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.

Comments

Re:Maybe if the Senate Dems hadn't dragged their f

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Hey states! Do it yourself!

[Pseudonym]

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.

There's no revenue in telling people that they can't buy stuff so they throw a fit in the hope to find enough judges that think they can pass laws from the bench.

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.