Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) thinks the government may be plotting to reduce America’s fossil fuel use under the cover of new safety regulations for trains carrying crude oil.

The Transportation Department proposed new regulations on Tuesday that would make it illegal for trains transporting oil to be left unattended. Federal officials drafted the rules after a train left unattended in Canada derailed in July 2013.

Rohrabacher is not convinced that the new rules are entirely about safety, however.

During a House Science Committee hearing on Bakken crude oil Tuesday, the congressman said he thought the regulations were an attempt to limit the country’s fossil fuel use due to the “theory” of climate change, according to National Journal.

He said that the rules are “perhaps a facade to obtain what we clearly have as a goal of this administration, which is to reduce America’s use of fossil fuel, even though it is now being presented to us as something about safety.”

Rohrabacher said that Transportation Department regulator Timothy Butters was not answering questions in order to help hide the government plot to reduce American use of fossil fuels.

“You just won’t answer anything,” Rohrabacher charged at Butters, “because the agency may be involved in a play based on global-warming theory, trying to, again, suppress the usage and the use and availability of fossil fuels, and letting that be in the background, forcing situations and forcing people like you to have to go through those verbal acrobatics not to answer a question.”

Butters said that the congressman’s accusations were unfounded and that the department was focused on safety after multiple accidents involving trains carrying crude oil.

“This material poses a risk. We are not trying to restrict the movement. We want to make sure that it moves safely,” he told Rohrabacher, according to National Journal.

Rohrabacher said last year that “global warming is a total fraud” and that liberals use the concept of climate change “to create global government.”

H/t Salon