A baseless waste

This past week we have seen the unedifying spectacle of shallow public intellectuals, press-release journalists, and bad scientific research (or, at the very least, badly misrepresented science) combining together and leading to headlines to the effect that the Federal government is considering outlawing gas stoves due to safety issues arising from air pollution in the home and global warming.  

Fatuous in the extreme.  So fatuous that it now appears that the whole governmental apparatus is backpedalling like a drunken duck, declaring emphatically that they are not coming for your gas range.

All so cognitively childish and wasteful of public attention.  The study that started the cascade of vacuous opinions did not, and given its design, could not, support the conclusion that gas stoves were the cause of bad health outcomes among children.  Indeed, one of the lead authors was emphatic , in a separate interview, that their findings did not hold any predictively useful information for those considering purchasing gas appliances.  At most, the study supported the need to be attentive to maintaining effective venting and good household air circulation, a much more quotidian and common sensical conclusion.

But much less appealing to bureaucrats wanting control over citizens lives or fanatics wanting to immiserate citizens on the alter of the New Age faith in Anthropogenic Global Warming.

And almost regardless of the quality of the underlying science in the study, the whole brouhaha ignored the most fundamental issue of all.

All decisions, personal or public policy, all always and everywhere a function of how confident we are in the empirical condition, what are the range of alternative choices to address the condition, what are the trade-offs (the relative costs and benefits of each alternative), which solution (and associated costs and benefits) are most supported by the stakeholders, what is the cost of implementing the solution, and what are the risk percentages at each stage of the implemented solution.

In this particular storm in a tea cup, 

There was no evidence presented that gas stoves actually cause demonstrated negative health outcomes.

There was no discussion of what alternatives there might be to gas stoves. 

There was no discussion of the impact of banning gas stoves or the costs and benefits of any alternatives.

There was no discussion of relative priorities of stakeholders.

There was no discussion of the cost of replacing gas stoves nationwide.

There was no discussion of the quantified health benefit supposedly arising from this replacement.

There was no discussion of risks in the policy of replacing gas stoves.

In other words, this was much ado about nothing.  But various ideologues, advocates, Federal agencies were all gung-ho to barrel ahead with an initiative with absolutely no empirical or evidentiary basis.

Pretty much like their response to Covid-19.  

Even were the research rock solid and we thought that there might be a one month gain in longevity over time, and even if we ignored the cost of the transition, we might still choose not to proceed given the anticipated risks.  Just because we plan something doesn't mean that it will happen, and certainly we can be certain that it won't go exactly the way we intend.  Virtually all public programs cost more and deliver less than anticipated.  So even if we were confident in the benefit, if the risks of transition are high enough, we still might not choose to undertake the proposed policy.  

A level of sophisticated nuance way beyond journalists, advocates, bureaucrats and public intellectuals.

Just an absurd waste of time.

Other than that it tickled a memory I have chronicled elsewhere.  

When we moved to England in the mid-sixties, it was a distinctive feature for a six- or seven-year-old that the house was heated by a coal fired furnace. There was the dark, dirty coal shed. The shuttling of coal from the shed to the furnace (and to the fireplaces in the rooms) and having to clean your boots from all the coal dust. When you went away for the weekend, you banked the coal fire in the furnace hoping it would last.  If you were lucky, it did. If not, the house was cold, and you had a half hour or hour job of getting the furnace fire started all over again. All that went away with North Sea gas coming online in the late sixties. 

If we were to get rid of natural gas, what would be the alternative?  Certainly not coal if you are at all concerned about the environment.  Electric would be the obvious answer.  But if ESG policies continue to be implemented which make the electric grid increasingly unreliable and unavailable and people begin to build with back up systems in place for when the electric grid fails, the alternatives will be liquid natural gas, propane, wood and coal - none of which are safer AND cleaner than the current infrastructure.

If one were jaundiced or conspiratorial, one would speculate the whole thing was a venture toward an outcome beneficial to various interests both ideological and commercial.

But we are left with the issue that a proposal was floated with no evidentiary basis which consumed a week's worth of public discourse and it was all baseless.

UPDATE:  From The Gas Stove Asthma Lie by Handwaving Freakoutery.  The subheading is "Gas Stoves Cause Asthma" junk science ignores the biggest asthma confounder.

HW has done the work I had vaguely intended to do but I only got so far as opening a couple of data tabs when I got diverted by actual necessary work.  HW lays out the core issue with the research - it is pure correlation and explicitly with no effort to take into account confounding variables.  In this instance, the confounding variable is air quality.  There are two components of air quality in terms of personal health.  First is what is the air quality (measured in particulates) in your geographical area?  It varies significantly from place to place and asthma is significantly correlated with particulates.

The second component is air quality in your personal space.  This often correlates with poverty.  If you are poor you tend to live in older, less clean, less ventilated environments.  

If you are going to correlate asthma with gas ranges, you have to control for both topographical air quality as well as personal air quality.  If you don't control for those two variables, you merely have a correlation and no indication of causation.  And if you do control for topographical and personal air quality, I would wager virtually all correlation with gas stoves disappears.

One more episode of mainstream journalists practicing uninformed press-release journalism, drawing the wrong conclusions which they trumpet broadly to the misinformation of all.