Fox & Friends didn’t just sneer at EPA-funded research into cleaner cookstove technology, they dismissed the dangers from present cookstoves and then fear mongered that the whole project was little more than a way to “just put a fist on your kitchen and what you can use” as Elisabeth Hasselbeck put it.

As Media Matters explains, World Health Organization statistics show that pollution from inefficient stoves kills 4.3 million people early each year, more than AIDS and malaria combined. Dirty cook stoves also contribute to climate change. 

But on the Curvy Couch, all they could think about was the possibility that their own stoves might be more tightly regulated. Brian Kilmeade tried to scare people into thinking stoves would be taken away. He said “First, they came for your light bulbs, remember the knock? Now the EPA using taxpayer money to target kitchen stoves. …Why? Because climate change.”

Stuart Varney joined the fear mongering. He called the research “a backdoor way of regulating the kitchen stove in your house. ...You ever get tired of being pushed around? Because I think bureaucrats are pushing us around already and they want to do it some more. …Can’t you see it coming? A label required on your stove, it’s got x degree of efficiency for burning this particular type of fuel. You need a new stove to conform with the new standards. You can see it coming a mile off.”

Like anyone there would have trouble affording a new stove.

Steve Doocy said scornfully, “This is just to make us feel good, like we’re trying to do something.”

“I think it opens that backdoor,” Varney continued. “$17.6 trillion in debt, but we’ve got $9 million to study cooking stoves at several universities.” He called stove pollution “a mere contribution to those deaths.”

Video below via Media Matters.