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The Department of Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm is at it again, this time targeting many more of your home appliances and labor-saving devices. You may recall how Ms. Granholm made news and received well-deserved scorn for her “summer road trip” intended to show off the benefits of electric vehicles (EVs).
In case you had not heard, or to refresh your memory, here is some of the Congressional fallout from her asinine publicity stunt, as reported in Townhall.com.
All emphases and comments in [brackets] are ours.
QUOTE: In a letter to Granholm sent Tuesday, Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-KY) and Subcommittee on Economic Growth, Energy Policy, and Regulatory Affairs Chairman Pat Fallon (R-TX) state that they are “alarmed by recent reports of your four-day summer road trip apparently intended to showcase the Biden administration’s progress in achieving a radical green agenda.”
Specifically, the House Republican lawmakers note that: “Using an internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle, your Department of Energy (DOE) staff blocked off an EV-only charing [sic: charging] station so you could stay on a schedule which was”painstakingly mapped out ahead of time” because of limited, slow, and nonworking EV chargers along your route.
In “sweltering” Georgia heat, your staff’s action caused a family with an infant child and low charge on their EV battery to call the police out of urgency while waiting at this charging station.
You ultimately blamed your staff for “poor judgment” while testifying about preventing other EV vehicles from charging. This taxpayer-funded publicity stunt illustrates yet again how out of touch the Biden Administration is with the consequences of the policies it has unleashed on everyday Americans.” …
“[A]t every point on this journey, you relied upon [internal combustion] vehicles using gasoline to try to boost the charade of the effectiveness of green energy,” the letter highlights, because the “fleet of EVs could not complete the trip without the support of the fossil fuel industry which you and the Biden Administration have been trying to vilify and destroy.” END QUOTE
The rest of the report is linked here at Townhall.com.
Now comes this insanity from Sec. Granholm and her accomplices at the EPA and other deep state entities. This report comes from the Epoch Times.
QUOTE:
Despite widespread opposition to Biden’s appliance crackdown, the administration is seeking even more restrictions in the coming days and months.
The Biden administration’s energy department has plans to regulate a wide range of appliances used by Americans under the agency’s evolving “energy conservation standards.”
According to the semiannual Unified Agenda, a list prepared by federal agencies detailing the regulations they plan to undertake within the next 12 months, the Department of Energy (DOE) will be pushing ahead with proposals to regulate several more appliances in the United States.
Just a few days back, the DOE announced new energy efficiency standards for residential gas furnaces—the latest in a wave of restrictions, which had earlier covered pool pumps, battery chargers, ceiling fans, dehumidifiers, gas stoves, and incandescent light bulbs, among others.
The latest Unified Agenda list is not absolute but offers an insightful peek into the federal agencies’ outlook for American consumers moving forward.
“It’s just spreading to more and more appliances. It seems that almost everything that plugs in or fires up around the house is either subject to a pending regulation or soon will be,” Ben Lieberman, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told Fox News.
“Consumers aren’t going to like any of it. These rules are almost always bad for consumers for the simple reason that they restrict consumer choice.
“Anybody who wants to choose the more eco-friendly versions of appliances is always free to do so. But these rules force that choice on everyone, whether it makes sense for them or not,” Lieberman added.
“Almost all of these appliance standards raise the upfront costs. It’s not clear that you’ll ever earn that back in the form of energy or water savings.”
Here are some of the home and commercial appliances and equipment targeted by the DOE, as revealed in the Unified Agenda Spring 2023 list.
While some equipment is under the “proposed rule stage,” others are in the “final rule stage.”
The DOE and Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm justify their new efficiency standards by projecting consumer savings.
“At the direction of Congress, DOE is continuing to review and finalize energy standards for household appliances, such as residential furnaces, to lower costs for working families by reducing energy use and slashing harmful pollutants in homes across the nation,” Ms. Granholm said late last month while the department finalized efficiency rules for residential furnaces.
The agency estimates that its standards for residential furnaces would save Americans “$1.5 Billion in annual utility bills.”
However, this is only 0.39 percent of the $380 billion that American households spend annually on utilities, according to an estimate by bill pay manager Doxo.
In recent months. lawmakers and multiple organizations have expressed opposition to the Biden administration’s encroachment on appliance use of Americans.
“First, the Left comes for gas stoves and washing machines. Now, the Biden administration wants to take away your water heater. What else will they take in the name of their socialist agenda?” Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) said in a July 24 post on X.
In June, Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) introduced the “Save Our Gas Stoves Act” to prohibit the DOE from implementing costly standards on kitchen stovetops.
“At a time when families across Nebraska are concerned about high inflation and the southern border crisis, Washington bureaucrats are considering whether to cancel gas stoves. It’s ridiculous,” he said at the time.
“The 38 percent of the American people who have a gas stove or range don’t need more of the federal government intruding into their lives.”
Karen Harbert, president of the American Gas Association (AGA) called the DOE’s proposed rule cracking down on gas stoves—“predetermined bias being used to achieve misinformed and politically motivated outcomes.”
“This rule includes numerous flaws, from the procedural and legal errors to the test procedures. It is ill-conceived, analytically unsupportable, and anti-consumer, and it should not stand.”
Susan Orenga, executive director of the Portable Generator Manufacturers’ Association, has spoken out against the Biden administration’s push to restrict portable gas generators through a policy proposed by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC).
The proposal “could lead to higher costs for consumers and create unintended consequences of more safety concerns of fires and burns, as we do not believe that the CPSC has adequately evaluated the safety hazards of their newly proposed rule.”
In August, Rep. Stephanie Bice (R-Okla.) raised concerns about the DOE’s energy efficiency standards on ceiling fans, arguing that it is against consumer choice and would raise prices.
“We are currently in a period of hot summer weather but also a time of high inflation. It is unconscionable that your department would seek to limit the options of the American people to stay cool in their own homes at a time like this,” she wrote in an Aug. 25 letter to Energy Secretary Ms. Granholm.
Ms. Bice also criticized the Energy Department’s other proposed rules to regulate appliances like water heaters and gas stoves as a “significant overreach of the federal government.” Such “heavy-handed regulations” would drive up prices, limit consumer choice, and impose burdens on many small businesses, she added. END QUOTE
The full story from the Epoch Times is archived here.
Sensible Americans must wonder, have these bureaucrats and deep state denizens like Granholm lost their marbles? Although these actions seem like evidence of insanity to most Americans, we must realize that these people are not insane, of course.
They know exactly what they are doing and they will continue forcing Americans into further bonds of slavery, even to the genocide of a large portion of the world’s population which we have discussed in these posts on many occasions.
So, no, they are not insane. And they will not stop until…until what? They will not stop until they are removed from positions of power. In other words, they will not stop until many more Americans wake up to what is going on, get out of their pews and take biblical righteousness into the public arena, each in his/her own local community.
It is often said, all politics is local, and it is true. When each local community of Christians get out of their pews and become active in installing good people in the local school boards, county commission, town/city council, etc., then this will have its effect downstream at the statehouse level and ultimately at the federal level. This is the very necessary bottom-up operation that President Trump has underscored on numerous occasions, especially in his rallies.
Meanwhile, Trump and the white hat team are working from the top down. Please share this article to help awaken others and get them involved, too.
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