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US Appliance Inefficiency Costs Billions

Posted: Mon Mar 05, 2007 1:06 pm
by Dardedar
DAR
More energy down the tubes. Europe continues to improve efficiencies, dramaticly, while we dawdle and waste:

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Report: DOE's Missed Deadlines on Appliance Efficiency Cost Billions

By Robert Lee Hotz
The Los Angeles Times

Saturday 03 March 2007

The Energy Deptartment was to tighten rules on appliance efficiency.

Over the last three decades, the federal government has missed legal deadlines for setting stricter efficiency standards for common appliances, resulting in billions of dollars in higher utility bills and millions more tons of the greenhouse gases that fuel global warming, congressional investigators reported.

All told, the Department of Energy has missed every one of 34 mandatory rule-making deadlines for setting minimum energy efficiency standards involving 20 products including refrigerators, dishwashers, freezers, pool heaters, furnaces and central air conditioners, analysts at the Government Accountability Office reported.

The delays ranged from a few months to 15 years, according to the GAO report made public this week. Of the 34 energy efficiency standards, 24 have yet to be set, involving 17 household and industrial product categories.

"I have never seen anything like this," said GAO analyst Karla Springer, who led the group that prepared the report. "It is nearly 30 years of not meeting a deadline. It is kind of frightening."

LINK

Posted: Mon Mar 05, 2007 6:27 pm
by Hogeye
The headline is a good example of the broken window fallacy. What is the cost of upgrading all these products, and the R&D necessary to make the products more efficient?

If legislators can create efficiency simply by passing a law, why don't they decree that it not rain on weekends? The solipsism of statists never fails to amaze me.

Posted: Mon Mar 05, 2007 7:59 pm
by Doug
Hogeye wrote:If legislators can create efficiency simply by passing a law, why don't they decree that it not rain on weekends? The solipsism of statists never fails to amaze me.
a. No one thinks that legislators can create efficiency simply by passing a law. The law must make the system more efficient, and it must be enforced.
b. It does not follow that if legislators can create efficiency simply by passing a law, we should expect that they could affect the weather.