Forget the fact that the Earth is belching heat like a dying furnace. Forget that 2024 was the hottest year on record, again. Forget the warnings from NASA, the UN, the screaming winds and flooded basements.
Two apostles of carbon, Senator Latham Tiver and Assemblyman Michael Torrissi, have a plan to protect your right to poison our future in peace.
It was a warm, uneasy June day when the unthinkable became ordinary in Trenton—a town long accustomed to strange deals and silent betrayals. But this, this was different.
This was willful madness dressed up in legislative drag, a dangerous mix of nostalgia and sabotage disguised as the “Affordable Home Energy Protection Act” and its evil twin, the “Vehicle Choice Protection Act.”
They were dropped like gas bombs into the legislative chambers by Tiver and Torrissi, flag-bearers for a dying industry with deep pockets and soot-stained hands.
These men are not stupid. No, stupidity would be a kindness.
What we’re dealing with here is something darker: the cold-blooded commitment to prolong the death rattle of fossil fuels no matter how many lungs must burn, how many shorelines must drown, how many children must inherit skies the color of a smoker’s teeth.
“Trenton’s green energy crazies,” they scoffed, casting Governor Phil Murphy and the unseen drafts of his Energy Master Plan as a mob of candle-burning druids rather than rational stewards of a planet on fire.
With cartoonish defiance, Tiver and Torrissi swore allegiance to methane and monoxide, standing proud before the altar of the almighty gas range like priests of petroleum, warning us that without their bills, we’d soon be cooking with solar shame and riding bikes like Europeans.
Their bills, S4610 and S4611, are as subtle as a tire fire. One blocks the state from regulating gas appliances, as if your stove is the last bastion of liberty.
The other prevents a future ban on internal combustion engines, a blank check to Detroit and Houston to keep churning out piston-driven climate bombs well into the apocalypse.
And why? Because “freedom,” they say.
Freedom to choke. Freedom to burn. Freedom to ignore the very science that could save us.
They stand firm not because they believe in the righteousness of carbon monoxide, but because fossil fuel profits still buy loyalty in Trenton.
The oil lobby knows it doesn’t need to win the war—just delay the retreat. Every year the phaseout is postponed is another year of profit, another generation of asthma, another acre scorched or species silenced. This isn’t policy; it’s planetary ransom.
Don’t be fooled by their press releases, their moaning about electric bills and overreach. These are not populists defending the common man—they are political arsonists, pledging allegiance to an industry that has known for over 50 years that it was killing the planet and chose to double down.
Tiver warns of a future where “electric prices make it impossible to cool a house and afford a car.” But what he’s really selling is a future where the house is underwater, the car is buried under ash, and the grid has collapsed because men like him refused to act.
Torrissi decries “anti-freedom” mandates, but what he champions is a freedom that kills—a death cult of deregulation and denial that prioritizes profit over people, smoke over science, and ideology over survival.
They will lose. The tide of history and the fury of youth are rising faster than the seas. But in the meantime, their sabotage will cost us dearly. Every ton of carbon they defend is another nail in our collective coffin. Every lie about affordability masks the far higher price of inaction: pandemics, migrations, food shortages, war.
They call this freedom. Sane people would call it treason against the Earth.
If you ever wonder what it looks like when elected officials choose the past over the future, the profit of the few over the survival of the many, you don’t have to look far.
It’s happening now, on the New Jersey Senate floor and General Assembly chamber, where they pledge allegiance to gas ranges, oil barons, and the slow, deliberate burning of everything alive.
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