By Craig Rucker
America has an abundant supply of inexpensive, clean-burning natural gas. Naturally, the climate-Left hates it.
Now they’re coming for our stoves, despite the fact that natural gas is the choice of millions of cooks from the home kitchen to the finest restaurants.
“These are truly crazy times,” said CFACT’s Marc Morano on The Joe Piscopo Show, “everyday we wake up and find some unelected bureaucrat is seeking to ban something.” .Marc also tackled the issue on David Horowitz’s Frontpage Magazine video podcast, Vicki McKenna radio, and Newsmax TV. Marc was scheduled for Fox and Friends on Wednesday but the airline shutdown bumped his segment at the last minute.
CFACT’s Gabriella Hoffman also was published in Townhall on this matter, with a piece titled “My Kitchen, My Choice: Hands Off Our Gas Stoves.”
The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board summed it up nicely, writing, “A Biden appointee on the Consumer Product Safety Commission explicitly threatened to ban gas stoves based on dubious evidence of public-health harm. ‘This is a hidden hazard,’ said commissioner Richard Trumka Jr. ‘Any option is on the table. Products that can’t be made safe can be banned...’ Don’t believe this week’s denials. Progressive Democrats really are coming for your kitchen appliances... Progressive cities such as Berkeley, San Francisco and New York City have already banned gas stoves and other appliances in new buildings. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul this week proposed a ban on gas equipment including stoves in new small buildings in 2025 and larger ones in 2028.”
The Biden Administration rushed out denials that it intended to ban gas stoves, but as the WSJ made clear, the all-out war on natural gas is real. It is driven by an unholy alliance between the anti-hydrocarbon climate-Left and wind and solar profiteers whose inefficient energy can’t handle the competition from this plentiful and efficient energy source. Natural gas is an extremely clean burning fuel, emitting a third less CO2 than oil and nearly half less CO2 than coal. Burning natural gas does not emit ash and particulates like oil and coal. It was the wide scale adoption of burning natural gas to generate electricity that allowed the United States to reduce CO2 emissions more than any other nation (if that’s your thing).
The latest justification for the attack on gas stoves is that they increase childhood asthma, which is a claim without basis in fact.
Robert Bryce, producer of the Power Hungry Podcast clearly laid out the science which debunks the spurious link between gas stoves and asthma saying, “The most definitive study of cooking fuels and asthma was done in 2000. The study was published in 2013... in The Lancet... the study looked at 500,000 children over a multi-year period, and sent questionnaires to their parents or their mothers saying... to identify symptoms... The results of the study said, quote, ‘We detected no evidence of an association between the use of gas as a cooking fuel and either asthma symptoms or asthma diagnosis.’”
America is fortunate to have plentiful reserves of natural gas. It is a crucial component of our energy mix.
We cannot allow ideologues, profiteers or bureaucrats to turn off our lights, control our heat, or dictate how we prepare our food.
For nature and people too,
Craig Rucker, President