Tag Archives: Department of Energy

You Can Release Your Hold On Your Gas Stove–At Least Temporarily

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On Tuesday, Just the News reported that the House of Representatives has passed the Hands Off Our Home Appliances Act. The act will at least temporarily keep the government away from our gas stoves.

The article reports:

The bill, which was introduced by Arizona Republican Rep. Debbie Lesko, “modifies the process by which the Department of Energy (DOE) amends, revokes, or implements energy conservation standards for certain consumer products (other than automobiles), such as household appliances,” according to an official summary of the legislation.

The legislation was introduced after the Biden Administration’s Energy Department proposed a rule that would have led to a ban on the sale of about half of the gas stoves currently on the market.

“My constituents in the north and northwest valley of Maricopa County, Arizona, do not want this government interference in their homes and lives,” Lesko told reporters on Tuesday, per Fox News. “I know that millions of Americans around the country feel the same way.”

The Department of Energy has no business making laws–that is supposed to be done by Congress. If a Congressman (or woman) finds it too burdensome to create laws, they should resign.

The article concludes:

No government bureaucrat should ever scheme to take away Americans’ appliances in the name of a radical environmental agenda,” Lesko added.

The House previously passed Lesko’s “Save Our Gas Stoves Act ” last year, which attempted to block the DOE from implementing a proposed efficiency standard for gas cooking products, but it never received a vote in the Democrat-led Senate. 

We could probably end 90 percent of the regulations passed by unelected bureaucrats and still live happily ever after.

Who’s Idea Was This?

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On Mondays, Newsweek posted the following headline:

US to Sell Off Entire Northeast Gasoline Supply Reserve

The article reports:

The sale of the Northeast Gasoline Supply Reserve is among the provisions intended to raise funds in one of six bills setting out appropriations for some federal departments this year after Congress narrowly avoided another shutdown last week.

Under a bill providing funding for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) for the fiscal year, a million barrels of the government’s strategic reserve of petroleum would be sold off—the same amount as in the NGSR, which is located in New York Harbor, Boston, Massachusetts and South Portland, Maine.

“Upon the complete of such sale, the Secretary [of Energy] shall carry out the closure of the Northeast Gasoline Supply Reserve,” the bill states, and “may not establish any new regional petroleum product reserve unless funding of the proposed regional petroleum product reserve is explicitly requested in advance in an annual budget.”

…Congress is expected to pass the package, which is the result of cross-party negotiations, with votes set to take place this week. Negotiations on a further six spending bills continue.

This is reckless. What part of ‘Gasoline Supply Reserve’ does Congress not understand? This is not to be used to fund America, this is supposed to be used in case of emergency. If the government truly wants to reduce the deficit, they need to look at the amount of land the government controls that could easily be sold without endangering national security.

Reining In The Federal Government

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In recent years, the federal government has altered the lives of Americans in small ways and big ways. The small ways include dishwashers that used to take an hour to cycle now take two hours, showerheads don’t put out the same amount of water that they put out ten years ago, and washing machines also take longer to wash the clothes. These changes are not the result of laws passed by Congress (which is where we are supposed to get out laws), they are the result of federal regulations. Well, the ability of federal agencies rather than Congress to pass laws is now being challenged in our courts.

On Tuesday, The Daily Caller reported the following:

A federal appeals court shot down the Biden administration’s efforts to repeal existing regulations on dishwashers and clothes washers on Monday.

The U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued an opinion in a legal battle between eleven red states and the federal government over the Department of Energy’s (DOE) efforts to impose energy and water efficiency standards for dishwashers and clothes washers that asserted it “is unclear that DOE has statutory authority to regulate water use in dishwashers and clothes washers,” according to the opinion’s text. The Biden administration has attempted to push new standards for both appliances since coming into office in 2021 as part of a wider push to nudge the market toward more energy efficient appliances, which in some cases are generally  less effective than their other models, the court asserted in its opinion.

In March 2018, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) proposed standards for dishwashers that allow the sale of models that run faster cycles, using more energy and water than standard dishwashers in the process. The Trump administration then adopted similar guidelines as policy in 2020, but the Biden DOE repealed those standards in 2021 before advancing its own standards that crack down on the faster models advantaged by the Trump administration’s rules in May 2023.

The article concludes:

Beyond clothes washers and dishwashers, the Biden DOE has also sought to impose energy efficiency regulations for items like water heaters, furnaces and pool pump motors. The administration has also spent hundreds of millions of dollars on helping state and municipal governments pursue building codes

“In this opinion, the court has forced DOE to follow the law and even noted that one of the positions DOE took in this suit ‘borders on frivolous.’ This decision allows manufacturers to build better dishwashers, not be encumbered by counterproductive federal regulations,” Devin Watkins, an attorney for CEI, said of the opinion.

The DOE did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

Giving Away Important Technology

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On Wednesday, The Daily Wire reported that the Department of Energy’s Inspector General is investigating why the Biden administration gave promising green energy technology to China instead of creating manufacturing jobs in America.

The article reports:

The Department of Energy’s Inspector General is reviewing why the Joe Biden administration gave promising battery technology, developed by taxpayer dollars, to a Chinese company instead of making the batteries in the U.S.

China is now reportedly building one of the largest battery grids in the world using the technology, which could store huge amounts of solar energy without degrading over time or requiring lithium, mitigating a major environmental impact of current green technology that ends up in landfills.

The article continues:

In 2021, there was an “illicit Department of Energy (DOE) transfer of a fifteen million dollar, taxpayer-funded advanced battery technology to China,” Sens. John Barrasso (R-WY) and Joni Ernst (R-IA) wrote in a letter to the DOE’s internal watchdog.

The company that received the license “plainly stated on their official website that they planned to manufacture the batteries in China,” even though the license included “a requirement that the batteries be ‘substantially manufactured’ in the U.S. As these stipulations were continuously violated, DOE never raised any concern,” they wrote.

“We are concerned that this is an overt dereliction of duty by DOE, and that this case may be emblematic of a department that routinely and flippantly permits government-funded technology to be transferred to China,” the senators concluded.

The article explains exactly what happened:

In 2017, Yang (Gary Yang, one of the scientists who helped develop the technology, so that he could commercialize it) — an American citizen who was born in China — obtained a sublicense from the DOE to allow a Chinese firm to make the batteries. In 2021, he transferred the license outright to a Dutch company called Vanadis Power, which said it would make the batteries in China but eventually move production to Europe to comply with European rules.

America had those rules too, but seemed less strict about enforcing them. On July 7, 2021, UniEnergy emailed a government manager at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to request approval to transfer the license to Vanadis, and within 90 minutes, the government granted approval, even though Vanadis’ website said it would make the batteries in China.

Unnamed DOE officials told NPR they often rely on “good faith disclosures” — in other words, the honor system.

I would love to see a list of Americans who are in some way involved in the finances of the Chinese company involved.