The call to ban gas stoves in the U.S., based on environmental concerns, certainly drew backlash from an angry public tired of seeing their household appliances, critical possessions, and standard of living being targeted.

After all, they've already gotten our incandescent light bulbs and flush toilets in many quarters.  They've meddled with the design of our cars and guns.  They're trying to get our meat, telling us to eat bugs instead.  Many consumers, and professional chefs, who say gas is best for cooking, simply put their collective foot down.

Where did this lunacy come from?

About where you'd expect — from our enemies.

According to the Washington Free Beacon:

The green energy group behind a study cited in Consumer Product Safety commissioner Richard Trumka Jr.'s call to ban gas stoves has partnered with the Chinese government to implement an "economy-wide transformation" away from oil and gas.

Colorado-based nonprofit Rocky Mountain Institute, which published the December study that attributes 13 percent of U.S. childhood asthma cases to gas-stove use, is hardly staffed by an objective group of scientists.

The organization is demanding "systemic change and economy-wide transformation" to address a climate crisis it says we must go to great lengths to avoid. In 2013, for example, the Rocky Mountain Institute joined forces with China's National Development and Reform Commission — the government agency tasked with planning the communist nation's economy — to produce a report that advised China to replace existing appliances and generators with "clean energy technologies." 

So this green think-tank, which comprises non-scientists, takes money from China, has a Red Chinese oligarch as board member, and participates in ongoing projects with China's central planners, all under the rubric of "going green."

Anyone smell anything stinky here?

China has been trying for years to reduce our standard of living, in a sorry strategy of elevating its own.  That makes U.S. energy production a top target, so removing gas stoves, or failing to permit new ones, pretty much meshes with that aim, as it reduces U.S. natural gas consumption.

What's China's agenda on natural gas? 

Well, resource-wise, it has some of its own but not as much as it would like. 

According to Worldometers.info, a statistical data site:

China holds 184 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of proven gas reserves as of 2017, ranking 10th in the world and accounting for about 3% of the world's total natural gas reserves of 6,923 Tcf.

China has proven reserves equivalent to 21.9 times its annual consumption. This means it has about 22 years of gas left (at current consumption levels and excluding unproven reserves).

The U.S., meanwhile, has this:

The United States holds 322 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of proven gas reserves as of 2017, ranking 4th in the world and accounting for about 5% of the world's total natural gas reserves of 6,923 Tcf.

The United States has proven reserves equivalent to 11.9 times its annual consumption. This means it has about 12 years of gas left (at current consumption levels and excluding unproven reserves).

Some reports say that China has less than 3%.

Whether it's 3% or 2%, it's a fact that China would like to therefore get its hands on ours.

According to a report by the Department of Energy's U.S. Energy Information Administration, which ran in April 2022, they're ravenous for it: 

China increased both natural gas imports and domestic production in 2021

In 2021, an average 35.5 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) of natural gas was consumed in China, more natural gas than in any previous year. More than half of the natural gas consumed in China in 2021 came from domestic production, but China also imported record amounts of natural gas by pipeline and as liquefied natural gas (LNG), based on data from Global Trade Tracker and China's General Administration of Customs.

Government policies promoting coal-to-natural gas switching to reduce air pollution and meet emissions targets have been a major factor in the rapid growth of both domestic natural gas production and natural gas imports in China. In March 2022, China's government released its 14th Five-Year Plan (2021–25), which sets the domestic natural gas production target at 22.3 Bcf/d by 2025, or 3.0 Bcf/d more than domestic production in 2021.

According to this piece that ran in Politico last fall, it's created problems for them:

China wants America's natural gas. Some lawmakers are worried.

China is buying up America's natural gas — sparking worries across Washington and fueling a potential new clash between the two global powers.

Chinese energy companies are the fastest growing customers of American natural gas exports, purchasing nearly half the gas that U.S. companies agreed to ship in the last year.

But some of those firms are working against U.S. interests — dealing in oil from sanctioned countries, drilling in areas notorious for human rights abuses or helping the Chinese military capture contested territory from its neighbors.

As tensions between Washington and Beijing rise — and high natural gas prices squeeze American manufacturers — lawmakers from both parties are calling for the White House to consider new limits on the gas sales to China. They want more Chinese energy companies added to a trade blacklist and they're calling for the Biden administration to close a loophole that allows one major company already on that list to buy American gas and oil.

What better than to lower demand for natural gas in the U.S. by demonizing the use of gas stoves as "unhealthy" and leaving the rest to the energy companies to lobby Congress to open up exports of the product as a substitute?

China would like nothing more than to get its hands on our natural gas, even as it bankrolls think-tanks to tell us to shut our use of it down.

It has expended billions in LNG port capacity and storage and is already trying to hoard a lot of it.

Now the Chinese have cynically put out an idea for the greenie rubes out there to promote, that gas stoves are Bad For Us, hoping to scare low-information voters out there and gullible Democrat lawmakers that natural gas may be a health hazard, all to scarf up the unused natural gas  in the wake of its legislated disuse in the U.S.

They're long-term players, and like Russia's President Vladimir Putin, who's been caught handing out money to greenie groups intent on promoting a halt to domestic fuel production in Europe and elsewhere, they see the green agenda as the lever for achieving their long term aims of reducing America's standard of living.

The Beacon notes that the think-tank study cited and picked up by the Consumer Product Safety commissioner, Richard Trumka, Jr., who promoted it and then said he didn't, was a junk study with no scientific rigor to it, done by non-scientists with irrelevant majors from college.

What a plan the Chicoms have, to separate Americans from their standard of living in order to take the remains of it for themselves.

Somewhere in Beijing, they must be laughing.

Image: Pixabay, Pixabay License.