The Patriot Post® · Gaslighting America on Gas Stoves
If you were wondering why Joe Biden chose this moment to go after your gas stove, yesterday’s report from The Wall Street Journal provides a clue: “U.S. production of natural gas … has hit record levels.” President Green Energy and his ecofascist allies can’t have that.
The Biden administration’s Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) has teased that it could soon decide to ban gas stoves. “This is a hidden hazard,” explained CPSC Commissioner Richard Trumka Jr. “Any option is on the table. Products that can’t be made safe can be banned.”
What in the world does he mean “made safe”? The crack scientists informing the CPSC on the matter fret that indoor pollution created by gas stoves can cause or worsen asthma, especially among children. Regarding a new study, The Washington Post’s climate blog dutifully relays the propaganda: “Gas-burning stoves in kitchens across America are responsible for roughly 12.7 percent of childhood asthma cases nationwide — on par with the childhood asthma risks associated with exposure to secondhand smoke.”
Noted scientist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez fumed, “Did you know that ongoing exposure to NO2 from gas stoves is linked to reduced cognitive performance?” We didn’t, but maybe she and Joe Biden have been spending too much time near the stove.
Yet even the EPA says gas stoves “burn very cleanly, emitting very little pollution.” Furthermore, according to the International Study of Asthma and Allergies in Childhood, a far more comprehensive study than the one the CPSC is using, there is “no evidence of an association between the use of gas as a cooking fuel and either asthma symptoms or asthma diagnosis.”
For the Biden administration, however, The Science™ is always a moving target.
This isn’t about science, of course, but the Left’s radical climate agenda. It’s about crushing fossil fuels under the weight of government regulation while promoting anything and everything electric and “green.”
How do we know? Well, the Post offers this tidbit: “The study, which was led by the environmental think tank RMI…” If you’ve never heard of RMI, you’re not alone, and it doesn’t help that the Post deliberately avoided committing actual journalism by telling you anything about the think tank. RMI is bad news. National Review notes that it’s “an environmental group with the radical goal of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by 50 percent within the next seven years.”
Worse, the “science” RMI and Co. conducted was a hack job of results-driven quackery. In essence, the “study” was a math formula that had nothing to do with real scientific research and everything to do with a predetermined outcome. The Post also gives that game away with this bit of activism posing as journalism: “Under the Clean Air Act, the Environmental Protection Agency has the authority to regulate outdoor air pollution,” but “advocates have urged the [CPSC] to fill this regulatory vacuum that persists inside people’s homes.”
Got that? It’s a “regulatory vacuum.”
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm likewise made the “green energy” agenda clear by pointing to the study to tout tax credits in the grossly misnamed Inflation Reduction Act. “We can and must FIX this,” she said of gas stoves. Taxpayer financed electric alternatives, she added, would “keep pollution out of the home, cook food faster, and help families save money.”
That information is all either false or missing context, to borrow the “fact-checkers” favorite line. For example, banning a segment of products used in 35% of homes would do the opposite of save money. It would drive up the prices of electric alternatives, which are by the way increasingly powered by unreliable solar and wind energy.
The climate radicals will never be done interfering in every aspect of your entire life, invading even your kitchen to slay phony dragons.
There are other outrageous factors here, as well. This is the same administration, after all, that demands government “keep your laws of my body” when it comes to abortion. Out of the bedroom, they say. Well, how about get out of the kitchen?
This is also the same administration advocating for “gender affirmation” — i.e., sex change medication and procedures — for children, all while howling about the children and asthma supposedly caused by gas stoves. It’s the same administration whose assistant health secretary is an overweight man pretending to be a woman. It’s the same administration that insists COVID meant children had to stay out of school, mask up when allowed back, and then vaccinate early and often, all despite the incredibly low risk infection posed to children. We could go on.
But sure, we’ll listen to ‘em on the “science” involving gas stoves.
Meanwhile, where’s the Constitution? Lit on fire at the gas stove, as usual. There is NO constitutional authority for the administration to regulate what kind of stoves Americans buy. Yet there’s also no authority to regulate lightbulbs, or toilet flushes, or any number of other awful policies implement by Democrats and Republicans alike. It was Richard Nixon who created the EPA, after all, not a Democrat.
In any case, feel free to tell the administration exactly where it can stick this latest tyrannical idea.
Well that was fast. No sooner had we published this article than U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission chairman Alexander D. Hoehn-Saric issued a statement denying any of this ever happened: “Over the past several days, there has been a lot of attention paid to gas stove emissions and to the Consumer Product Safety Commission. To be clear, I am not looking to ban gas stoves and the CPSC has no proceeding to do so.” Then why float the idea in the first place?