Free Republic

2023 was an unusually bad year for appliance regulations, and future years won’t be much better unless Congress finds a way to stop the nonsense. It all started last January when Richard Trumka Jr., a commissioner on the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), announced an investigation into the safety of natural gas stoves and boasted that a ban on them was "a real possibility." That sparked a powerful consumer backlash, followed up by strong denials from the Biden administration that any such ban was in the works. But CPSC has still gone ahead with its inquiry, and in February, team...

Reflections as Joe Biden takes on the furnace manufacturers... Regulator-in-Chief Joe Biden's latest demands on the manufacturing community include attacking the makers of furnaces and other household heating appliances for using too much energy (which is only so expensive because of their policies), and for producing too much carbon dioxide (you know, the stuff we all exhale every day of their lives, without ill effect). The Biden-Harris regime is therefore "proposing" new efficiency standards for manufacturers and distributors of such appliances, requiring the use of much more expensive manufacturing and operating processes. If we had a divided government, with either...

With little fanfare, the U.S. Department of Energy enacted a rule last year that will require all new furnaces installed in 30 Northern states including Pennsylvania and New Jersey to be high-efficiency models. Who would object to such a noble effort to conserve energy? Philadelphia Gas Works, for one. The city-owned utility is among several parties that have challenged the Energy Department's rule, saying that some homeowners cannot afford to install costly high-efficiency heating systems and will opt for cheaper electric or kerosene heaters. They say the new rule, which will go into effect nationwide in May 2013, will have...

The Holocaust horrors are unspeakable. The images of the Auschwitz death camp are indelible. Dr. Klara Swimmer speaks nonetheless. "You cannot imagine the pain, the suffering, and the smell," says the 80-year-old retired physician. She was a teenage Hungarian Jew when she entered the camp of the damned. Bill Kugelman, a Polish-born Jew, was interned behind the wire fences of Auschwitz when the first Hungarians arrived. He recalls the naked body of a young girl thrown from the train onto a heap of corpses. "She was blue all over," says Kugelman, also 80. "She was all blue," he repeats. His...