An Attack on Culture and Small Business: NYC’s DEP Draft’s New Legislation Targeting Pizza Ovens

June 26, 2023

New York City’s Department of Environmental Protection has just drafted new legislation that aims to help the city lower its carbon footprint. They are targeting one of New York’s hallmark cultural elements that attracts tourists from near and far, traditional wood and coal-fired pizzas. Not only does this new legislation take aim at one of NYC’s societal cornerstones, but it also directly targets a field that makes up a large chunk of the city’s small business sector. 

The New York Post reports, 

“All New Yorkers deserve to breathe healthy air and wood and coal-fired stoves are among the largest contributors of harmful pollutants in neighborhoods with poor air quality,” DEP spokesman Ted Timbers said in a statement Sunday. “This common-sense rule, developed with restaurant and environmental justice groups, requires a professional review of whether installing emission controls is feasible.” 

The pizza-makers have not taken lightly to this proposal due to the expenses that are associated with changing their age-old cooking techniques: 

“the owner of one Brooklyn joint saying he’s already tossed $20,000 on an air filter system in anticipation of the new mandate. “Oh yeah, it’s a big expense!” said Paul Giannone, the owner of Paulie Gee’s in Greenpoint. “It’s not just the expense of having it installed, it’s the maintenance. I got to pay somebody to do it, to go up there every couple of weeks and hose it down and you know do the maintenance.” […] “If you f—k around with the temperature in the oven you change the taste. That pipe, that chimney, it’s that size to create the perfect updraft, keeps the temp perfect, it’s an art as much as a science. You take away the char, the thing that makes the pizza taste great, you kill it,” he claimed. “And for what? You really think that you’re changing the environment with these eight or nine pizza ovens?!” the restaurateur added.” 

These small business owners certainly make a valid point; their traditional values and source of income are now under attack by power-hungry bureaucrats looking to advance their political agenda to appease the radical eco-left. Reducing emissions from a handful of local pizza joints will hardly make a dent in reducing NYC’s inevitably massive carbon emissions.