[Congressional Record Volume 169, Number 37 (Monday, February 27, 2023)]
[House]
[Pages H882-H883]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     WAGING WAR ON AMERICAN ENERGY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
California (Mr. LaMalfa) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. LaMALFA. Mr. Speaker, for the last 2 years, the Biden 
administration has consistently waged a war on American energy and our 
fuel sources.
  This unscientific, ideologically driven assault has crippled American 
energy and hurt American families and our economy greatly. The American 
economy and our way of life are dependent on reasonable, reliable, and 
easy access to energy.
  He has gone so far as to even deplete our Strategic Petroleum 
Reserve--as you see here, these numbers going down dramatically--in 
order to cover over this bad policy and make everybody think it is 
going to be okay.
  Americans rely on access to low-cost, efficient energy from sources 
like natural gas to heat their homes, cook their meals, and keep their 
lights on. It is neither feasible nor desirable for most Americans to 
abruptly switch to green alternatives, such as wind and solar power, 
and have to change all of their appliances and yard tools out simply 
because of the whims of government and having too much time on their 
hands.
  Many can't afford to do these changes, nor should they have to. The 
unreliability of green energy makes it a much less preferable 
alternative. Faced with a choice between these two, most Americans make 
the sensible decision to stick with low-cost, reliable natural gas over 
expensive, unreliable green energy.
  In my home State of California, the electricity power grid in the 
summertime at any time could go down, yet they are trying to force 
people into electrifying just about everything--their cars, their 
stoves, their yard tools, even generators. Think about this for a 
minute. How do you have an electric generator when the power goes off 
from your electricity?

                              {time}  1230

  I guess this is supposed to mean we have a warehouse of batteries 
somewhere because, otherwise, I don't know how you do it.
  Generators are supposed to be a backup plan. Frequently, hospitals 
have diesel generators. People have generators they own for camping as 
well as backup for their homes. But they just keep going on and on, 
making up regulations.
  So faced with these choices, Americans would rather have their own 
choices. This administration has essentially tried to ban and regulate 
Americans off of fossil fuels, off of nuclear power, it seems, until 
recently when California--hallelujah--decided to expand the Diablo 
Canyon Power Plant an additional 5 years, which is 9 percent of the 
power grid of California--9 percent. Imagine if they took that offline 
like they were hell-bent on doing.
  Keeping natural gas is part of the equation. We have so much natural 
gas reserved in this Nation now because of the miracle of hydraulic 
fracturing. It is amazing what that has caused for us.
  Radical environmentalists, though, can't take no for an answer. They 
have done away with trying to argue for their ideas and simply use 
government fiat, a stroke of a pen, to try and take these things away, 
including the latest proposal by the Department of Energy to ban gas 
stoves, which has got everybody all in a twitter right now.
  Is that what we really need to be focused on right now with the 
situation with the railroad in Ohio and whatever the mess is we are 
going to make out of Ukraine, our border, and so many other issues?
  No, let's keep people distracted with this gas stove situation here.
  So what we have is a proposal by the Department of Energy to do it by 
the stroke of a pen, by just making a regulation to ban the sale of 
stoves that don't meet what is called an EL2 standard. They are just 
going to block the sales of these stoves, which means about half of 
them that are currently on the market will no longer be available on 
the market. People will have less choices that may not fit their style 
of kitchen, the size of their family. It may not fit a restaurant. It 
may not fit what you need for a kitchen that helps aid people that are 
short of food, soup kitchens. They want to take all these options away 
simply by a stroke of a pen.
  People are getting furious over this stuff. And for families that 
enjoy the use of that gas stove, they work nice. I have one. I saw 
First Lady Jill Biden, a picture of her cooking on one in the White 
House.
  So where does the hypocrisy end on all this?
  Evidently, it doesn't end at the White House. It ends at the choices 
that humans have in this country.
  We need to block this EL2 regulation that the Department of Energy is 
putting out, yet another thing that is trying to distract us I think 
from other issues. It is an important one for people to have natural 
gas stoves and

[[Page H883]]

other appliances that are available to them.
  And so I sum up on that with the ideal being that the only reason we 
are really doing all this stuff, ostensibly, is because of 
CO2. You see right here, carbon dioxide represents 0.04 
percent of our atmosphere, okay.
  People think from all the hype over CO2: Oh my gosh, 
climate change, climate change. It is a religion being pounded away in 
our schools and in our society, in ESG, and these corporations all day 
long. It is only 0.04 percent of our atmosphere.
  So they would have us all live in caves eating crickets because of 
0.01 percent and take away our stoves on top of that right now.
  We have to fight back on the DOE regulation.

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