Willie R. Tubbs, FISM News
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The Biden administration swears it doesn’t want to take away your gas stove, and now West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin and Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz are joining forces to prevent the administration from having the option.
Thursday, Cruz and Manchin introduced the Gas Stove Protection and Freedom Act, a relatively straightforward piece of legislation that would block the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) from issuing a ban on gas stoves.
“Make no mistake, radical environmentalists want to stop Americans from using natural gas,” Cruz said in a statement. “The Consumer Product Safety Commission’s proposed ban on gas stoves is the latest egregious scaremongering by the Far Left and their Biden administration allies. I am pleased to partner with Senator Manchin in this bipartisan effort to stop the federal government from issuing regulations that put the interests of the Green New Deal before the well-being of American families.”
Last month, a CPSC commissioner said gas stoves were hazardous to people’s health and the environment and could, if deemed unsafe products, be outlawed.
This statement was received with such scorn from the right and parts of the left that, within 24 hours, the CPSC had backtracked and issued a statement promising that there were no plans to outlaw gas stoves, even though last October the agency began the process of seeking public comment on the matter of gas stove safety and solutions.
CPSC’s assurances have not satisfied the likes of Manchin and Cruz, who view the suggestion of a gas stove prohibition as little more than government overreach.
“The federal government has no business telling American families how to cook their dinner,” Manchin said in a statement, “which is why Senator Cruz and I introduced bipartisan legislation to ensure Americans decide how to cook in their own homes. I can tell you the last thing that would ever leave our house is the gas stove we cook on, and I will continue to fight any overreach by the Consumer Product Safety Commission.”
In a related move, Manchin teamed with Sen. Jaime Lankford (R-Okla.) to write a letter to CPSC Chairman Alexander Hoehn-Saric requesting the chair cease any effort to ban gas stoves.
“Simply put, it is not the responsibility of the federal government to decide what kind of stove Americans can have in their kitchens…We have heard from many of our constituents who are now suddenly, and rightfully, concerned about the future of gas stoves,” Manchin and Lankford wrote.
According to the senators’ letter, gas stoves are a poor target for the particularly devout environmentalists to fixate upon.
Natural gas, of which gas stoves represent a fractional subset, accounts for less than 5% of all greenhouse gas emissions in the United States.