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Since January, the Biden administration has been blowing considerable smoke threatening a ban on gas appliances, with stoves the first item in their crosshairs. The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) and the Department of Energy know full well that this would cripple a multitude of industries, the least being food service and restaurants whose efficiency and profit margins rely on the use of natural gas.
According to a Fox News exclusive, this supposedly new agenda item was actually hatched in the Summer of 2022 and has been taking considerable shape since then.
Biden administration officials have quietly contemplated regulating natural gas-powered stovetops for at least a year, far earlier than previously known, according to internal communications.
The communications, obtained by Fox News Digital via information request this week, show the little-known four-member Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) was actively exploring legal justifications for regulations impacting gas stoves last summer. In June 2022, CPSC commissioner Richard Trumka Jr. consulted with a New York City eco group, asking for a legal justification to issue gas stove standards, according to the documents.
“I would like to follow up on our discussion that took place on June 2, 2022,” WE ACT for Environmental Justice policy manager Yuwa Vosper wrote in an August email to Trumka and other CPSC officials. “During the call, Commissioner Trumka suggested for us to evaluate the legal rationale for gas stove standards and labeling within the Federal Hazardous Substances Act (FHSA).”
“Since our call, I have been heavily researching to make the connection and find the legal support that Commissioner Trumka was referencing within the FHSA,” Vosper continued. “Therefore, I would like to meet as a follow-up to discuss and determine if I am on the correct path with my thought process for our organizational memorandum draft to further our advocacy on gas stove regulation.”
In February, this writer sat down with Ken Davis, a former deputy attorney general for the Commonwealth of Virginia, who currently writes and speaks on policy issues, particularly involving the energy sector. For Davis, none of this is new or revelatory.
The attack on gas stoves that began in the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) in January, and so on, is just part of a much broader initiative by the Biden administration in the name of fighting Climate Change. To, as I say, limit the production and use of fossil fuels to limit the CO2 emissions that result from the use of those fuels.
But Davis surmises that this move is a combination of things: ideology, virtue signaling, and money.
No surprises there, either.
I mean, they are ideological more than pragmatic. And so, once they’ve identified Climate Change as a threat, and further identified carbon dioxide emissions as the major driver, then, to literally to save the world, they say we have to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and related greenhouse gas emissions. But it’s really a combination of ideological commitment, virtue, signaling, and plain old pork politics than it is sound science.
The letters obtained by Fox Digital reveal that WE ACT assisted CPSC in supplying the junk science used by Trumka to begin crafting legal rationales and standards to ban gas stoves.
Ten minutes after Vosper sent the email, Trumka, who President Biden nominated in 2021, responded to schedule a follow-up call on Aug. 17. After that call, Trumka’s legal adviser Robin Lipp emailed Vosper and WE ACT for Environmental Justice senior director Dana Johnson thanking them for meeting.
Lipp also shared an Aug. 1 letter Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill. — who at the time chaired the House Oversight Subcommittee on Economic and Consumer Policy — sent to CPSC Chairman Alexander Hoehn-Saric, detailing risks posed by gas stoves and asking whether the commission planned standards regulating the appliance.
In a response letter dated Aug. 10, also obtained via information request, Hoehn-Saric told Krishnamoorthi that CPSC staff were crafting gas stove standards.
Davis explained that this creation of “causations” to produce a correlation started with the environmental movement back in the 70s.
No, since the environmental movement really got aggressively started in the 70s, one driver has always been questionable studies, junk science kind of studies that really don’t support the proper conclusion. Take that study that referred to 12 percent of children with asthma get it from gas stoves. I mean, never mind allergies to laundry detergent or mold or other things. No, no, it’s all gas stoves now.
Davis then revealed how these studies are conveniently weighted to get a certain result.
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And you know a foundational flaw in so many of the environmental health studies that are conducted is that there’s an assumption of what they call the “zero acceptable threshold assumption,” the “single molecule assumption,” or the “one hit assumption.” [This is] where these studies are conducted on the assumption that if the survey identifies these smallest traits of nitrogen dioxide, then that is a potential health risk. In other words, these studies typically do not except what we all know to be the fact. That we live in a world where we are naturally in normal and due course exposed to all kinds of emissions from all kinds of sources, all kinds of chemicals, all kinds of byproducts and things. [Our reactions are based upon] our immune system resistance and the natural way our body functions.
The information uncovered through the letters also showed,
In addition to the CPSC request for information, on Feb. 1, the Department of Energy proposed the regulations, saying they would go into effect in 2027 and save Americans up to $1.7 billion while curbing greenhouse gas emissions. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm pushed back on criticism, saying she owned a gas stove and that the regulations would merely impact 50% of current gas stove models.
The average American keeps their ovens for 10 years or longer. The used appliance market is a huge opportunity for those who cannot afford to buy a new appliance. So impacting 50 percent of current models means you destroy opportunity and access not only for individual American households, but American businesses as well.
From Davis’ decades of experience in analyzing policy surrounding the energy sector, it corroborates this reporting. The Biden administration’s agenda was crafted first, and the evidence produced to support the agenda was inserted accordingly.
Take again the gas stove business for example. Forty percent of the electricity in this country is generated today in power plants that are fueled by natural gas. To generate electricity, you have to get the the generator coil turning really fast. A great big thing and then a gas-fired plant. They do it. It’s like a great big jet engine where they burn natural gas. Blow the hot air against fan blades. Spin the turbine and generate the electricity, and that’s how 40 percent of the electricity in this country is produced, including a significant percentage even in California.
The Biden administration, Granholm, Trumka, all the players, are quite comfortable with shutting down 40 percent of power generation in the country.
Now if you banned gas stoves or gas-end uses of all kinds heating, as well as cooking—as I think they have done in Berkeley and New York City and maybe Oakland—in any place where you banned the end use of natural gas for domestic purposes, if that area is getting its electricity from a power plant run on natural gas, because of the conversion process and the distribution of this power over a distance, you’re actually using more gas.
Ultimately it proves to be a self-defeating proposition. Much like a country full of all-electric cars, whose large lithium batteries require a huge carbon footprint to produce and that cannot be recycled, filling landfills and distributing toxins throughout the earth. The push for green energy is neither sound science nor sound common sense.
Bottom line, this is not about saving the planet, it’s about controlling the planet’s inhabitants.
There’s no efficiency reason for this gas stove ban. There’s no health reason. It’s all just part of the overall effort to do everything possible to restrict as much as possible the use of fossil fuels in this country.
It really is an interesting combination to hear them go on and on about the wondrous technologies that everybody loves and so forth, and then turn around and say, We have to make sure that everybody gets the obvious benefits from these new technologies and electric stoves, so we’re going to ban what you have now.
They can say over and over again, We’re we’re not planning to ban. But the regulatory state, they are masters at killing things by regulation, claiming all the while that they’re not going to ban them now, while slowing cutting off their use.
Davis wasn’t all doom and gloom. The tide can still be turned if Americans at the local and municipal level get engaged with their city, country, and state policies on energy and its use, and work to combat the boards and city councils that seek to institute these green agendas under the guise of efficiency and global health. California is a shining example of the result of these dead-end policies. The state can barely keep its lights on or charge its electric cars.
But people have to engage. They have to make themselves aware of these issues and they have to learn enough about the facts to understand that this is not about saving the planet. This is not about ensuring the future of our children. This is a scam, a fraud perpetrated on the American people to justify the expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars [that is] distributed to favored constituencies of the investors and producers in these technologies that could not themselves stand up in a competitive market test.
Ultimately, the rest of the world will continue to maintain its use of fossil fuels, while the United States under Biden will fall headlong into the dark ages.
Even if the United States did everything that Biden and the radical environmentalists want to have happen, a host of other countries, all of whom understand the importance of fossil fuel development and use to their national security, are going to go on expanding their use of fossil fuels. So, there won’t be any impact on global reduction of carbon dioxide emissions. This is a utopian green electrified future vision of the president and his cabinet.
