Climate Alarmists Want To Take Away Everything That Makes Life Good
When climate alarmists criticized gas stoves, people warned that they’d try to ban them, the zealots ridiculed the claim and then… tried to ban gas stoves
Then, Climate Depot alerts us to a Bloomberg piece claiming refrigerating food is for planet-destroying losers.
Next they’ll insist they’re not coming for our fridges.
No, really. . Indeed Canary Media, having relabeled natural gas “fossil gas” (nature good, fossil bad), notes with pleasure that:
“After the courts squashed its first-in-the-nation natural gas ban, the city of Berkeley, California, has emerged with a new strategy to curb the planet-warming fossil fuel: taxing large buildings that use it.”
There was a time when people would have celebrated an achievement like having huge numbers of people able to eat fresh, varied food at all kinds of times of year, cooked with a marvelous source of heat that goes on when you want, adjusts instantly, and goes off without requiring a “hot surface” warning that lingers for an hour, in a building whose temperature was Goldilocks, neither too hot nor too cold.
But no, they’re just one more disaster in our catalogue of sins against Gaia, now including your stinking fridge:
“The ‘cold chain’ that delivers our food is inconspicuous but vast. The US alone boasts around 5.5 million cubic feet of refrigerated space (that’s 150 Empire State Buildings!) and three-quarters of the average American plate has spent some time in a commercial fridge. Now, the developing world is catching up.”
Boo developing world! Boo United States! Boo preserving food. Yay pease porridge in a pot three days old. No, wait…
Among the odd things in this puff piece about “Nicola Twilley, author of Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves” is that the author “says this expansion of the world’s ‘distributed winter’ has wide-ranging climate implications.”
No, sorry. That’s not the odd bit. That’s the bit so obvious it almost didn’t need to be written. All bad things cause ‘climate change’, and ‘climate change’ only causes bad things, and all human actions are bad.
The odd bit is the claim that:
“‘Food waste is often touted as the reason to build a cold chain,’ Twilley says on the week’s Zero podcast. ‘The problem is that in the developed world, we are throwing away 30 to 40 percent of our food at the retail and consumer end.’”
Tell us about it. We just took Roz Chast’s classic “Journey to the centre of the refrigerator” and found some items that we had believed were extinct and which, had we eaten them, we might well have become so.
Even so, we feel the wrath of our (especially Scottish) ancestors’ ghosts when we discard anything. But surely a crucial point is that for 99 percent of human history, there was so little to eat that throwing food away really was an act of insanity and people were willing to, say, eat an oyster or a snake, or have an egg somehow get so hot it went white and cloudy and eat it anyway.
Indeed, the piece goes on to mention that:
“More than 30 percent of all food produced on farms in poor nations never makes it to a store, and a cold chain can help reduce that food waste.”
And in those countries, the food that is wasted does result in hunger, even starvation, though thanks to massive expansion of ‘fossil fuel’ use the amount of acute poverty and actual famine in the world has dropped dramatically in the last century and even the last 50 years, outside places where maniacal governments and movements deliberately starve people directly or by waging such a violent war on normal life as to do it as a byproduct.
Of course we in the rich world should be less wasteful. But a degree of abundance so staggering that we can afford to waste food is actually a sign of progress, if also of certain inherent defects in human nature.
Consider Twilley’s complaint that:
“The abundance that refrigeration has given us has translated into a sort of lack of care, a willingness to waste. The food is so plentiful and so cheap that people would rather go and buy something else.
I mean honestly rather than sniff their milk – because obviously sniffing off-milk will kill you, everyone knows that – they would rather pour it out and buy, just trust the sell-by label and buy another pint. And that is an impact of refrigeration too.”
Another way of looking at it is that food is now so cheap that people throw it out because of the government-mandated misleading label about when it’s still good. What a recommendation for capitalism and what an indictment of the state.
Or vice-versa if you’re a climate activist.
Speaking of capitalism, we have even known people with walk-in fridges. And we’re not bitter about their wealth. Well, not very. On the other hand we are a bit annoyed that the author of the book admits she didn’t understand the basic mechanics of fridges until very recently, especially as people like her are generally big enthusiasts for heat pumps.
It’s also annoying that after describing the various economic revolutions including refrigeration that let ordinary people and then the poor in the West eat a lot of meat, she dismisses the notion that meat protein is good for you as “sort of a sad mistake in the history of science”.
We might reserve that description for the government’s advice from the 1970s on to shun “cholesterol” and fat for carbs leading to a populace that didn’t just gorge on muffins but looked like them.
But according to Twilley:
“we could have had a very different world if those scientists had been like, ‘We all need to eat lentils.’ It’s all a sort of misunderstanding, but it shaped our modern food system.”
Either that or steak just tastes better. It’s not as if the poor didn’t have lentils, or know how to stretch food to the utmost, or that nobody knows what they like until some state-funded scientist tells them.
On the contrary, it’s that meat isn’t just a more efficient source of nourishment, it’s also more enjoyable. To the point that those who could afford to would spike the pease porridge with bacon or ham.
Just as those who could get it preferred wheat bread to bean bread back in the Middle Ages, but either way would make do without a bunch of nattering from their betters.
Don’t think it’s just some journalist and some writer prating. Twilley claims the “cold chain” accounts for more than eight percent of global electricity use before she and the interviewer get into the global-warming contribution of refrigeration gas, and then add that the ‘climate-change’ panic (they don’t call it that) is pushing industry back toward poisonous alternatives like ammonia.
From the government, and here to help you… use a substance that:
“wants your crevices apparently, it goes for your eyeballs. It is just really a nasty chemical.”
So yes, the upshot of this apparently fringe prattle really will be compulsory limits on the size and effectiveness of fridges, of the same sort that increasingly make your dishwasher run for two hours or more, and then a push to ban them altogether in favour of root cellars and (organic, locally-sourced) hair shirts.
We do agree with her on one point:
“you really don’t need to have a tomato in December, it’s going to taste like nothing anyway, just don’t do it.”
Except we’d say grow it yourself. And wait for them to snatch away the grow light and irrigation system with a finger-wag about the climate footprint of home gardens, good-tasting food and anything else you like.
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