Americans love their gas stoves

They do not want to replace their gas stoves with electric stoves.

“I’m Eddie Chiles, and I’m mad as hell,” was the famous quote from Eddie Chiles (1910-1993), Fort Worth, Texas Oilman, who advocated for a less intrusive federal government. His signature introduction was inspired by the movie, “Network,” in 1976.

Why do federal regulators keep trying to make home appliances not work? Dishwashers were initially designed to get dishes clean in about an hour, but in 2012, the Department of Energy decided that they used too much water, or at least that was what they said, so they mandated that dishwashers use a maximum of 5 gallons of water per cycle of water. Just three years later, the same DOE decided to reduce the water used by standard dishwashers to 3.1 gallons per cycle. That increased the run time to 2 or longer, and most users complained that dishes were no longer clean. So what did people do? They started pre-washing their dishes by letting the faucet run for 10 or 15 minutes, and then they might still have to run the dishwasher through 2 cycles to get the dishes clean, which used more water. Of course, we all know the regulators were never really concerned about saving water. It’s about control.

We are now seeing a similar exercise of control, this time for natural gas stoves, and soon, there will be similar regulations on gas furnaces and water heaters. The current administration hates natural gas because it is the near-perfect fuel, but people like it, so DOE decided their only choice was to regulate natural gas appliances out of existence. DOE wrote 560+ pages of regulations that are impossible for gas stoves to meet and are currently going through the sham process of getting public comments. We all know where this is headed: there will be no future gas stoves, or they will be costly and unable to perform their basic cooking function. All other gas appliances will meet similar fates unless the regulators are stopped.

The regulatory state is out of control. The latest listing of regulations issued by all government agencies totaled 1,028 just in the 90 days before May 4, 2023, on Regulations.gov. Many Americans are close to the tipping point with the nanny state telling them which government-approved appliances and otherwise intruding on their lives at every turn.

Frustration with government overreach is nothing new. An outspoken opponent of the regulatory state emerged in the 1970s. Harrell Edmonds, “Eddie” Chiles, was born in Itasca, Texas, in 1910. He was a hardworking young man looking to make a buck after graduating from Wentworth Military Academy in Lexington, Missouri. He worked as an oil patch roustabout before graduating from the University of Oklahoma with a B.S. in Petroleum Engineering. He ended up in Houston, where he founded the Western Company of North America in 1939. He grew that company into a major oil services firm specializing in acidizing, fracturing, and cementing. Western Company had over 5,000 employees and an annual revenue of over $500 million. He bought the Texas Rangers baseball team in 1980 and eventually sold it to a group of investors, including the future President of the United States, George W. Bush.

Chiles was an outspoken advocate for a smaller and less intrusive federal government. He became known for his 1970s radio commentaries with his trade-mark sign-on “I’m Eddie Chiles, and I’m mad.” Western also featured television commercials telling viewers, “If you don’t have an oil well, get one—you’ll love doing business with Western!” He would always end with this: “The government should deliver the mail and stay the hell out of my business.” He died on August 22, 1993, at the age of 83.

For years, I have enjoyed walking my dog past Mr. Chiles’ well-manicured, multi-acre estate with its beautiful yard sculptures. I always get a feeling of satisfaction when I stop and yell out, “I’m mad too, Eddie.” I’m unsure what the neighbors or their armed security guards think. Maybe I’m not the only one that yells it out in front of the Chiles mansion.

I tell this story because I think that Mr. Chiles’ thoughts about government overreach are boiling up again, and rightfully so. Why do 24,075 government employees of the DOE think they have the right to tinker with virtually every aspect of our lives?

One way of gauging peoples’ thoughts about such things is through public opinion surveys. Most people are skeptical of public opinion surveys, and rightfully so. It is relatively easy to design a survey that will have a specific desired result. One way is to skew the results by overweighting the survey group with people known to have particular preferences, such as political party affiliation.

Another way of skewing the results is to ask questions that pose no cost to the person being questioned. A new Pew Research Center survey of 10,329 adults surveyed from May 30 to June 4, 2023, found that many Americans support the United States taking steps to address global climate change and back efforts to prioritize renewable sources such as wind and solar.

Americans showed sizable support for several specific policy proposals aimed at reducing the effects of climate change by targeting greenhouse gas emissions and carbon in the atmosphere:

85% support planting about a trillion trees around the world to absorb carbon emissions.

76% favor providing a tax credit to businesses that develop carbon capture technologies, and 70% support taxing corporations based on their carbon emissions.

61% favor requiring power plants to eliminate all carbon emissions by the year 2040.

It is important to note that these questions and answers were “cost-free” because they did not ask if people would pay for these proposals.

When costs were included in the questions, the respondents were reluctant to make sweeping changes to cut carbon emissions. The survey found that most Americans oppose ending the production of gas-powered vehicles by 2035, and there’s limited support for steps like eliminating natural gas pipelines into new buildings.

When asked if they favor an energy transition to using more renewables, the result will more often than not be answered positively because there is no cost involved in the question or answer. When cost becomes a factor in the question, answers change. While 32% say expanding the exploration and production of oil, coal, and natural gas should be a priority, just 31% say they are ready to eliminate oil, coal, and natural gas altogether. A much larger share (68%) says the U.S. should continue to use a mix of fossil fuels and renewables as part of the mix of energy sources the country relies on.

When asked about their willingness to replace their gas appliances with electric appliances, only 7% of homeowners say they “have seriously considered” replacing their gas stove or oven with an electric or induction system.

When asked about installing an electric heat pump system to heat and cool their home, only 11% said they had considered it. The same was true about replacing their gas water heater with an electric system, with only 11% responding that they had considered it. Most homeowners who have chosen natural gas home appliances do not want to replace them with electric appliances.

This signals that voters in the U.S. are “fed up,” so to speak, with a federal government that decides, out of the blue, to make gas stoves, furnaces, and water heaters illegal so in the name of promoting an energy transition to an all-electric world. If the EPA regulations on gas appliances are implemented, multiple lawsuits are inevitable and will end up in the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court will likely make the same ruling they did on the Clean Air Act of 2015: that the EPA had overstepped its Constitutional authority.

The pushback to the out-of-control regulatory state is intensifying. The lack of support for an all-electric America demonstrates once again that there is no energy transition happening in the United States or the world, for that matter. Consumption of crude oil and natural gas worldwide was up in 2022 and shows no sign of changing anytime soon. Governments worldwide continue to push energy transition-related policies on the citizens, but their efforts are failing.

The tipping point may be the attempt to regulate gas stoves and natural gas itself out of existence. Maybe we need to bring back a variation of the bumper sticker that says, “I’m mad too, Eddie. The government should deliver the mail and leave my gas stove alone.”