Highlights: A study this summer found that using a single gas stove burner on high can raise levels of cancer-causing benzene above what’s been observed from secondhand smoke.
A new investigation by NPR and the Climate Investigations Center found that the gas industry tried to downplay the health risks of gas stoves for decades, turning to many of the same public-relations tactics the tobacco industry used to cover up the risks of smoking. Gas utilities even hired some of the same PR firms and scientists that Big Tobacco did.
Earlier this year, an investigation from DeSmog showed that the industry understood the hazards of gas appliances as far back as the 1970s and concealed what they knew from the public.
It’s a strategy that goes back as far back as 1972, according to the most recent investigation. That year, the gas industry got advice from Richard Darrow, who helped manufacture controversy around the health effects of smoking as the lead for tobacco accounts at the public relations firm Hill + Knowlton. At an American Gas Association conference, Darrow told utilities they needed to respond to claims that gas appliances were polluting homes and shape the narrative around the issue before critics got the chance. Scientists were starting to discover that exposure to nitrogen dioxide—a pollutant emitted by gas stoves—was linked to respiratory illnesses. So Darrow advised utilities to “mount the massive, consistent, long-range public relations programs necessary to cope with the problems.”
These studies didn’t just confuse the public, but also the federal government. When the Environmental Protection Agency assessed the health effects of nitrogen dioxide pollution in 1982, its review included five studies finding no evidence of problems—four of which were funded by the gas industry, the Climate Investigations Center recently uncovered.
Karen Harbert, the American Gas Association’s CEO, acknowledged that the gas industry has “collaborated” with researchers to “inform and educate regulators about the safety of gas cooking appliances.” Harbert claimed that the available science “does not provide sufficient or consistent evidence demonstrating chronic health hazards from natural gas ranges”—a line that should sound familiar by now.
Marxist ideas just don’t seem to work in practice. You have to have a revolution that is authoritarian to force the change, and then the people in power never give it up willingly. Almost no one ever does.
But even if you did an ideal Marxist transformation, you have the huge economic problem of figuring out what to produce and where to distribute it. This is an impossible task for a committee to manage at a national scale. Capitalism outsources figuring that out to every transaction. Even when a company gets it wrong, it’s limited to that company or sector. But in planned economies when they get it wrong, it’s the entire economy. It’s all great depressions and no minor corrections.
Whats worse is you lose a lot of choices - at best a good hearted technocrat is telling you what to make and what you will get. At worse you get famines because of mistakes in prediction.
It’s pretty ignorant to act like we know it doesn’t work. If you’re having a race and one racer has his shoes tied together, do you really know who was fastest? Nearly every time a leftist government has been installed the US intervenes to ensure it doesn’t succeed. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d’état
The US feared a successful “communist” country, so they toppled the democracy and installed a dictatorship more aligned with US business ideals. If it’s guaranteed to fail, why was the US so scared of them succeeding?
The fact of the matter is the only countries that could survive the US attempting to topple then were countries with a strong central power and cultural hegymony. Those aren’t requirements to exist, they are requirements to outlast US intervention.
Why would non-capitalist countries need capitalist countries to do well? We have had very large non-capitalist countries, like the USSR. Can a country that size not do well if there aren’t capitalist countries to help it economically? What size does a non-capitalist country need to be to not have to rely on capitalist countries?
What?
I’m assuming you didn’t read my comment. They don’t need capitalist countries. They just are never given a chance by capitalist countries to even try to be successful. Capitalists are scared of the status quo changing, so they undermine any non-capitalist country. Why do they always do this, without exception, if they’re so certain they’ll fail regardless? Obviously it’s because they know they aren’t guaranteed to fail.