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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.
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.
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?
because efficiency is more expensive. Why make something more efficient when it is more profitable to be able to undercut the competition with less efficient systems. Many people that buy and install those systems are also only caring about their profit margin as they don't intend to be the long term user of the system.
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.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
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)
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