The push for banning all gas-powered appliances in favor of an electric hegemony is getting more ludicrous than it already was.
Now, not only are elites wanting to take away our gas stoves and gas-powered cars, they’re deciding that gas-powered lawn mowers are their next victim.
A recent memo by the Center for Progressive Reform (already a bad sign), entitled Safe and Sound: How the Environmental Protection Agency Can Protect Us from Dangerous Noise, presents an argument for the cessation of what they call “noise pollution.”
According to authors James Goodwin, Sasha Kliger and Will Dobbs-Allsopp, excessive noise is not just an everyday irritant, but a harmful form of pollution that leads to all manner of physical and mental health problems.
Their proposal for alleviating this purported plague of noise?
They want the U.S. government to revive a dormant statute, the Noise Control Act of 1972, which, though technically still on the books, has not been enforced since the 1980s, when then-President Ronald Reagan stripped it of its funding.
Enumerating the supposed benefits of reviving a useless government agency, which, they contend, would alleviate air pollution and those evil carbon emissions, Goodwin, Kliger and Dobbs-Allsopp, of course, tried to make their case stronger by framing the proposed statute as especially beneficial for low-income and minority communities.
As Dobbs-Allsopp said in a report on this memo, “Like every environmental injustice, this one hits low-wealth communities and communities of color particularly hard, compounding other burdens and harms.”
After further making the case that, since electrified machines are generally much quieter than gas ones, they helpfully offer a list of equipment and vehicles they believe would be better if electrified, ranging from portable air compressors and lawn mowers to diesel-powered buses, trucks and snowplows.
Do you use a gas-powered lawn mower?
Now, who are these menaces, and what exactly is this Center for Progressive Reform?
First off, this is not a solo effort — CPR is working on this initiative in conjunction with a shadowy organization known as Governing for Impact.
According to Fox News, this group was founded in 2019, backed by none other than liberal billionaire and menace to the free world, George Soros (who is beginning to make Ernst Blofeld look like the Hamburglar).
Author Goodwin clarified (or at least tried to) in an interview with Fox News what exactly they are asking of the Environmental Protection Agency and the government, saying what they want is for the EPA to leverage the authority they already have when it comes to the Noise Control Act.
The supposed environmental benefits, he said, are merely the “cherry on top.”
As he said in this interview, “they’re not going to set out and say, ‘We’re going to regulate leaf blowers because we want this as climate policy.’ That’s not what their statutory authority says. Nobody is asking EPA to do something it doesn’t have legal authority to do.”
Really?
Because, reading their memo, that seems to be what they ultimately want.
Regardless, this proposed policy, like most of the Biden administration’s environmental policies, is destined to go over like a lead balloon.
If dads around the country don’t already own an electric lawnmower, then legislators will have to pry their gas lawnmowers out of American dads’ cold, dead hands.
The Biden administration has already issued dozens of unnecessary restrictions on water heaters, furnaces and gas stoves, despite many Democratic elites (like Kamala Harris) happily using gas-powered appliances for themselves.
We don’t need any more in the name of reducing “noise pollution” with a statute that hasn’t been enforced in 50 years.
These ivory-tower activists have no concern for the ordinary Americans who would be forced to deal with the fallout of these regulations, paying exorbitant sums just to get their grass cut.
This is just another attempt to impose the unrealistic and unworkable socialist liberal utopia our elites are so enamored by.