Gas stoves are bipartisan!

At least for now.

In a rare moment of sanity and bipartisanship, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the second of two GOP-led bills that block the Administration from imposing regulations restricting gas stoves manufacturing and use. H.R. 1615 passed with a 248-180 margin, with 29 Democrats joining 219 Republicans to support the bill. The bill was written to stop the Consumer Product Safety Commission from using federal funds to regulate gas stoves and enforcing a product safety standard prohibiting using or selling gas stoves.

Matthew Agen, chief regulatory counsel at the American Gas Association, spoke to how ridiculous the attempt to ban gas stoves is:

Eliminating, at minimum, half of the gas stoves available to consumers prevents customers who want a gas stove from obtaining one. Not only is the proposed rule ill-conceived, analytically unsupportable, and anti-consumer, the proposed rule suffers from a series of procedural and legal errors that render it unlawful.

The first bill preventing the federal government from banning gas stoves, the “Gas Stove Protection and Freedom Act, passed House 248-180, on June 13, 2023, with more than 25 Democrats voting in favor of the bill.

The bill may have a more challenging time in the Democratic-controlled Senate. Senator Dan Sullivan and seven colleagues introduced companion legislation. Senator Joe Manchin is among its backers and may have enough leverage to pass a bill similar to the House bill.

Seeing some sanity prevail on something that should not be an issue is refreshing. As I wrote just three days ago, the attempt to ban gas stoves is, in my opinion, the first of a series of rules, regulations, and legislative initiatives that attempt to ban the use of natural gas for any use:

The plan is to ban gas stoves, followed by banning gas furnaces and gas water heaters. A very important part of this plan is to make natural gas used in power generation prohibitively expensive by requiring that the CO2 emitted be captured and sequestered, known as carbon capture and sequestration or CCS. CCS is part of the EPA's proposed regulations, “Greenhouse Gas Standards for Fossil Fuel-fired Plants.” I discussed these proposed rules in my recent article titled “EPA proposed new rules to limit carbon emissions from coal and gas-fired power plants.”

The anti-fossil fuel forces have always wanted to eliminate natural gas and have tried everything from attacking drilling, fracking, and pipelines. Banning gas stoves is just one more step toward their ultimate goal of banning the use of natural gas altogether. Once natural gas use is severely restricted, it can be argued that gas pipelines are no longer needed, and neither is gas drilling.

I doubt that the gas stove kerfuffle is over, but maybe at least it may be on hold. This pause should shift public focus to the very important proposed EPA rule, “Greenhouse Gas Standards and Guidelines for Fossil Fuel-Fired Power Plants.” This EPA rule is a blatant attempt to ban the use of natural gas and coal for power generation, which would be devastating for the U.S. power grid.