Most of us hate government regulations generally, but especially when they make stuff we buy worse or more expensive. Or both. It really burned us up when the Biden administration floated regulating gas stoves. And it really puts folks through the spin cycles to think that his administration is pondering the same thing with washing machines. Robert Spencer explores the latter:

“No credible scientific body,” wrote energy and environmental researcher Michael Shellenberger in 2019, “has ever said climate change threatens the collapse of civilization much less the extinction of the human species.” In fact, the whole idea that temperatures are rising to catastrophic levels is based on circular reasoning. But the Biden regime is all in on the climate change myth, and as always, ordinary Americans are the ones who have to pay the price. The latest manifestation of this comes in the form of new regulations for washing machines that make them work less well. Ready to stink to save the planet? You may have no choice.

The Washington Free Beacon reported [recently] that Old Joe Biden’s Energy Department “last month proposed new efficiency standards for washing machines that would require new appliances to use considerably less water, all in an effort to ‘confront the global climate crisis.’ Those mandates would force manufacturers to reduce cleaning performance to ensure their machines comply, leading industry giants such as Whirlpool said in public comments on the rule. They’ll also make the appliances more expensive and laundry day a headache — each cycle will take longer, the detergent will cost more, and in the end, the clothes will be less clean, the manufacturers say.” America, welcome to managed decline.

Unfortunately, Spencer writes, manufacturers aren’t waiting for the actual regulations to start moving in the direction they know they’ll be pushed eventually. People will inevitably respond by washing clothes twice, thereby using more water. Unless you don’t mind your clothes not getting fully clean. As Spencer jokingly put it after a short anecdote about sticky clothes, “‘Dude, you stink!’ could be the epitaph of the entire Biden administration.”

The Energy Department, firmly committed to the climate mythology, actually wants us to believe that descending to Third-World living standards will change the climate sufficiently to allow for the continued existence of human life on this planet: “Collectively these energy efficiency actions … support President Biden’s ambitious clean energy agenda to combat the climate crisis.” Yeah, and if we just weigh down the accused witches with heavy stones and lower them into this pool of water, the ones who aren’t really witches will miraculously be prevented from sinking.

Team Biden is doing its best to “hoodwink Americans into thinking that these new, less efficient appliances will be just as good as the old ones that actually worked,” Spencer says, though most of us are smarter than that. He concludes:

In this, as in so much else regarding the Biden regime, you have to wonder: do they really believe their own nonsense, or do they just want to reduce America to Third-World status to satisfy some socialist, globalist imperative?

Read the whole thing here.