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11 States Sue Trump Administration's Energy Department After Weeks of No Movement On Efficiency Standards (go.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ABC News: New York, California and nine other states sued the Trump administration Tuesday over its failure to finalize energy-use limits for portable air conditioners and other products. The new standards would reduce greenhouse gas emissions, save businesses and consumers billions of dollars, and conserve enough energy to power more than 19 million households for a year, but the U.S. Department of Energy has not met a requirement to publish them by now, according to attorneys general who filed the lawsuit (PDF) against the DOE in federal court in San Francisco. That means the standards are not legally enforceable. The other states in the lawsuit are: Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, Vermont, Washington, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Oregon and Maryland. The City of New York is also a plaintiff. The energy efficiency standards at issue in the lawsuit also cover walk-in coolers and freezers, air compressors, commercial packaged boilers and uninterruptible power supplies. There is currently no federal energy standard for air compressors, uninterruptible power supplies or portable air conditioners, according to the lawsuit. The lawsuit seeks a court order requiring the DOE to publish the new standards as final rules.
Good. The existing program is useless. Maybe they can do something more useful with the money, time and effort than try and have the Federal government dictate what energy use standards should be.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
Good plan. I wish I had bought some gas cans before federal regulations ruined those, too.
and the Tragedy of the Commons would like to respectfully disagree.
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The new ones with "automatic" spouts leak all over the fucking place... The regular old kind are much better.
You must be fucked off Obama took all your guns too.
Since this is Rick Perry, well known here in Texas for basically doing nothing, this is no surprise. Perry also could not remember that this was a dep't he wanted to get rid. He later demonstrated that in fact, he had no idea what the thing did.
Hilarious. The GOP controls the Presidency, the House, the Senate, and has a Supreme Court stacked in their favor... Yet all they can do is blame the Democrats. How about using your party's monopoly of government to actually accomplish something, instead of whining all the time?
They're suing to make the Department of Energy do what it is legally required to do. If you don't like it, by all means contact your legislator about amending or repealing the relevant legislation which requires them to do this.
Oh, yeah, and good luck getting Congress to pass legislation at the moment.
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You, sir, have fallen into the Chasm of Sar.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Wow, that reflects a terrible understanding of Game Theory... Player A and Player B (or in this case Players 1-50) know that if they both act the outcome is better for both of them, but if either of them acts first, they lose and the other wins.
Combine this problem with the dilemma to business of 50 different state standards across countless different product characteristics and the damage that does to economies of scale...
There are good reasons for product standards. The commercial sector tends to address the ones that collectively are good for profits (often via operational efficiencies of standardization, mass production and compatibility). They don't tend to address the ones that are collectively good for purely social reasons, like the environment, product safety, public health, etc. - especially when any subset acting alone lose the market... That's where government plays a good role!
Come play Moral Decay!
If there's one thing I've learned in my 25 years in the software business, it's that common standards are better than mutually incompatible competing "standards".
It really doesn't matter who does it, as long as it happens.
I know, it's hard to RTFA, but let's be clear on what's happening here.
The DoE is legally required to have published the standards by now. It hasn't done so. This is not "pass[ing] laws from the bench". This enforcing laws already passed by the legislature.
If you don't like this, campaign to get the law changed. Be angry all you like, but be angry at the right target.
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Except that, at least in some cases, the price and life-cycle cost of refrigerators and AC goes down with energy-efficient standards. In particular, look at the kinks in figure 1.
But of course the senior author on this paper was involved in a pretty big scandal so maybe we shouldn't take the results too seriously. But at least he responded to the allegations.
Answers to your questions:
1) To prevent Fraud. It's a regulation on what you have to do to say "Energy Efficient". If you don't regulate, than some businesses will reduce power by 1% and say "Buy our 'Green' product." and paint their 1% lower item greeen. The reason to legislate is to stop businesses from lying and claiming things like "No reasonable person would think VitaminWater TM had vitamins in it."
2) To ensure uniformity. Don't want 5 different businesses using made up terms like "Green", "Lite", "Low Power", "Energy GOOD", and what not, forcing the consumer to research what each thing does.
3) Because despite what libertarians think, the government has a better success rate than business. The problem is that governments failures are public and stick around way too long (Afghanistan, Vietnam, Veterans Healthcare - note all three are MILITARY failures),, while the business failures tend to fade away like New Coke, Colgate TV dinners, and the Delorean (all of which died in less than 4 years)
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Yeah bad journalism. Journalists should stick to "households powered per year". FWIW this is over a 30 year product lifecycle, so it's 600kish households baseline, or about 0.5% of households in the country. That's actually fairly significant.
Of course relying on "households powered per year" means eventually we'll have powered more households than we have, since the majority of energy consumption is transportation and industrial.
Someone had to do it.
The antidote for corruption and abuse of the legislative system is anti-corruption enforcement. Not anarchy.
Of course if we had it, Trump would have been in jail decades ago, so I'm not holding my breath for any progress there.
Someone had to do it.
Wrong. DOE standards updates are required by the Energy Policy and Conservation Act and Energy Policy Acts
42 USCS 6201.
42 USCS 13456.
42 USCS 16103.
42 USCS 6322.
Someone had to do it.
Yep. The whole "checks and balances" plan kind of falls flat when Congress is more interested in covering the president's ass than being an independent branch as the constitution intended.
The GSM network that most countries use doesn't count?
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That's just bone-headed. If you want to manufacture a new energy-efficient whatzit, go right ahead. No one's stopping you.
In the past, before we had standardised units of measure, the size of a foot, for example, would be different from city to city, and the same for everything else, which meant that there would be constant problems with claims about short measure etc. Both traders and customers wanted to have standardised measures, so they could feel confident that they knew what they were buying. Same now - I don't think this is the government telling manufacturers how to produce their goods, it is about defining a standard scale, so everybody knows how different brands compare. This makes it possible to compete on objective value of the goods rather than perhaps lies.
To this day Trump still has to hire thousands of appointees that work in the various departments. No wonder why no work gets done when nobody is there to run the shops. Worst case is the department of finance, inept Mnuchin is the only one in the management and leadership level. It clearly showed in the various international meetings where he was unprepared and totally clueless. Given that Trump's only agenda is to destroy government, he is doing a fine job. His plan on creating an oligarchy of the top1% is on target. Thanks to all those morons who voted this idiot into office. Did you get your mining jobs back already?
It's OK, the mines are Italian :-).
DoE manages all nuclear weapons, nuclear materials handling and security, and nuclear weapons research as well. It's the direct descendant of the Atomic Energy Commission. We probably don't want to disband that.
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Cheap storage VM.
Yep. I just unscrew the spout and use a funnel. Can be a bit hard to see into the tank to avoid overflow but you get used to it quickly. Way better than trying get those stupid spouts to actually cut on and off correctly without leaking all over the place through the sides of the anti-spill mechanisms.
Oh, but one kid got burned from spilling gas...
A real bad guy once wrote “The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation.”