Gimme Some of Those Induction Cooked Ribs

2021: Oakland food hall (Chron/Getty)

One of the underpinnings of the urban lifestyle is at war with urban culture's aspirations.

Headline: the surprising force stalling climate progress: California restaurants [bold added]

When Berkeley became the first city in the country to ban the extension of gas pipes into new buildings, it targeted a contentious source of climate pollution...Berkeley was the first to try to stop this climate problem from becoming bigger. Since it enacted its ordinance in 2019, more than 100 cities, counties and states across the country have followed.

Today, these efforts are reeling. The California Restaurant Association took the city to court in November 2019, arguing that its 20,000-plus members preferred cooking with a gas flame and that, even though the rule wouldn’t require changes to existing buildings, such an ordinance would limit their options when opening new locations. Moreover, they argued, federal energy laws preempt these aggressive local ordinances.

After a see-sawing legal battle, the restaurants prevailed...

Now, Bloomberg Green has learned, a coalition of gas companies and their supporters are planning to wield the restaurants’ legal victory to beat back similar rules across the western US. This puts restaurants directly at odds with a hospitable planet, as there’s no feasible pathway to avert catastrophic warming if places like California don’t sharply reduce gas combustion in buildings, according to climate experts.

“It’s rather irritating to have restaurant owners put their heads in the sand,” says Robert Howarth, a professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell University. “We have to move away from natural gas. The planet demands it.”

Comments:

1) Travel and dining-out shows heap effusive praise on fancy restaurants, street-food vendors, and everything in between around the world. These places all cook over an open flame. I've never seen an induction heater (the warmists' cooktop of choice) on any of these shows.

2) Restaurants are going out of business across the country, a post-COVID phenomenon that's not related to the ban on natural gas. One just has to be patient for dining-out economics to take hold, and carbon emissions will go down on their own accord without the need for government intervention.

3) Banning gasoline-powered cars and natural gas stoves in the U.S. pales before China building two new coal-fired power plants per week, but that's just me.

4) Old-time believers claimed to speak to God. New time religionists speak to Gaia ("the planet demands it.")