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Comment by thegrim33 | Hacker News Reader

The overton window is skewed? Do you think people 20 years ago would be more likely to agree or disagree with this policy, compared to people today? What about 40 years ago? What about 60 years ago? 80 years? If anything, the window has moved so far in the direction of your ideology that this is the first point in history where such a policy would have any chance of being implemented.

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During the post-war period in the states, natural gas displaced coal and oil for domestic consumption in part because it burnt cleaner. So yes, people in the past did agree with displacing inconvenient fossil fuels for modern alternatives.

Consumers exercising preference for a better technology and nanny-state interference in people’s lives are two very different issues.

In both cases I’m talking about people’s preferences, since that’s the way the question was framed.

It's not just "direction of ideology," it's direction of science. We know now that stoves are bad for the environment and extremely bad for public health. 60 years ago the environmental impact was seen as minor compared to coal or wood stoves, and the public health impact totally unknown. This is no longer the case.

What are you even talking about? Not everything has to be interpreted in the context of some cataclysmic battle of ideologies. And this sort of policy is not uncommon in other parts of the Western world.

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