Compelling Americans to give up fossil fuels, gas stoves, and other gas-fired appliances is not a vice for the Biden administration.  Now more than ever, the administration's climate change police are coming after cooks and Americans who heat their homes with natural gas.  Consistent with this prospect, the Wall Street Journal editorial board concludes that the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) is poised to ban gas stoves soon.

A puritanical war on fossil fuels drives this possibility.  It follows a destructive pattern designed to impoverish and control American citizens.

President Biden has consistently claimed that climate change is the greatest threat to American security.  He argues that Americans must embrace an ambitious climate action plan to prevent the cruelest impacts of climate change as part of the global transition to clean energy technology.  Spurred by the Biden administration's climate change fantasy, the federal government is working tirelessly to make fossil fuels scarcer and more unavailable.  This wearisome campaign represents a surrender to far-left environmentalists, who are committed to making natural gas, petroleum, and all forms of fossil fuel more expensive for working people.  

This agenda is part of a deliberate effort to diminish Americans' interests and elevate the shrill claims of the World Economic Forum (WEF), which demands that nations take action against fossil fuels to reduce the number of bearded lizards experiencing sex changes.  At the same time, the World Bank also seeks to reduce humans' carbon footprint and emissions, no matter the cost to human lives.  

Given President Biden's surrender to the tyrannical demands of global elites, it was no surprise that he acted during his first day in office by killing the Keystone Pipeline.  This pipeline was designed to bring oil from Alberta, Canada to the United States.  Recently the Biden administration released a study showing that Biden's rash decision to kill the Keystone Pipeline cost the U.S. economy 59,000 jobs plus almost $10 billion in economic growth.

The war on fossil fuels has gathered additional momentum due to the archaic provisions of a federal statute, the Jones Act.  This statute requires goods shipped between U.S. ports to be carried on vessels built, owned, and operated by American shippers.  This means that unless the Biden administration grants a Jones Act exemption, the energy-poor Northeast must compete with Europe for scarce liquid natural gas supplies on the global market to fulfill its demand for heating oil.  The grant of an exemption would allow American energy products to be sold to Americans in the Northeast, even if natural gas liquids were shipped on non-American vessels.  

Despite the Northeast's desperate need for energy relief, the Biden administration has refused to grant an exemption.  Rather than provide an exemption, the government has doubled down on its indifference to the Northeast.  President Biden and other Democrats promise to curtail American domestic oil production even though the Northeast faces a winter energy crisis.  The Biden administration's policy ensures that energy remains expensive and scarce in the Northeast, thus advancing the climate change agenda.  The government's policy shows its commitment to putting the ideological interest of global elites in Europe ahead of the American people.  The Biden administration's energy policy failures are compounded by the ongoing war in Ukraine, thus straining European supplies.

Led by global elites, the climate change agenda has spurred an entrenched war on fossil fuels.  In response to rising energy prices this past fall, approximately 70,000 people filled Wenceslas Square in the center of the Czech capital of Prague.  This move followed the implosion of the Sri Lankan government, driven by the Western elites' war on fossil fuel, and the farmers' revolt in the Netherlands over soaring energy and nitrogen prices.  Now Europe faces the prospect of a soaring recession, leading to massive closures of French bakeries, owing mainly to a tenfold increase in electricity prices.

Now the ambitious move to eliminate fossil fuels includes the claim that gas stoves, which have been around since the early 19th century and are used by 35% of American households, emit health hazards and planet-warming pollution.  The CPSC claims that "gas stoves cause indoor air pollution and asthma, though there's scant evidence to support such claims."  The CPSC also ignores the severe risks associated with electric stoves pose, including accidental burns from stovetops that remain hot after being turned off.

Despite the hysterical fear-mongering regarding gas stoves, it is clear that elites in New York and dozens of local governments throughout the United States have already mandated that new homes and businesses run on electricity rather than on natural gas.  Consistent with such moves, the California Air Resources Board, despite California's weak electrical grid, has also decided to rid California of natural gas heaters, stoves, and furnaces.

These tyrannical moves based on tenuous science raise the question of whether gas stoves and other appliances will be eliminated from existence by federal bureaucrats.  Whatever the eventual outcome will be, it seems clear that the economic interest of average Americans is incompatible with the war on fossil fuels and the elites' demand that the nation eliminates gas appliances.  Indeed, in the future, if these initiatives remain unchecked, American citizens may be forced to retrofit their homes with electric devices before they can resell their real estate property. 

This quasi-religious war is led by centralized bureaucrats, giving rise to Tocqueville's nightmare.  In the 19th century, after traversing America, Tocqueville warned that if the populace ever accepted centralized administration to complement a central government, a "more insufferable despotism would prevail than any which now exists in the monarchical states of Europe."  Despotic global elites prefer to focus their attention on the lives of bearded lizards rather than humans.  Simultaneously, they are prepared to inflict a nightmare on America as they ignore the human costs of the climate change agenda.

In response to such moves, Americans should demand that the federal government open the Keystone Pipeline project and avoid over-regulating the energy sector, including gas stoves and other gas-fired appliances.  Additionally, Americans should encourage the American government to urge the combatants in the war in Ukraine to enter immediate peace talks.  These moves will help make living less costly for ordinary Americans while making fossil fuels more available and the lives of global elites less comfortable.

Harry G. Hutchison is a senior lecturing fellow at Regent University.  His latest book is Requiem for Reality: Critical Race Theocrats and Social Justice Dystopia.

Image: Ivan Radic via Flickr, CC BY 2.0.