On paper, Dr. Julie Goodman is exactly the kind of seasoned scientific expert the New York Times would typically venerate.
She received her Ph.D. in toxicology from Johns Hopkins University. She taught at Harvard's School of Public Health. She served as a cancer prevention fellow at the National Cancer Institute. And she's now affiliated with both the American College of Epidemiology and the Academy of Toxicological Sciences. She believes in "the science."
There’s just one problem. Goodman doesn't think the federal government should come into your home and rip out your gas stove. In her (expert) opinion, studies linking the suddenly controversial appliance to childhood asthma are flawed. They don’t justify dramatic action.
Goodman’s evidence-based conclusions made her, understandably, an attractive resource to the gas industry’s lobbying arm, which has paid her to testify on its behalf. It’s a tale as old as time, but news to the New York Times, which published a hit piece on Sunday arguing that Goodman is little more than a gas industry shill posing as an "independent scientist."
The Times has of course demonstrated less interest in ferreting out the conflicts of interest behind the groups producing the studies suggesting gas stoves are to blame for a host of maladies.
Take the Rocky Mountain Institute, the green energy group behind the now-infamous report attributing 13 percent of U.S. childhood asthma cases to gas-stove use. That study, the Times says in the same Sunday piece, is the "solid" work of unbiased "experts."
Our colleagues Collin Anderson and Joseph Simonson have reported on the Rocky Mountain Institute’s agenda. It boasts of its attempt to drive an "economy-wide transformation" away from oil and gas in the name of the "climate crisis" and is led by green energy executives who stand to profit from such a transformation.
That is information you won’t glean from a paper whose primary business—aside from recipes, Wordle, and negotiating pay raises with its union—is mediocre political axe-grinding.