After proposing a ban on gas stoves, the disaster known as the Biden Administration is now considering new regulations for other household appliances. In its zeal to eliminate fossil fuels, the administration wants to impose draconian restrictions on dishwashers, washing machines, air conditioners, and furnaces. If the proposed regulations are enacted, consumers will suffer from fewer choices, higher prices, and diminished performance. Like all controls and restrictions on production, the regulations are anti-life.
More than fifty years ago, Ayn Rand warned of the consequences of the then nascent environmental movement. In an essay titled “The Anti-Industrial Revolution,” Rand addressed one of the complaints then being voiced by environmentalists—“unwanted sound”:
Consider the fate of a human being, a woman, who is to become once again a substitute for washing machines, garbage disposal units and blenders. Consider what human life and suffering were like, indoors and out, prior to the advent of air conditioning. The price you pay for these marvelous advantages is “unwanted sound.” Well, there is no unwanted sound in a cemetery.
As it has done throughout its history, the environmental movement continues to make dire predictions unless we act quickly and dramatically. And no matter the alleged doom that awaits us, eliminating fossil fuels is always proposed as the solution.
The attacks on fossil fuels are, as Alex Epstein persuasively argues, an attack on industrialization. Fossil fuels provide the cheap, abundant, and reliable energy that industrialization, and thus, human life, requires.
While a growing number of Americans are outraged by the regulations being proposed and enacted by the Biden Administration, few are questioning the premises underlying those regulations. At its root, environmentalism holds that human beings should not exploit nature to produce the values that life requires. Protecting nature, according to environmentalism, is more important than promoting human flourishing.
If we truly want to promote human flourishing, then we must recognize the anti-human nature of regulations and the premises that give rise to them.