I & I Editorial BoardWe’ve noticed over the last couple of decades a repeating cycle in which finger-wagging scolds tell us that we need to drop some of the conveniences of modernity as sacrifices to Gaia, our Mother Earth. Two examples that have come around more frequently than Halley’s Comet have been the loony broadsides launched against air conditioning and showers.
Now add to that a campaign aimed at refrigeration, because it causes “wide-ranging climate implications.”
Nicola Twilley, author of “Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves,” seems to be on a crusade to reverse the benefits of refrigeration. In an interview last month with ABC News, she discussed the “bigger downside” of refrigeration in regard to “our environment.”
“All the power that is used for cooling. It’s a huge vast contribution to climate change. And that’s before we even get to the chemicals that we use to refrigerate. They’re called refrigerants, and they are the number one thing we could tackle to mitigate climate change, according to Project Drawdown. So it’s it’s got a lot of downsides. They’re just not usually talked about.”
Refrigeration has a lot of upside, too.
“A refrigerator is one of the most important pieces of equipment in the kitchen for keeping foods safe,” says the U.S. Agriculture Department.
Human Progress, a project that highlights the “dramatic improvements in human well-being throughout much of the world,” reminds us that “Refrigeration has revolutionized public health and improved the quality of life worldwide,” and has blessed us with “remarkable benefits,” such as “reducing foodborne illnesses and improving the quality of food.”
Twilley even admits that refrigeration’s ability to keep food from spoiling is responsible for height increases among “19th-century army recruits.”
As far as we know, Twilley hasn’t called on policymakers to ban refrigeration. Nor is she the first to try to connect refrigeration with a climate disaster. Four years ago, the BBC swore that “your fridge is heating up the planet,” while in 2022, The New Yorker declared that the refrigerator had become “an agent of climate catastrophe.”
But Twilley is clearly wagging a finger, just as those who tell us daily showers are unnecessary due to water use and the carbon dioxide emitted when heating the water, and air conditioning “is a big contributor to global warming.”
The climate nags have already had plenty of policy success, particularly in virtue-signaling California, where internal-combustion engine automobiles have been outlawed, natural-gas appliances have been banned, and there will be no new gas stations built in a few cities.
But even with those Ws, the eco-tyrants, whose goal is total elimination of all opposition to their deindustrialization agenda, are never satisfied. They want to remake Western economies, keep the Third World mired in the poverty and place their controls over society. The mantle of green is nothing more than a coverup for a scheme so dark that its tenets cannot be said out loud.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
Thank goodness for the refrigerator. We have to eat to live-and I assume the eco-freaks want most of us to live. If it weren’t for refrigeration there would be no grocery stores and we’d have to somehow get our food from somewhere.
And we’d have to be doing this every darn day.
By the way, if we had to forage for food daily we wouldn’t have anytime for work, so we wouldn’t be paid, so we couldn’t buy any neat and relaxing things (like cell phones, dvds and computers)-each of which probably wouldn’t be made anyway because the developers of them would be too busy hunting and foraging for there daily food.
And if we ever got sick we couldn’t go to the hospital-first because we’d have no cars or money to buy them, and second because there would be no one to construct hospitals or work in them (everyone having their days taken up by being too busy foraging for their food).
And, of course, since we’d all be busy foraging, there would be no time to earn, invest, or participate in capitalism. Thus, nothing would be made, nothing would be bought. In consequence there would be no wealthy elites or even a middle class.
Only the poor would be with us. The good thing about it, I suppose, is that we’d all be poor-so there would probably be no envy or jealousy. Just-I suspect-misery and a short life.
So thank goodness for refrigeration and many thanks to I&I for pointing this out.
Like I keep saying, when these m—-r f—ers start living in caves and eating berries I will believe they have the courage of their convictions! Until then they can just pound sand!!!!!!
I worked with a young eco-terrorist back in 1994 or so. He wanted to reduce the human population on earth to no more than 10 million hunter gatherers. When I asked him how that would be accomplished he didn’t have any coherent answer. When I asked him who would pick and choose who lived and died he stopped talking to me.
Eventually, we will ask “Was ist night verboten?”
Next-gen refrigerators achieve higher efficiency because they have better motors and better insulation. We’re kind of down to percentages at this point. The environmentalists mean well but would probably experience difficulty in plugging the refrigerator power cord into the wall socket, much less be able to explain the operating principles. What would REALLY be ‘cool’, since we are talking california and EV-related power blackouts, would be if they invented a refrigerator with a manually operated compressor. Crank the handle once an hour for 5 minutes to maintain pressure and temperature while you wait for the lights to come back on, that way you don’t lose all your food. Might not maintain right AT 40 degrees but might be good enough to get you by…?
We all love having a well-working refrigerator in our homes, right?
But consider this: In the 70s I encountered several Iranian students (bright all get-out in sciences, but foaming-at-the-mouth medieval on Israel) who never missed a chance to condemn everything the Shah was doing. They were particularly incensed when it came to refrigerators, which meant that food-shopping was no lnger a daily chore. To them, men adn women alike, going to the market daily was an important part of social life. They saw it as the glue that held together their communities. Electrification and the prevalence of refrigerators in nearly all homes was anathema and a clea sign that thhe Shas was betraying Iranian values.
How many Irans are there?