COMMENTARY: AOC and the war on our appliances

AOC and her Green New Deal buddies in the Biden government are not just winning their crusade against fossil fuels. They’re also wrecking the country — appliance by appliance.

Our washing machines, refrigerators and microwaves have already been made less efficient and more expensive because of new federal standards pushed by fanatical environmentalists who think like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Not long ago, government regulators were caught planning to outlaw gas kitchen stoves in new homes and apartments because they make climate change worse and can supposedly kill us by emitting 12.3 molecules of unburned CO2 per breakfast.

Then last week, the green crusaders running Biden’s Department of Energy went after America’s most sacred appliance — the dishwasher. A proposed new rule would limit dishwashers to using 3.2 gallons of water per cycle instead of 5 gallons, and it would require manufacturers to reduce a dishwasher’s energy consumption by nearly 30 percent.

Federal regulators promise, as they always do, that the new dishwasher standards will not only help to fight the climate crisis, they will eventually save homeowners $652 million a year in utility and water costs.

I’m not good with math, but since there are about 100 million U.S. homes with dishwashers, I think that comes out to $6.52 a year per household — about 13 whopping cents a week.

Of course, based on what happened years ago when we got new federal rules mandating less water use for washing machines and toilets, we know what these stricter dishwasher standards will mean in the real world. It means we’ll have to run the new dishwashers twice to get our plates as clean as the old models.

Speaking of insanity, as part of their holy crusade to save the planet from climate change, AOC’s soulmates in the EPA currently are drawing up rules that, according to Politico, could mean the end of most of our power plants that burn coal, natural gas and oil to generate our electricity.

The new plans, which are a long way from becoming law, would require most fossil fuel-powered plants to reduce their greenhouse gas pollution 90 percent by 2040 — or shut down.

Let’s pray that sensible people take over the White House soon and tell the EPA to shove their proposed rule in the nearest coal-fired waste incinerator.

Meanwhile, it should be obvious by now that “energy regressives” such as AOC in the Biden government are hellbent on wiping out the burning of fossil fuels — which currently produce about 60 percent of our electrical power. They irrationally hate the energy resources that built America’s wealth and want us to sacrifice our standard of living and some basic freedoms to save the purity of their almighty false god — the climate.

They don’t care whose lives they make poorer or harder with their foolish environmental laws, whether here in America or Africa or anywhere else.

AOC and her fellow crusading Green New Dealers in and out of government claim to be the infallible experts of the incredibly complex science of climate change and the great threat it poses to us and the planet. But they really are a bunch of dangerous religious nuts who are armed with a lot of government power they shouldn’t have.

So excuse me if I don’t believe them when they say my kitchen stove is going to kill me.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation.