WISENBAKER: Cookin’ with gas: a thing of the past?
Gary Wisenbaker
“We’re going to need oil for at least another decade.”
President Joe Biden delivered this remarkable line at his 2023 State of the Union speech on Feb. 7.
Unbelievable naivete.
Biden said he used this line initially when berating the oil industry for failing to invest their recent record profits (fueled by incoherent industry suppressing regulations, thus creating an artificial shortage) into infrastructure to increase production.
A clear prevarication.
Contrary to the President’s misrepresentation, Big Oil invested heavily in the very infrastructure the President said they ignored. In fact, 2023 may set a record for U.S. oil and gas production.
Facts, however, have never bothered this President nor the socialist Democrats.
This cabal, however, never quits in its quest to shut down conventional energy sources.
Take the recent assault on natural gas, for example.
According to the American Petroleum Institute, natural gas was first discovered by French explorers in 1626 in the Lake Erie region. In 1821, the first natural gas company opened in New York and by the 1960s thousands of miles of natural gas lines crisscrossed the country. And today 192 million customers rely on natural gas in a variety of applications.
Natural gas is primarily used for producing electricity, heating, and, of course, cooking.
It is abundant and economical.
Natural gas has a place in creating an energy mix that reduces harmful emissions, pretermitting there is such a thing.
Georgia Public Service Commissioner Jason Shaw writes, regarding our energy grid, “What is needed is an ‘all of the above strategy’ not ‘either-or’… (R)enewable energy technology cannot … replace peak day energy demand served by natural gas. ... All electricity consumers rely on natural gas generation for some portion of their power.”
He goes on to point out that this is still the case in Georgia. Even though Georgia is seventh in the nation for installed solar, that source can’t carry the energy burden alone.
But now the Biden Administration is bringing the issue closer to home: they recently announced a plan to ban gas stoves.
Yes, after that plan was announced there arose such a clamor that the Consumer Product Safety Commission recanted, saying they weren’t coming after your gas stove.
Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal writes, however, “don’t believe for a second” that that’s the case. Strassel identifies a group of activists including the Climate Imperative Foundation, the Rocky Mountain Institute, Rewiring America and the NYU Institute of Policy Integrity whose aim is to “kill gas” to – you guessed it – “save the planet.”
They failed, she writes, because Americans aren’t buying that argument.
So they initiated a new tack: it’s about health, especially children with asthma. To advance this angle they engaged the “neutral” Consumer Reports editors in November to run an expose titled the “Hidden Health Hazards in Your Home” which relied on specious studies conducted not by the health industry but the environmental industry.
And just like that, for the first time in recorded history, gas stoves are hazardous to your health. Not only that, all emissions need eradication so all “combustible appliances,” like your stove, washer, dryer and furnace must go, according to the White House Policy Office.
Know that they can do this by bureaucratic regulation. They don’t need laws passed by any legislative body.
And they’ll do it.
Be vigilant. Be watchful.
They’re serious.
Gary Wisenbaker is a Realtor with Century21
