RUTHFULLY YOURS

Looking forward to using your air-conditioning this summer to keep you from misery and lack of sleep? Well, you might have some issues. You see, the Biden administration has declared war on comfort. It’s not just gas stoves, leaf blowers, and lawnmowers the Biden-ites are coming for.  No siree. They are also bound and determined to eventually make air-conditioning prohibitively expensive for all but their coastal elite friends and allies.

New Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations are limiting supplies of freon and other refrigerants, because they are allegedly contributors to “climate change.” The new production quotas have driven up the price of these refrigerants by about 300%, meaning that a recharge may cost $100 to $500 more than before these regulations took effect, depending on how much replacement refrigerant is needed.

But wait, there’s more! The coolant quotas get even more stringent next year. Moreover, other new EPA rules are directed at those who service air conditioners. Some of these pertain to the types of containers in which refrigerants can be housed and transported. And all of which are going to impose additional costs that will need to be passed on to the consumer.

So, if you balk at the price of refilling or repairing your air-conditioning unit this summer, perhaps you could consider purchasing a new one. Unfortunately, Department of Energy (DOE) efficiency standards will be piled on to the EPA measures, and the combined effect of these excessively stringent requirements will be to raise the price of new A/C equipment, as well.

If infants and the elderly and infirm end up dying because they and their families can no longer afford air-conditioning to cool their living and sleeping quarters—due to government policies purportedly intended to fight “global warming” — that would be ironic as well as tragic.

It is one thing if the global average temperature rises by, say, 1.5 degrees by the year 2100. It is quite another if the temperature in one’s apartment jumps from, say, 72 to 92 in the course of one year.

That would be real climate change.

But, hey, don’t sweat it.

And don’t lose your cool. The Biden administration would rather take it from you.

Thomas Lifson adds:

This looks to me like war on the South, the bastion of conservatism and the GOP. If an when air conditioning is no longer available, the huge outflow of Californians, New Yorkers, and Illinoisians to Florida and Texas, among other states, will be halted and even reversed. Air conditioning liberated the hottest and most humid parts of the US from the climate-induced torpor that had limited their growth. Is it paranoid to suspect a larger purpose in this attack?