Estimated read time: 5-6 minutes
- President Donald Trump's executive order supports gas stoves and revokes mandates on electric vehicles.
- The order also reverses federal policies on plastic straws and expedites environmental reviews.
- Trump's actions challenge the Biden administration's energy policies, affecting clean energy projects and liquefied natural gas exports.
SALT LAKE CITY – Deanna Buck loves her gas stovetop.
"Well, the fact is gas is so quick I have not used an electric stovetop in years," the Hooper woman says.
Buck has a dual stove appliance, meaning it has an electric oven. One is quite small, heats up quickly and can handle muffins and cookies. The other, larger one she uses for oven-baked meals.
"I am shocked at how long at that bigger one takes to preheat," while her five burners provide gas heat instantaneously, she said.
The convenience, too, is that her appliance has an electric starter that she can easily light should the power go out.
In her 16 years in her home she has never had a health concern. There was a push under the Biden administration to phase out the gas stoves because of the indoor pollution they create.
"It just sounded so stupid, I didn't think anyone would implement it," she added. "If they had, I think I would have joined a march."
It is the same way with Andrea Widdison, who had grown up with electric stoves and didn't give them much thought, other than her irritation of being able to control the cooking temperature in an ideal way for her recipes.
When she and her husband moved to Hooper, her new residence included a gas stove.
"The difference is amazing," she said. "I enjoy cooking a lot more on a gas stove because you have so much better control of the temperature."
Widdison said she opposed the rationale of the Biden administration.
"I think the premise was faulty because their premise is that gas stoves produce so much pollution because they have a pilot light that's on all the time, so they are releasing small amounts of of combustion products into the house." she said. "But people have had gas stoves and gas heat for, gosh, you know, over 100 years, and they say that it's unhealthy for people, but we haven't noticed that it causes any respiratory problems or anything like that."
Personal choice, appliances and straws
President Donald Trump's executive order on "Unleashing American Energy," takes care of any effort to get rid of gas stoves. It also safeguards people's personal choice for lightbulbs, dishwashers, washing machines, water heaters, toilets, and shower heads, designed to promote market competition and innovation within the manufacturing and appliance industries.
Trump moved to revoke the mandate on the federal government's use of plastic straws, complaining they do not work.
"It's a ridiculous situation," he said, according to an Associated Press story. "We're going back to plastic straws," Trump said as he signed an executive order to reverse federal purchasing policies that encourage paper straws and restrict plastic ones. The order directs federal agencies to stop buying paper straws "and otherwise ensure that paper straws are no longer provided within agency buildings."
Trump also rolled back the electric vehicle mandate announced in 2021 — which directed that by 2030, half of all new cars sold in the United States would be electric, not gas powered. Biden's plan also prioritized infrastructure development, underscored by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. It directed $7.5 billion to establish a nationwide network of 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations.
To undercut Biden's move, Trump suspended the distribution of unspent funds of $5 billion allocated for electric vehicle charging stations and potentially will repeal the $7,500 federal tax credit for electric vehicle purchases.
Put simply, Trump said, "You will be able to buy the car of your choice."
According to Innovation Newsnetwork, Trump is also asking the Environmental Protection Agency to reconsider changes made to vehicle emissions rules set under Biden.
The order stresses the termination of the Green New Deal and by necessity suspends the disbursement of funds related to that policy by federal agencies.
Permitting and environmental reviews by the appropriate agencies will be expedited under Trump's executive order. The current environmental review process poses significant delays on pipelines, transportation corridors and even green energy pursuits such as geothermal development, according to Utah legislators, local communities and industry across the United States.
The American Clean Power Association, for example, said environmental review delays have had these consequences:
- 100 gigawatts of clean energy;
- $100 billion or more of lost investment;
- 150,000 lost American jobs;
- Delayed energy independence from foreign sources;
The group said the average timeline for a clean energy project to obtain necessary National Environmental Policy Act reviews is 4.5 years. For transmission projects, the average wait is even longer — 6.5 years. And it can take some projects a decade to get a permit. By comparison, it took that long to build the entire Panama Canal, it took five years to build the Hoover Dam and a decade is 2½ times longer than it took to build the Golden Gate Bridge.
In the order, Trump's energy secretary was directed to restart reviews of applications for approvals of liquified natural gas export projects as expeditiously as possible, consistent with the law. Biden's action to pause new construction of liquefied natural gas export terminals was upended by a federal judge.
Supporters of liquefied natural gas exports saw it as a way to stabilize the energy economy abroad by helping U.S. allies and weaning them from adversarial sources. Natural gas is largely viewed as one of the biggest contributors to declining U.S. emissions.
Biden's action struck at the heart of the U.S. success in liquefied natural gas exports by pausing construction of new terminals — much to the delight of fossil fuel foes and the dismay of industry.
