(Joshua Paladino, Headline USA) Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm met with the CEO of the Rocky Mountain Institute, a leader in the World Economic Forum whose think-tank published research linking childhood asthma to gas stoves, Fox News reported.
The bombshell discovery of the memo fueled additional suspicions that the Biden administration was waging a secret war on gas stoves while publicly denying its intentions.
The issue first arose in January after Richard Trumka Jr., the commissioner of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission and son of the eponymous former labor-union boss, hinted at the ban, which the Biden administration promptly backpedaled.
But the newly discovered memo, from the early months of Biden’s presidency, revealed that the slip was no accident and that the plan has been in motion for more than a year.
The Energy Department denied that Granholm’s meeting in June 2021 with Jules Kortenhorst—who no longer serves as RMI’s CEO—had anything to do with a ban on gas stoves.
“Get the facts straight,” a DOE spokesperson told Fox News.
“The June 2021 meeting with CEOs of American chemical, energy, transportation and electrical companies wasn’t about appliances, it was to build support for the NOW enacted $1T Bipartisan Infrastructure Law which is creating thousands of JOBS across red and blue states alike,” the spokesperson claimed.
Granholm and Kortenhorst met for an hour on Zoom, but the Energy Department did not post an agenda for the meeting. No one else joined the meeting.
RMI did not comment on the meeting.
Americans for Public Trust, a government watchdog organization, learned about the meeting after finding a calendar from the Energy Department.
“Despite calling stories about the Biden administration banning gas stoves ‘ridiculous’ and ‘not true,’ Secretary Granholm’s calendar tells a different story,” APT executive director Caitlin Sutherland said. “We’ve now learned that she consulted with the dark money group pushing to ban gas stoves.”
The Energy Department’s explanation of the meeting makes some sense, considering Kortenhorst’s role as founder of the Energy Transitions Commission and chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Net Zero Transition.
Granholm has a lot of money to pass out to special interests, and Kortenhorst has the influence to capture some of those federal funds.
But Sutherland does not buy the explanation after Trumka’s recent admission that a gas stove ban was “on the table.”
“Suffice it to say, ‘ridiculous’ and ‘not true’ proposals don’t ordinarily involve a meeting with the Secretary of Energy—and where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” Sutherland said. “Americans everywhere must demand Granholm and green energy extremists stay out of their kitchens.”
Several blue-run cities already have passed their own restrictions on the stoves.
