty of noise but not much heat, and that's sort of the point. Make enough noise so that regulators, who have been aware of gas stoves' health risks for decades, will be too scared to protect the public from that particular source of pollution.
Because it's certainly not about the quality of gas stoves.
Literally the only thing Consumer Reports found that gas stoves did better than electric stoves is that they have a scary flame: "The visual feedback provided by a flame growing and shrinking as you adjust a burner is valuable when gauging heat." (A problem that was literally solved in 2015.)
So if you're so dumb you need to see a flame to know the stove is on, then Republicans have your back, and your stove. Hopefully it's worth the asthma and the climate-killing emissions.