Is there a war on appliances? Or is it a war on you?
I’d tell you to keep your cool, but that’s going to be hard when Team Biden takes away your air conditioner.
And the Biden administration certainly has an appetite for regulating household appliances in a way that seems calculated to make your life worse.
Many readers will remember the Biden team’s recent abortive effort to regulate gas stoves largely out of existence.
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm — later forced to admit she has a gas stove at home herself — proposed draconian gas-stove regulations in the name of “climate change” and a dubious scientific study connecting gas cooking and asthma.
She withdrew them in the face of massive public resistance.
People like their gas stoves, and a proposal that only electric cooking should be allowed sat poorly with people (like me) who had just experienced rolling electrical blackouts due to chilly weather.
(Gov. Kathy Hochul is still pushing ahead with her proposal to ban gas hook-ups in new buildings, however.)
Before that, the Energy Department had nixed Trump-era regulatory reforms designed to allow “quick” dishwashers, as well as similarly improved washers and dryers.
Want your dishes or clothes done in what used to be seen as a normal time? Forget it, peasants!
Now, in the latest episode of Team Biden’s “war on appliances,” the Energy Department has turned its attention to air conditioners, specifically room air conditioners of the sort used disproportionately by poor people, minorities and the elderly to keep cool in summer heat.
New energy-efficiency regulations promise to make these units more expensive for consumers and potentially less reliable and less effective at, you know, actually cooling things off.
“What these standards do is enforce a level of efficiency that doesn’t make sense,” the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Ben Lieberman told Fox News Digital last week. “And they compromise product quality. We’ve already seen this to an extent with cost of clothes-washer standards.”
As Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas) tweeted: “They’re after our stoves, our washing machines, and now, our air conditioners. Funny you never see them coming after private jets. The only goal of the ‘green’ agenda is making you SUFFER! That’s it!”
It does seem the common thread in all these environmental proposals is making ordinary people’s lives worse. Especially senior citizens’ and minorities’.
More than 80% of heat-related deaths in America are among people over 60.
Many older people live in older buildings without central air. Their only prospect for staying cool during summer heat waves may be a room or window-unit air conditioner, which will see price hikes and quality drops under these new rules.
(Ironically, one of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s top heat-related recommendations for older adults is to stay in air-conditioned spaces.)
Black people are another group more likely to die from heat stress, with New York City blacks, for example, almost 2½ times more likely to die from the heat than whites.
What’s more, CNN reports, “Health officials said many of the deaths directly caused by heat occurred at home and a significant number did not have an air conditioner or one was either not working or not in use.”
Making air conditioners more expensive and less reliable can only make that gap wider. Why do Jennifer Granholm and the Biden administration hate minorities and the elderly?
They point to climate change and the environment. But if those problems are bad enough to justify putting our most vulnerable citizens at risk during summer heat waves, I think we need to see that our most powerful citizens share in their sacrifice.
Therefore, I have a proposal of my own: Ban air conditioning in Washington, DC.
Sure, it’ll be less comfortable. But let’s face facts: We won two world wars with a capital city that was largely devoid of air conditioning.
Now there’s air conditioning everywhere in DC, but is the government working any better?
At least in the old days, Congress and senior bureaucrats used to flee the Washington heat for a few months, keeping them out of trouble and, in the congressmen’s case, possibly in closer touch with constituents. So no AC for DC!
(I would consider only banning air conditioning in federal buildings, but then they’d probably just hang out in cushy air-conditioned lobbyist offices, so it’s best to subject everyone to the rule.)
Dealing with climate change demands sacrifice, we’re constantly told, so let those calling for it sacrifice first. Leave our elderly and minority populations alone.
Now about those private jets . . .
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.
