Paul Kengor: Fossil fuels are a blessing

I marvel at fossil fuels. I really do. Fossil fuels are found in the earth’s crust, the natural byproduct of decomposed plants and animals. The best examples are coal, oil and natural gas.

Leftist environmentalists have a curious hate relationship with fossil fuels, even as these fuels are produced naturally, and even as they provide the primary fuel source for electricity. These same folks protest nuclear power and want everything to go electric, including cars, but the reality is that you need fossil fuels to produce the power to generate electricity. You’re not going to power New York City with windmills, nor Chicago with solar panels.

To repeat: I marvel at fossil fuels. When I pump gas into my vehicle, I’m struck at how clean the process is. The gasoline is extracted and refined into underground tanks, from which you magically pump the stuff. You don’t even see it, but it goes into your vehicle and makes it run.

Natural gas is even cleaner. You can drip gasoline from the pump and see and feel it, but not natural gas.

Here in Pennsylvania and this wider region, we have been uniquely blessed with gasoline, natural gas and coal — the extraction of which has produced countless millions of jobs. I come from a family of miners and steelworkers. Their jobs depended on fossil fuels.

And when I say “blessed,” I mean it literally. Excuse me for waxing religious, but I truly feel the Creator must have ordained it this way. We have literally under our feet all the energy we’ve needed, courtesy of the good Lord — or Mother Earth or Gaia or Darwin or whoever you choose to credit.

All of which brings me to a big negative: I’m perplexed at leftists who seek to ban these forms of energy, even as, again, they seek to move to electric and banish nuclear power. Sure, I know their arguments, believe me. You need not email me.

To that end, I’m especially perplexed right now by the push against natural gas. They’ve already gone after coal and oil, and now they’re targeting natural gas.

And in the latest effort, they’re drawing crosshairs on gas stoves. Yes, gas stoves. That includes a move by the Biden administration’s U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) to ban gas stoves.

Fortunately, there’s bipartisan resistance by Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Joe Manchin D-W.Va.

“Make no mistake, radical environmentalists want to stop Americans from using natural gas,” states Cruz. “The CPSC’s proposed ban on gas stoves is the latest egregious scaremongering by the far left and their Biden administration allies. I am pleased to partner with Senator Manchin in this bipartisan effort to stop the federal government from issuing regulations that put the interests of the Green New Deal before the well-being of American families.”

States Manchin: “I can tell you the last thing that would ever leave our house is the gas stove we cook on, and I will continue to fight any overreach by the CPSC.”

Finally, some bipartisan common sense to stop the nonsense.

Think about it. I wonder how cooks in restaurants feel about this. Aside from cooks, Americans generally ought to be outraged at this latest effort by ideological discontents against another of our precious fossil fuels. Enough is enough.