RON DeSANTIS You're not taking our gas stoves away from us.                        

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Coming up on this week's On the Media, fights over the future of fossil fuel powered durable goods generates a whole lot of hot air all the way to the statehouse.

 

NEWS REPORT Get this, Wyoming is proposing a bill to ban new sales of electric vehicles.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE EVs may be making the news, but they're far from a new idea.

 

PARIS MARX There have been a few other moments through the 20th century where it looked like electric vehicles were going to take off. You know, in the 1970s in particular, and the oil shock then.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Plus disruptive leaps in science have given way to small incremental steps. Why?

 

WILLIAM J. BROAD The media are complicit. We've conditioned the public to see science as an accumulation of facts and discoveries, but real science. It's mostly ideas and concepts.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE That's all coming up after this.

 

[END OF BILLBOARD]

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media, I'm Brooke Gladstone. Now, when you think of electric cars, you might think of the long touted benefits to the environment. And likely Tesla, whose famous CEO continued to make headlines this week for not-Twitter.

 

[CLIP]

 

NEWS REPORT Opening arguments kicked off today in the securities fraud trial of Tesla CEO Elon Musk. [END CLIP]

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Well, actually, for Twitter.

 

[CLIP]

 

NEWS REPORT It's over tweets from 2018 where Musk claimed he secured funding to take Tesla private.

 

NEWS REPORT The class action lawsuit alleges that Musk's Twitter activity caused stock prices to roller coaster.

 

NEWS REPORT Investors claim they lost billions when that deal just never happened. [END CLIP]

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE But in the last few weeks, electric vehicles have been making headlines for other reasons. In Wyoming–

 

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NEWS REPORT Wyoming is proposing a bill to ban new sales of electric vehicles by 2035. [END CLIP]

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE That was last Friday. It didn't pass. And in Virginia...

 

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NEWS REPORT Virginia has stopped car maker Ford Motor Companies plan to install a battery factory in its state over concerns of Chinese interference. [END CLIP]

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Yep. Over the last week, if you live in a Republican-led state, it might seem like everywhere you turn there was EV backlash. The latest casualty in a political battle that started months ago.

 

[CLIP]

 

NEWS REPORT No secret that Joe Biden wants you to buy an electric car. Sure, it's expensive, but come on, you can afford it.

 

PRESIDENT BIDEN Now we're choosing to build a better America. An America that's confronting the climate crisis. With America's workers leading the way. Look, folks, you know, the great American road trip is going to be fully electrified. [END CLIP]

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Meanwhile, Democratic led states have continued to push a move toward electric vehicles, with New York and California promising to sell only zero emission cars by the year 2035, which would effectively ban the sale of new gas powered cars. As it happens in 2022, sales of EVs spiked something like 68% higher than 2021, an increase that many on the left count as a victory. Paris Marx is the host of the podcast, tech Won't Save Us, and the author of Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation. He says the marketers knew what they were doing, at least when it came to the blue states.

 

PARIS MARX This is your no guilt purchase, right? You don't need to feel guilty about anything anymore because you're helping the environment and all this stuff.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Okay. But some car manufacturers, some politicians say that EVs are actually not that much better for the environment than gas cars. That can't be true, right?

 

PARIS MARX The electric vehicle is certainly an improvement over the vehicles that we have now. But the batteries that go into electric vehicles, a lot of metals go into making those batteries. The rare earth lithium, there's cobalt in there – graphite. A lot of other minerals are necessary to make those batteries, and that requires a lot of mining. And one thing that we know about the mining industry is that it's not always the most environmentally friendly. It can have impacts on the communities surrounding those mines, and the workers aren't always treated the best.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE You've observed that the pollution caused by EVs generally happen when they're being produced. While with gas cars, it happens as you use them. That doesn't mean, obviously, that gas cars don't produce emissions when they're being produced as well, but I guess fewer of them.

 

PARIS MARX And that's right. You know, this is kind of the nuance in the conversation. The electric vehicle, you know, a significant proportion of its lifetime emissions are going to come from production. Right. And in particular from the battery itself. But the more you drive it, the life cycle emissions decrease, because if you're going to, say, drive an electric car or a fossil fuel vehicle for the same number of miles, there will be a moment where the life cycle emissions of the electric car drop below the fossil fuel vehicle because you've driven it enough miles, and that depends on where the vehicle was produced, the type of energy powering the vehicle itself, the type of vehicle that you're actually driving. There are many things that go into that, but say if you have a luxury car that you don't drive very often, you're actually contributing more emissions. Whereas if you buy an electric car, you're replacing the trips that you would have driven in, you know, a fossil fuel vehicle, then yes, you are actually going to have a lower environmental impact if you drive the car until it dies. And that's even if the grid is powered by fossil fuels and isn't just by renewables.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Right now, we don't have enough charging stations. In the Inflation Reduction Act, they're dedicating seven and a half billion to building electric vehicle charging infrastructure on federal highways and millions in tax incentives that will make it cheaper for businesses to buy and install their own charging equipment. That's projected to be enough to build half a million public chargers over the next five years, right?

 

PARIS MARX Yeah. But then we also need to ensure that these are charging stations with high quality chargers that are going to charge your vehicle quick enough so you're not going to be sat there for, you know, 15 minutes, a half hour or even longer waiting for your vehicle to charge up. And then on top of that, you need to ensure that any vehicle can use the chargers at that station. Tesla owns a lot of charging stations right now. For a long time, it was only Teslas that could charge there. Now they've opened that up. But other vehicles still need particular adapters.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Like Apple cables. You just have to keep buying them and buying them and they keep changing them.

 

PARIS MARX Exactly. And so this is a real issue that is going to need to be dealt with if we want to make sure that people feel they can go anywhere, they can trust the chargers. They know that they're going to work for their vehicles. And that's not always the case right now.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE So Tesla has been an innovator, but you've noted that the story of electric cars long predates that. It practically goes back to electricity itself, right?

 

PARIS MARX Oh, yeah. The history of electric cars is very long and we're just in the most recent period of excitement or expectation around it.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE In the 1830s, a Scottish inventor motorized carriage but things didn't really start going until batteries could be recharged. And that happened in 1859.

 

PARIS MARX And that was a really key development. And so, you know, by the late 1800s, motor vehicles start to become a bit more common on streets. There's still quite a niche product, but in that moment there's a debate as to what is actually going to propel these vehicles into the future. Is it going to be the electric batteries as you're talking about? Is it going to be the internal combustion engine powered by fossil fuels, or is it going to be steam power, which was another, you know, way of moving things back in that period? And for a while it did look like the electric vehicle was going to take off because the electric vehicles moved more smoothly. They were easier to drive the early internal combustion engines. You had to hang crank them to get them started. But then in the end, of course, you know, Henry Ford came along. He brought in the factory and the assembly line, fossil fuel vehicles dropped in cost. And then, of course, when World War One came around, fossil fuel vehicles were very key to that, and that helped to entrench them. There have been a few other moments through the 20th century where it looked like electric vehicles were going to take off, you know, in the 1970s, in particular in the oil shock then. But it's really in the past couple of decades that they've really started to take hold and become the solution to the climate crisis that we're facing, in part because of all the emissions created by our cars.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE In your book, you wrote about another form of transportation infrastructure that has intrigued Elon Musk. He apparently admitted to his biographer that he'd been investing in what he called the Hyperloop in order to stop the state of California from developing a high speed rail system.

 

PARIS MARX What he proposed with the Hyperloop was it was like a train because California, a decade or so ago was proposing to start building its high speed rail system that is still under construction right now. It's certainly run into problems, but Elon Musk really did not want to see that project built. And so he proposed a Hyperloop instead. So instead of a high speed train, it would be like a vacuum tube that went all the way from L.A. to San Francisco.

 

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HOST It still sounds pretty complicated, Elon.

 

ELON MUSK It's like a tube with an air hockey table. It's just a low pressure two with a pod in it that runs on on air bearings, on air skis, with an air compressor on the front that's taking the high pressure air buildup on the nose and pumping it through the air skis. [END CLIP]

 

PARIS MARX It's really said it would be much cheaper to build. It would move people much faster. Of course, there's no sign anywhere in the world of an actual working Hyperloop right now, but it did become part of the ammunition used against the high speed rail project in California. And then the other piece of that, as well as he's not just pushed the Hyperloop, right. He has another company called the Boring Company.

 

[CLIP]

 

ELON MUSK Traffic it's like acid on the soul. It's horrible. Finally, finally, finally, there's something something that I think could solve the goddamn traffic problem. [END CLIP]

 

PARIS MARX Which, you know, was initially proposed to be a tunnel under Los Angeles. Now we see one that has been built under Las Vegas, which does not live up anywhere near to what he initially promised it would be. But the boring company has gone around to cities around the United States who were looking at new transit projects and said, here is our idea for this tunnel based transportation system. And instead of a subway line or anything like that, build this tunnel for cars and that would fix the traffic problem. And then every time it comes time for them to deliver, with the exception of Las Vegas, they tend to disappear and not actually follow through on the promises. Meanwhile, they've helped disrupt any plans for transit in those cities or the development of those.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE There's another technical innovation I suspect, that probably gets in the way of building these mass transit infrastructures, and that would be the promise of self-driving cars.

 

PARIS MARX Yeah, we can think back almost a decade ago now when the tech companies started to promise this. Just give us a few years and we'll develop these self-driving cars and they'll be all over our cities and they will take you everywhere you want to go. They'll be incredibly cheap. But I think if we look at the ways that we get around, we see that hasn't made much of a difference.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Well, they haven't really made reliable ones yet. And and they say self-driving cars won't work until everyone is in a self-driving car because human drivers mess everything up.

 

PARIS MARX Yeah, which is going to be a bit difficult to do, especially if we're thinking about the timeline that we have to address these problems and especially reduce transport emissions. But the thing with self-driving cars as well is again, it wasn't just a promise that was put out there by the tech industry. The New York Times reported, I believe it was in 2018 that self-driving cars have become part of the pitch for groups like Americans with Prosperity that are funded by the Koch brothers. They were going across the country fighting efforts to increase transit, to build new transit projects.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE This is because they're big investors in oil.

 

PARIS MARX The oil industry, auto parts as well. So they profit from the way that things are. And once the tech companies started to promise self-driving cars, that became part of their pitch against transit. Self-driving cars are going to be here in a couple of years. So why would you invest in this outdated infrastructure?

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE There is a cultural issue, though. Just in case you didn't know, Americans really like to drive big cars. You noted in an article that when President Biden made a stop in Detroit in the fall of 2021 to promote the Democrats infrastructure bill and the electric vehicle rollout, he jumped behind the wheel not of a bolt, GM's electric subcompact, but the new Hummer EV, a vehicle that you wrote is the embodiment of everything wrong with the trajectory of vehicle design in the past couple of decades. The International Energy Agency found that between 2010 and 2018, the growing demand globally for SUVs was the second largest contributor to increasing emissions. And you reported that they're expected to account for 78% of new vehicle sales by 2025. How is this complicating the ecological benefit of EVs?

 

PARIS MARX Yeah. Even though the engines are getting more efficient in many of the cars that we drive, the vehicles are getting heavier. So it takes more power to propel them and then that creates more emissions. And so then when we translate that to electric vehicles, if we're not going to rethink how much larger these vehicles have gotten, we just switch that over to electric vehicles. Then we have really large vehicles that require incredibly large batteries. And those batteries make the vehicles even more heavy. It's going to require more energy to power them. But because those vehicles are even heavier and they still have the high front ends that SUVs and trucks have today, that also makes them more dangerous for pedestrians and cyclists. These big trucks and big SUVs are 2 to 3 times more fatal if they hit a pedestrian. If you make the vehicles even heavier, you make them more dangerous. And that's a serious problem.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE But we love our big cars. And in fact, aren't most American cities designed around cars as the main form of transportation? I mean, the infrastructure is already there. New York City is a big subway, but it's still clogged with traffic. Is it realistic at this point to see a future where we move away from that idea and the use of any car, electric or otherwise?

 

PARIS MARX The more that we can get people to move from fossil fuel vehicles to electric vehicles, it is still a net positive. But I think one thing that we forget is that there used to be different options in a lot of American cities where you didn't just have to drive to get around. And it was policy choices that took those options away and basically forced everyone to have to own a vehicle.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Didn't we already start to see at least a little bit of that discussion during the pandemic? Cities that were passing bills that allowed for more development around bike lanes and such.

 

PARIS MARX Totally, especially in that first year of the pandemic. There was a lot of discussion around how our cities could be different because a lot of cities closed some main streets to cars in order to allow people who live in the city to get out and walk around. They started allowing restaurants to do dining on the sidewalks or on the streets, made that space available. And I think for a lot of people, maybe they'd traveled to Europe and seen that things can work differently. But actually seeing these things in their own cities showed them that our cities can be different, too.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Also, when we talk about the social life of cities, cars and their upkeep, they're expensive. They're not accessible to a lot of people. So. That's a big chunk of a population left out of this conversation and and not really being served.

 

PARIS MARX Electric vehicle prices are often even more expensive than a fossil fuel car you might save over the long term when you're fueling up because you don't need to buy gas all the time. But then a lot of people have been hit as well as gas prices have gone up over the past year. And we should remember that these sorts of conversations have been have before. If we look back to the 1970s, when we had the oil shocks, then there was a discussion as to whether it made sense to have so many big vehicles. There was encouragement for people to cycle more and there was a bicycle boom in the 1970s because of that. So we're in this moment right now where we have an opportunity to do something different. We're making this large transition from fossil fuel to electric vehicles in order to address the climate crisis. But that also gives us an opportunity to have a deeper discussion around the transport system, around the decisions that we've made over the course of the last century. And also, you know, what is going to increase quality of life, make our roads and our communities safer into the future. And I think that we should try to seize that conversation instead of just letting the automakers and the mining companies and various politicians just have us focused on electric vehicles over anything else.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Thank you very much, Paris.

 

PARIS MARX It's been my pleasure. Thank you.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Paris Marks is the host of the podcast Tech Won't Save Us and the author of Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation. Coming up, proxy partisan battles aren't just rolling down America's highways. They're camped out in our kitchens, too:.

 

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NEWS REPORT He says: god, guns, gas stoves. [END CLIP]

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE This is On the Media.

 

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BROOKE GLADSTONE This is On the Media, I'm Brooke Gladstone. Last week, a fiery debate was ignited over a kitchen appliance.

 

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NEWS REPORT Gas stoves have become a hot button issue over the past week.

 

NEWS REPORT The gas stove band debate is boiling over. Not sure about you. But this story lit a fire under you know what. [END CLIP]

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE There's nothing that news writers like more than a pun-worthy story. This particular debate was catalyzed by–

 

[CLIP]

 

NEWS REPORT Comments from a member of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, or CPSC. It comes as mounting research links gas stoves to health risks when it comes to breathing issues, or a recent peer reviewed study from a prominent medical journal found nearly 13% of childhood asthma cases in the U.S. are attributable to gas stove use. [END CLIP]

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Commissioner Richard Trumka, Jr. In an interview with bloomberg called the use of gas stoves a hidden hazard. Any option is on the table. Products that can't be made safe can be banned, which left many Americans wondering.

 

[CLIP]

 

NEWS REPORT Will the United states of America ban gas stoves?

 

NEWS REPORT Can they do that?

 

NEWS REPORT Are these people insane? [END CLIP]

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE The Biden administration has said it's not moving towards a ban. No one's coming for your gas stoves, but that's not relevant to media outlets like Fox News. Horrified by the multitude of stuff, the feds want to pry from your cold, dead hands.

 

[CLIP]

 

FOX NEWS They came for our light bulbs. They came for the showerhead pressure. The toilet water pressure. So they've already taken all these things. So I do believe that they are coming eventually for the gas stove as well. [END CLIP]

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Senator Joe Manchin from West Virginia tweeted, I can tell you the last thing that would ever leave my house is the gas stove that we cook on. Here's Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

 

[CLIP]

 

RON DeSANTIS You're not taking our gas stoves away from us. That is your choice. And I know many people who cook a lot do not want to part with their gas stoves. And so we're going to stand up for that. [END CLIP]

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE By the way, both those states, like most of the country, are majority electric. The only states that run mostly on gas are New York, New Jersey, Illinois, California and Nevada. Nevertheless, The Wall Street Journal published an op ed with the subhead Progressive Democrats Really Are Coming for Your Kitchen Appliances. And then there was this succinct tweet from Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan.

 

[CLIP]

 

NEWS REPORT He says, God, guns, gas stoves. [END CLIP]

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Hot takes, but for the people who have been in this fight, this is nothing new.

 

[CLIP]

 

NEWS REPORT The doctors have been sounding the alarm for years now.

 

NEWS REPORT I mean, we hear the phrase now you're cooking with gas, right? But what this comes down to is a public health crisis, a public health concern for a lot of people. Asthma, heart problems, cognitive delays, all of this and more has been connected to gas stoves. [END CLIP]

 

REBECCA LEBER This is something that we've seen over and over again in the scientific literature dating back to the eighties that link gas to respiratory problems.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Rebecca Leber is a senior reporter covering climate advocates.

 

REBECCA LEBER The question that we're still debating is how much and how much should I be concerned? But the takeaway I would urge people to consider from this study, rather than getting hung up on exactly the percentage risk, is that exposure to elevated and prolonged and two can be linked to an assortment of health problems.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE When we interviewed you in 2021, it was about an article you'd written for Mother Jones about how the gas industry's lobbying got us to a place where we have gas stoves in the first place. And this dated back to the fifties in the sixties with celebrity endorsements from people like Bob Hope. You've said that actually newspaper ads throughout the last century have a lot of people notably talking about defending gas stoves. What was going on behind the scenes?

 

REBECCA LEBER The gas stove is trying to compete with electric stoves even then, and there were also other stoves like coal and wood at the time that we don't really use as much today. And the gas industry was trying to gain market share. The gas industry actually invented this phrase from Bob Hope Cooking with gas. And from there, I tracked this evolving PR campaign over time that actually echoes a lot of the things we say today, as a matter of fact, about the gas stove. So in the 1950s, I found all of these ads from celebrities of the time endorsing the gas stove as the superior way for the housewife to cook. This is the future of the kitchen.

 

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COMMERCIAL NARRATOR The world of tomorrow is cooking with gas. Right. Jinx Falkenburg.

 

JINX FALKENBURG Naturally, just as nearly all of America's fine restaurants do, 99% of the restaurants at the New York World's Fair use gas for cooking. Why not have in your own kitchen the same fast, cool, clean controlled gas cooking that fine chefs insist on. Live modern for less with gas. [END CLIP]

 

REBECCA LEBER But fast forward to present day, we have the successor to the original campaign, and that's social media influencers. The gas industry has paid influencers to promote the gas stove to their audiences. And what I love about this campaign is they'll always say natural gas stove. These are influencers who are posing with their spatula at their stove, showing you how they make tacos or whatnot.

 

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STOVE-TOK This only works on a natural gas stove, and I'll show you why. When we turn on the stove, you'll see that blue flame come up and you can tell that it's heating the entire bottom of the wok, which is key for that really great caramelization that you want and most of your stir fries and it make sure that the heat is distributed perfectly.

 

REBECCA LEBER One of my favorites is a woman just posing in monochrome orange, smelling her spatula in this beautiful kitchen. And her caption is, There's nothing better during the holidays and getting snuggled, filling up on our favorite holiday dishes. And then she starts talking about how she loves cooking with gas. It helps cook food faster and gives me more control over the temperature when cooking. These campaigns are repeating a lot of the myths I hear regularly that gas is superior, that it's just better than electric, that it's the only way chefs cook. What a lot of these campaigns miss is there's a better modern equivalent to that electric stove a lot of people hate.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE It seems they've gotten a lot better. But what about the pressure on the electrical grid? If we start hooking up everything to the grid, won't we end up using more fossil fuel?

 

REBECCA LEBER This isn't something we're all going to hook up to the grid in the next year or so. We're talking about ten, 20 year timelines. The grid today may run a bit on coal and definitely on gas and oil. But in that longer horizon, it's going to run a lot more on solar and wind. So the grid is going to get cleaner. But a building that has a gas pipeline today, in decades, it's still going to have that gas pipeline.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE How come?

 

REBECCA LEBER Well, that has to do with how hard infrastructure is to tackle when it comes to climate change. Once you build something, it's really hard to change it. We see that with our existing buildings and with the gas stove fight. But the power sector is getting tons of investment right now from the federal government to clean up its act. So we are seeing that transition happen already.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE You said that these links between the gas industry and these influencing campaigns, they may be hard to find because they don't want reporters like you to find them. But you did. So how did you.

 

REBECCA LEBER This is a fight that predates the blow up with the Consumer Product Safety Commission this week. This has been going back for years as climate activists fight on a local level throughout the country. So a lot of my sourcing has been with these local activists who are fighting day to day around trying to electrify their communities. The gas industry has tried all types of tactics, including trying to promote on social media sites like Next Door, which is in a certain community group. And it would have been impossible to learn about these endeavors without those community activists working on this. But another element of this reporting has been information requests for emails, because a lot of these gas utilities are actually public entities or the officials have semipublic duties that can be subject to FOIA.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE You mean they work for public utilities?

 

REBECCA LEBER They either work for public utilities or they're talking to a regulatory body that is the government. And some of the most interesting details from my prior reporting were from these emails, like a utility executive saying in response to my reporting on gas influencers, of course we should pay them to gush more. They should not stop for even one hour. That is also a result of tireless work from groups like Climate Investigation Center that have spent years filing FOIA requests. And what I've tried to do is really show how the research on the health effects, how the politics of the gas industry response and our actions around climate change all are linked in this same battle in this unexpected way.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE You've written that the next frontier in fighting climate change is the great indoors. I'm all into renewable fuels. I'm in. I'm hooked up to solar myself, but I also have a gas stove. And I'm wondering, is there a way to wean a soft these appliances without saying, you know, your refrigerator is going to kill you? Details at 11.

 

REBECCA LEBER Yeah, it would be hysteric to say you are going to die because of your gas stove and ditch it the second or you will truly regret it. There's no going back. But there are things people can and should be doing, guided by the science to move towards proper health warnings and reduce the risks of all that air pollution. And over time, when they're doing renovations or thinking about how they can electrify their own homes, there are steps they can take. And I think there is a difference in talking about those options and just talking in absolutes around gas stoves.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE So no federal. Ban is in the offing. But there have been statutes passed, right? In a variety of states and localities.

 

REBECCA LEBER Right. There is no federal ban happening. But at the state and local level, they might go a bit further. And we already are seeing lots of cities adopt electrification mandates where they say they're over time going to phase in a ban on pipelines to new construction. Again, we're talking about the new construction not existing. There are some states that are looking at gas stove science overall and also thinking about is this something that we should warn about the risks or specifically ban the gas stove? No one's quite there yet. This is something that California is looking at. This is something Oregon's looking at and now New York. But to say that there are gas stove bans in the works would be going too far because a lot of this is just whether new construction should hook up the gas or the electric grid.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE But if you are a California Republican who's all in for the culture wars, would they be justified in saying that their gas stove is being targeted?

 

REBECCA LEBER No one is touching existing stoves and existing buildings at this point, and that's not even part of the discussion. So even if you live in a state that is pursuing electrification in new buildings, you can keep your gas stove.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Even if you live in California.

 

REBECCA LEBER Even if you live in California.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE And that said, at least 21 states have passed laws that would preemptively prevent cities from passing gas bans. Right.

 

REBECCA LEBER Yeah. This was a whirlwind of laws, as you could probably expect, passed in red states in the last couple of years. In reaction to those city efforts. The industry, which has helped craft a lot of these laws, has now pushed more into purplish states to see if it can pass there. But a lot of red states don't run on gas for their buildings. At least they run on electric. If you look at a map, the Southeast is actually hugely electrified. While gas cooking is concentrated in a lot of big blue cities like New York City. So the irony here is, even though this is becoming this red blue divide around gas stoves in a lot of these red states, the cities weren't even considering electrification. So I think that's another example of the rhetoric versus the reality here. And important to distinguish.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Given the ferocity of this argument. Are there red flags that you see in some of the coverage of this issue?

 

REBECCA LEBER How much of this seemed so new to so many people the last couple of weeks who never heard about this ongoing debate around stoves? Sorry for the pun. This issue has really been heating up for a while now. And I think for someone who wasn't aware of all that was going on in the background, this probably seemed to come both out of nowhere and like the super extreme step that an agency would even consider. But when you realize that there was this long tail of debate starting in the states and cities, then it seems a little less drastic what the Consumer Product Safety Commission is doing here.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Rebecca, thank you very much.

 

REBECCA LEBER Thank you.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Rebecca Leber is a senior reporter at Vox. 

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE And...popular in Europe, but may be coming for you: induction stoves. They're currently a small slice of the electric stove market in the U.S. According to a 2022 survey, only 3% of Americans currently use them, but almost 70% say they'd consider it.

 

Coming up, what happened to all those eureka moments in science? This is On the Media.

 

[BREAK]

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE This is On the Media, I'm Brooke Gladstone. Imagine what it was like to be alive before and just after the turn of the last century. You'd be watching a dazzling parade of miraculous inventions.

 

[CLIP]

 

THOMAS ALVA EDISON Simple inventions have been revolutionized. [END CLIP]

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE That's Thomas Alva Edison in 1908, reflecting on the impact of his many inventions, including the automatic telegraph, the phonograph and transmitter. And so he claimed: the light bulb.

 

THOMAS ALVA EDISON It is still too early to stand outside these events and pronounce final judgment on their lasting value. But we base surely entertain believe that the last half of the 19th century was as distinct in its electrical inventions as the first half was in its determination to see it. [END CLIP]

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE And into that new century. The eureka moments continued.

 

[CLIP]

 

ERNEST RUTHERFORD In our laboratories today, we live in an atmosphere dim with a flying fragment of exploding atoms. [END CLIP]

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Ernest Rutherford In 1935, one of the scientists responsible for...

 

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ERNEST RUTHERFORD The discovery of the electron and of the spontaneous radioactivity observed in the heavy elements uranium and thorium. [END CLIP]

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Elementary particles, you know, just the building blocks of the universe. And then...

 

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NEWS REPORT The key to the atom sequence was first given to the world in 1905, when the genius Albert Einstein defined the relation between all matter and energy and evolved his revolutionary theory of special relativity. [END CLIP]

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Einstein looked to science for clarity amid the chaos, which happens from time to time, as when in...

 

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NEWS REPORT 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick first discovered the structure of DNA. [END CLIP]

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Even though the scientist, Rosalind Franklin, was the one who first photographed the x pattern, which was.

 

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SCIENTIST A telltale sign for a helical structure of some kind. [END CLIP]

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE A single snapshot containing the double helix secret of life. Now, compare that to...

 

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NEWS REPORT This year's Nobel Prize for Chemistry will be shared by three scientists.

 

PRIZE COMMITTEE They received the prize for the development of Click Chemistry and bio orthogonal chemistry. [END CLIP]

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Less eureka and more, huh? Earlier this month, a new paper by Michael Parke, Erin Lahey and Russell J. Funk in the journal Nature argued that the lack of 'aha' moments in science is no accident. The research team concluded that there just aren't as many disruptive scientific breakthroughs as there used to be. But how do you determine what's a disruptive breakthrough and what's just a great scientific achievement?

 

WILLIAM J. BROAD They came up with a beautiful, new, sexy idea in the very boring world of citation analysis.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE William J. Broad, science journalist and senior writer at The New York Times, says that the old way of gauging a scientific papers impact involved simply counting the number of how many people cited the paper in later research. A basic applause meter. But that kind of count could be thrown off by anything from the popularity of the researchers to the scientists who are citing themselves in their own work. So Park Leahey and Funke made an adjustment.

 

WILLIAM J. BROAD They were going deeper. They looked at nearly 50 million papers and patents going back to 1945 and analyzed them with this new technique of theirs.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE They measured not just how many times a colleague cited the paper at issue, but also how many times they cited the citations in that paper. But how does that indicate actual scientific disruption?

 

WILLIAM J. BROAD We could just use the Watson and Crick paper as an example.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE They made that breakthrough when they saw it visualized in a leaked photograph stolen from Rosalind Franklin.

 

WILLIAM J. BROAD Darn right. They took it and ran in one of the great outrages of science history. Using her research, they came up with the helical structure of DNA in 1953, which was a big deal. Now, that paper, if you look at it through this new lens, they don't look just at the paper. They look at what the paper cited when it was written. Now, in the case of Watson and Crick, there are just six citations to their paper that appeared in Nature. One, they're pointing out a mistake in theory on how DNA was structured. And two of them are saying we don't have enough data to really figure this out experimentally. Oh, and very few citations. It turns out that in this new kind of analysis, that's the hallmark of a breakthrough for breakthrough papers. People don't go back to papers that breakthrough artists cited because what they did was so novel in big. In desultory research, they're more interested in the winding path, things like mRNA vaccines, which were a lifesaver. Right? It seems like a huge breakthrough, and it is in terms of public health. However, if you go back and look at where that came from, it was decades and decades of itsy bitsy steps along this winding path. So that by the definition of these researchers, is ordinary science. It's consolidating information rather than taking giant leaps forward.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE If I'm understanding this correctly, the disruption and the breakthrough level of a paper or patent rests on how big of a leap it makes beyond the body of the research behind it. Right.

 

WILLIAM J. BROAD Beautifully said. I'm going to quote you in my next article.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Are their holes in this method?

 

WILLIAM J. BROAD Probably this is a new baby, right? I just became a grandparent for the first time.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Congratulations.

 

WILLIAM J. BROAD Thank you very much. But that new baby is perfect and it's obviously the world's most beautiful baby. Well, we'll see, right? Time goes by and it turns out the new baby has not ours of course, this new analytic technique has limitations. That's the beautiful and scary thing about this. Science is this enormous global enterprise. And yet we don't really have very good ways to get a grip on how well it's doing. This paper takes a very interesting step in that direction, and it's already creating a large hubbub in the community. But there will be criticism and there will be updates.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Since disruptive breakthroughs are rarer and rarer. According to the paper. Or nature. What are some of them?

 

WILLIAM J. BROAD The one on the top of their scale, almost off the charts is a breakthrough. Blew my mind because I had never heard of it. It's this gene splicing technique for inserting DNA into human cells, allowing all kinds of great biotechnology stuff. And it made between Columbia and these three investigators, almost $1,000,000,000 in royalties, all kinds of science awards. I had never heard of it, but it's in terms of their measure, more important than Watson and Crick. You know, it's like off the charts, which is fascinating. They've got a metric that's finding things that are huge and virtually unknown to the public.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Wow. Well, here's the proportion question then. More research is being published than ever. You say a million papers a year are published. Does the number of major breakthroughs look smaller because there's just so much more of it going on?

 

WILLIAM J. BROAD Another way this trend gets framed is that quantity is outdoing quality. Why? That's the big question. Why? Why is this literature exploding at the expense of seeing real breakthroughs? And that's a very, very hard question, which they don't really address in this paper.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE I think that maybe to answer it, we should try to follow the money, because money for science is just exploding!

 

WILLIAM J. BROAD Totally! I quote a guy at the end of the piece, this very nice sociologist at the University of Chicago, James Evans. This nation has invested literally many trillions of dollars in scientific research over the decades. But people on Capitol Hill are very worried about frittering away those trillions. Remember good Senator Proxmire, from the great state of Wisconsin.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Yeah.

 

WILLIAM J. BROAD He had these Golden Fleece Awards, which he gave out like every month. And a lot of those were science.

 

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WILLIAM PROXMIRE Ever since 1975, every month I've given an award, a golden fleece, to the most disgusting, revolting, repulsive waste of the taxpayer's money by the federal government. The first Golden Fleece we gave to an agency that spent $83,000 to try to find out why people fall in love. Now, the difficulty was that as even they could give you the answer, I wouldn't want to know because the great thing about loves this mystery. And once the scientists can weigh it measured, you can kiss a goodbye. And then I gave it to an agency that spent $130,000 to try to find out whether Sunfish that drink tequila are more aggressive than sunfish, that drink gin. Sunfish. Now, they could have come to Milwaukee, gotten all kinds of volunteers for that program. [END CLIP]

 

WILLIAM J. BROAD Scientists, frittering away your money on blue sky crap and they scared the crap out of a lot of scientists. And the whole apparatus has become extremely conservative in trying to encourage accountability in concrete results. We don't want to do blue sky research.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE I was reading the Vox article on this study, and Kelsey Piper wrote that, quote, It seems entirely possible that the slowdown in science is not an inevitable natural law, but a result of policy choices. Despite the record level of funding, we know that visionaries with transformative ideas like Katalin Kariko, who did the crucial early work to invent the mRNA vaccines, struggled for years to get grant money.

 

WILLIAM J. BROAD That's exactly right. Not only that, there's the academic complex like you want tenure. How many papers have you published? So people engage in what they call salami science. You cut your work into tiny, little incomprehensible bits, so each one gets a little paper, and then you can proudly announce to the tenure committee that you've got 300 publications out in respectable journals and give me tenure. It's put a big crimp in the quality of the research.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE I want to float another theory to you that Patrick Collison and Michael Nielsen articulated in The Atlantic a couple of years ago. They said, Suppose we think of science, the exploration of nature as similar to the exploration of a new continent. In the early days, little is known. Explorers set out and discover major new features with ease, but gradually they fill in knowledge of the new continent. To make significant discoveries, explorers must go to ever more remote areas under ever more difficult conditions.

 

WILLIAM J. BROAD What these people at the Atlantic are talking about is sort of science being a victim of nature. James Evans at the University of Chicago calls it, and they call it going for the low hanging fruit.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Newtonian physics is now the first page of the textbook, no longer eliciting the kind of wonder it once did. You've suggested that to make a Newton level jump in today's research would be like inventing a personal time machine. I mean, is it that hard?

 

WILLIAM J. BROAD Yeah. Since we're on the media here, let's just put our cards on the table. Mm hmm. The media are complicit in the dumbing down of science and our goals. We've conditioned the public to see science as an accumulation of facts and discoveries. Those little tidbits are easy to digest, and they're these symbols of science. But I was a graduate student in the history of science that our teachers used to bash this into our heads. Real science isn't just those little factoids and those little discoveries. It's mostly ideas and concepts.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE I have to be honest, I was very skeptical of this story and still am to a degree because I'm not sure I agree on what a disruption might be. A lot of the disruptions of the past were the cogitation of one or two people. You know, small teams finding the first electron didn't take a lot of people. Thousands of scientists worked on finding the Higgs boson.

 

WILLIAM J. BROAD And gravity waves. Right.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Right, right!

 

WILLIAM J. BROAD Very, very hard. Right. Huge endeavors.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE So it's it just the romance, is it that it has to be just the result of one or two scientists? Are we defining breakthrough correctly?

 

WILLIAM J. BROAD I think when you start looking at the guts of their analysis, you start to see the wisdom of it, like gravity waves a new lens on the universe. This is changing astronomy as we speak. You know, new teams are focusing in on new parts of the universe for a new time. Like the first one was a collision of two black holes. You know, it's telling you fundamental things about how the universe works is Huge in terms of application. But where did that come from? It starts with Einstein and general relativity, and then a century of hard work of hundreds of people and hundreds of papers making little incremental steps forward to try to do what? To confirm his brilliant theory. I mean, the effects of that proof are enormous. They're creating a new field, a new lens on the universe. But getting there was a century old idea, right? That's what they're identifying as being rare or those big breakthrough ideas.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Disruption means changing how we see the world, because in terms of technologies, one could argue that the Internet or something were disruptive in how they changed our lives.

 

WILLIAM J. BROAD Socially disruptive.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Materially disruptive.

 

WILLIAM J. BROAD One of the papers that these authors cite is the Google patent. This was a simple algorithmic change sponsored by federal research. Larry Page and company came up with it and presto-chango, everything has changed about search algorithms. But that's not science. And as we can see with AI, in many respects, it's getting easier, not harder. People think of electronics and the heart of your computer as really complex. Well, it's these little, you know, logic circuits that are basically really simple. It's just there's an awful lot of them. It's simple mathematics compared to chaos in the atmosphere and getting a grip on the swirls and how they affect your ability to predict the weather ten years in advance. A hundred years in advance.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE What is this research into the diminishing number of disruptions over time for what to do for us?

 

WILLIAM J. BROAD It's feedback from our millions of people and trillions of dollars that are piling away doing science. If we did for this research what they have done for all this other research, I think we'd find a lot of citations to it. It's a new way of thinking and we'd see that a lot of those citations are from people who are trying to figure out ways to make science work better.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE What do you hope comes out of this research?

 

WILLIAM J. BROAD We are dazzled by science because it does all these dazzling things, but in truth, it's a very fragile thing institutionally. And if I had a lamp and one wish that the genie would grant, it would be that people could and Congress could and the administrators could communicate better. What a beautiful, fragile thing it is. And that you got to look at it and take care of it if you want the miracles to continue.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Thank you very much.

 

WILLIAM J. BROAD No, thank you.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE William J. Broad is a science journalist and senior writer at The New York Times.

 

That's it for this week's show! On The Media is produced by Micah Loewinger, Eloise Blondiau, Molly Schwartz, Rebecca Clark-Callendar, Candice Wang and Suzanne Gaber with help from Temi George. Our technical directors. Jennifer Munson. Our engineers this week were Andrew Nerviano and Sham Sundra. Katya Rogers is our executive producer. On the Media, is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.