Let's Have More Gaslighting

Erika Minkowsky, co-owner of personal chef service The
Heirloom Chef, cooks at her Richmond, Calif. home
on a gas range. (Mercury News photo)

Earlier this month we noted how Berkeley's 2019 ban on natural gas in new buildings was successfully challenged in court by the California Restaurant Association. Other Bay Area cities who had followed Berkeley's lead are now suspending their bans: [bold added]

The Sunnyvale City Council recently temporarily suspended its ban on natural gas in new buildings, which was first adopted in 2022 to help cut Sunnyvale’s greenhouse emissions in half by the end of the decade.

Recently, Cupertino announced the city will suspend its gas ban until this fall. In the East Bay, the Contra Costa County Board of Supervisors earlier this month agreed to pause their all-electric building requirement and gas ban in unincorporated areas of the county. San Mateo County and San Luis Obispo also recently suspended their bans.

Except for his grandparents' house before 1961, your humble blogger has never lived in an apartment or home with a gas range and likely will never do so. Although I agree with the nanny staters that cooking with gas is riskier to health and safety than electric, I don't agree that the decision should be made for people.

Besides restaurants, there are many home chefs who prefer gas--in Chinese cooking, for example, electric cooktops cannot heat woks to the temperature required--and they should be allowed their choice.

Sure, bombard everyone with warnings about the potential dangers to themselves and "the planet," but one of the country's basic principles is that informed citizens should make their own decisions instead of having decisions purportedly made for their own good by a government bureaucrat.

Can you feel it? The tide hasn't turned, but it has been stalled.