OPINION:
New York City restaurant owners are facing mandated environmental regulations related to their ovens that could either hike their costs of compliance to unsustainable levels or — and perish the thought — leave consumers with really crappy pizzas.
First the gas stoves. Now the pizza ovens. What next — bagels and the very water that’s key to their deliciousness?
Climate activists kill everything good, fun, festive and free.
“The New York City Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has drafted new rules that would require pizzerias with coal and wooden-fire ovens installed prior to 2016 to cut carbon emissions by 75%,” Fox News wrote, citing the New York Post. “Restaurant owners would be forced to install a filter to the specified ovens then hire an engineer to regularly inspect the carbon emissions.”
It’s for the health of all of humanity, dontcha know.
What’s a $20,000-plus emission-control air-filter device here or there, so long as it lets even one person breathe easier while walking the hot, summer streets of New York City, right?
“All New Yorkers deserve to breathe healthy air,” DEP spokesman Ted Timbers said.
True. But going after the pizza-makers seems a dubious way of cleaning the air. The regulations currently on the table would reportedly impact fewer than 100 restaurants. Surely, that’s just a tiny piece of the pie of pollution that hits the city — that hits all cities, for that matter — particularly during summer months, when air tends to stay trapped, and when hot pavement mixing with heat tends to hover uncomfortably, and when breezes that could clear the streets of hard-to-handle hot air-mixed-with-pollutants are few and far between.
Wipe out the pizza ovens, and what have you got? Millions of idling cars, buses and trucks. Doesn’t seem a fair trade — or useful.
“This is an unfunded mandate and it’s going to cost us a fortune not to mention ruining the taste of the pizza, totally destroying the product,” one pizzeria owner said, Fox News wrote. “If you f— around with the temperature in the oven, you change the taste. … [Pizza-making’s] an art as much as a science.”
Radical climate alarmists have been busy going after cars, planes and all modes of travel; coal-fired plants, which is to say electricity, which is to say heating and lighting; gas stoves in Americans’ homes; beef and beef cattle — and trying to force citizens to instead go meatless, eat lab-grown fake meat, or insects; and, oh well, name it, the list grows long. Today’s radical reality is there can’t be a natural weather event anywhere without some Green-aligned nutcase blaming it on development or human behavior and calling for lockdowns of civilization.
Somehow, pizza-makers made it on the left’s target list.
There should be limits with lines that are considered so absurd to cross, though, that they don’t entice even the hardest-core leftists to try.
You’d think pizza ovens might be one of those limits.
Apparently not.
The lunacy of the left knows no bounds.
According to Greta Thunberg, the water carrier for the climate activist crazies, the world should have ended just a few days ago, based on so-called “scientific” environmental predictions from five years back — predictions she widely broadcast on Twitter as means of warning of the dire need to curb human activities. We’re still here. The mortgage must still be paid.
But the environmental world is filled with just such false prophets as Thunberg. It’s the religion of the left; it’s the pagan worship of the Democrats, the globalists, the Marxists, the collectivists.
Pizza-makers are just their newest sacrifice to their goddess of Green.
But if they go — if they’re successfully bowed to the will of the radical environmental crowd — think of the others to follow. The left won’t rest until its climate-screeching claws are dug in deep to every business, every development, every entrepreneurial pursuit, every money-making venture.
It’s not about pizza ovens, or pollution, or preserving humanity. It’s a quest for power, pure and simple. What is it all about? Here’s a definition.
Modern environmentalism: a game of regulations, aimed at stripping individuals and businesses of their money — money that is then used to aid and assist in the continued theft of more individuals and businesses.
It’s no wonder Democrats love environmentalism: Legalized stealing is oh so profitable and fun.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley. Listen to her podcast “Bold and Blunt” by clicking HERE. And never miss her column; subscribe to her newsletter and podcast by clicking HERE. Her latest book, “Lockdown: The Socialist Plan To Take Away Your Freedom,” is available by clicking HERE or clicking HERE or CLICKING HERE.
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