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EPA Plans to Shut Down the Energy Star Program
240 danso 270 5/7/2025, 1:11:10 AM nytimes.com ↗
Energy Star has been a huge success over the past 30 years. It's (now) widely supported by industry, has reduced the TCO to consumers for most household appliances, and results in hundreds of billions of kWh of electricity saved every year.
Energy Star is not some tree-hugging, drum-circle, feel-good program.
The US urgently needs to expand and modernize our grid. Every GW of power saved, is GW of generation and transmission capacity that we don't have to build and maintain.
I would rather have sound without these issues, even if my computer consumes an extra 100mW at idle to keep the sound system ready.
I'm aware that most sound chipsets allow a user override that keeps the circuits on, but the this newer chipset doesn't seem to implement the feature correctly. No combination of arguments to the linux sound system, or loadable modules seems to keep the sound circuits from switching to standby.
This over-aggressiveness turns a good feature into a problem forcing me to completely disable power saving. Which is sad because the biggest savings of the feature are when a screen is left on for hours when the PC is off or disconnected (which I don't do anyway, as the entire system is on a smart power strip). A monitor should hunt for a valid signal for at least 45 or 60 seconds by default before auto-offing itself.
Another "power saving gone awry" issue is that USB selective suspend can cause wireless mice to stutter after not moving for just a few seconds. I think this is due to lag in the wake-up time. Unfortunately, the interface doesn't have any time adjustment, so I have to just turn selective suspend.
It saves people money. Less spent on electric bills and tax money can be used elsewhere.
This is what they claim. The reality is a much different.
The usual libertarian point applies here: just because the government stops doing X doesn't mean that you automatically get less X.
Particularly in the case of EnergyStar, I think it's well into the tail of diminishing returns on investment -- manufacturers don't have any incentive to start producing power-guzzling appliances when power costs are increasing. Its the sort of program that sounds good in theory, and maybe made sense at one point, but doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
[1] I'm not arguing for regulation on GPUs...just pointing out that EnergyStar isn't touching the currently important part of the problem.
And sure Americans care about energy costs but looking at the car market you can see Americans don’t actually care to make choices that save them money in the long run. Ford doesn’t even produce sedans anymore.
Vehicles are primarily driven by culture, not pragmatism. I live in Texas, and not the outback part of Texas, but DFW. Trucks are prolific here and it's not exactly a secret that the greatest challenge most will ever face are the potholes on 360 heading into Arlington.
The truth is that many people are happy to burn money if it reinforces their sense of masculinity and identity as a Texan.
I’ve never even noticed how long it take my dishwasher to run because overnight is my requirement. If you throw parties weekly and need a fast dishwasher to clean plates between courses, buy one. Just as if you need a truck for your farm.
The majority of truck owners don’t use them for towing or hauling
https://www.axios.com/ford-pickup-trucks-history
- [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43912989
The usual libertarian point applies here: just because the government stops doing X doesn't mean that you automatically get less X. Particularly in the case of EnergyStar, I think it's well into the tail of diminishing returns on investment -- manufacturers don't have any incentive to start producing power-guzzling appliances when power costs are increasing. Its the sort of program that sounds good in theory, and maybe made sense at one point, but doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
[1] I'm not arguing for regulation on GPUs...just pointing out that EnergyStar isn't touching the currently important part of the problem.
> manufacturers don't have any incentive to start producing power-guzzling appliances when power costs are increasing
That's only true if customers can know how much energy their devices are going to use. Energy star forces that disclosure and that's it. Market forces are done everything else. Consumers prefer lower energy costs and devices that voluntarily achieve an energy star certification
Also, "takes like 4 hours to finish a load", I have a new dishwasher, there is no combination of settings (except adding a delay) that will make a load take four hours. Max I can get is 2:36
It's like advocating for the free market by saying used car dealers should be able to dial back the odometer. That's not free market economics. It's actually the opposite, these people are advocating for a less-free market.
When there is a huge government bureaucracy that is devoted to writing and implementing “efficiency standards”, then I question the value of the expense.
Y’all do realize that other countries with energy efficient appliances don’t have this program, right?
(It’s almost like it isn’t necessary to achieve the same outcome.)
Having failed to demonstrate convincingly how this greatly imconveniences the American household as consumer, you pivot to the inconvenience of the American household as taxpayer. But any serious discussion of that point requires you to discuss the concrete cost of this certification program compared to all other government services. This, you also do not do.
As for other countries not having this program, what do you think the purpose of the "EU energy label program" is?
My argument is not about dishwashers. It's not about specific buttons. It's that removal of this particular government bureaucracy is unlikely to lead to any bad outcomes, because it has long ago stopped doing much of anything that actually impacts energy use, and instead focuses on things like making your dishwasher work worse in the name of efficiency. A classic story of bureaucratic imperative.
Even if you do think it's doing something, you have yet to adequately explain why it needs to be done by the government.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels_effect
Maybe China? But I feel like China has pretty strict regulations about a lot of things.
I can't speak for Europe, but I know Japan well. It may have "joined", but there is literally no awareness of the program. You don't see the symbol on appliances here, and I'm not sure anyone would know what it is, if it appeared. They simply don't need such a program to have efficient appliances.
One thing the government does do is offer rebates for people upgrading old appliances. One might ask whether the money spent on EnergyStar would be better put to use on these kinds of direct incentives.
https://www.energystar.go.jp/
The EU's energy labelling scheme grades appliances on a scale, and gives the estimated annual electricity usage. I'm sure it's effective, as it makes clear why the cheapest appliance might not be a good purchase.
https://energy-efficient-products.ec.europa.eu/ecodesign-and...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_energy_label
I'm not certain, but I think the rating would be either performed or certified by an independent laboratory, i.e. a private business, so the government bureaucracy is limited to defining the specification/tests.
(And incidentally, my dishwasher defaults to the "Eco" programme, which takes 3½ hours. I don't care as I almost always run it overnight, and it's one button press to choose a faster programme.)
Incorrect. The far bigger part of the program is certification:
https://www.energystar.gov/about/how-energy-star-works/energ...
(There's also the scoring system, though I don't know if that falls under certification.)
This is how the efficiency requirements become de facto mandates. Federal procurement, among other things, requires energy star certification. There are even mortgage discounts for energy star certified buildings.
Nobody forces manufacturers to get certified, they do it because the market prefers it.
Energy star does not force manufacturers to be certified. I can walk into my local appliance store and walk out with a whole kitchen full of uncertified products if I wanted too.
But if the market prefers it, great! Do it without the need for a government bureaucracy! Organizations like Underwriters Laboratories don’t need an arm of the US government to exist.
Yes, I know the reason, but now say it in a way that doesn't make the assumption that the rule is rational: EnergyStar continued to increase the efficiency requirements to the point where the only option manufacturers had was to make the default cycles much longer in order to get the same performance [1]. Every dishwasher therefore has a button that reverts to the pre-regulation mode, but it's usually named in doublespeak.
Somehow I doubt that dishwashers are driving the power consumption curve in the US in 2025. But this is what bureaucracies do, unless given a self-destruct date.
[1] for example, what's preventing EnergyStar from requiring that the water be cold? That would use way less energy!
The idea that manufacturers wouldn’t just make energy and water hogging dishwashers now is naive at best. Making something run well using less resources costs more money up front, even though the total cost of ownership is lower. If you don’t have to make them efficient and you don’t have to display how much energy or water they use and how much that would cost, then you can massively undercut anyone that does those things, even though the consumer would end up paying more over time.
> Somehow I doubt that dishwashers are driving the power consumption curve in the US in 2025.
But of course it isn’t just dishwashers, it is practically every home appliance. If every house was using 10% more energy, that adds up to a lot. It doesn’t mean that data centers aren’t also a problem, but abandoning a program that saves energy doesn’t fix either problem.
>for example, what's preventing EnergyStar from requiring that the water be cold? That would use way less energy!
Is that something you are worried about or was discussed? Or is that just a ridiculous made-up scenario trying to paint a reasonable regulation for nonsense?
Really? You sound like someone who would pay for such a thing. I bet there are more of you!
> If you don’t have to make them efficient and you don’t have to display how much energy or water they use and how much that would cost, then you can massively undercut anyone that does those things, even though the consumer would end up paying more over time.
Nobody said anything about getting rid of the stickers. We can still require stickers, just like we require food has labels on it. We don't need a sprawling certification system encompassing everything from telephones (sigh) to roofing materials and the government bureaucracy that defines it.
I also don’t have the time, energy, and knowledge to be an expert on every single thing I buy or use. I know nothing about roofing materials, so having some bare minimum standards and left and right limits balancing societal harm/good and individual choice is perfectly reasonable to me.
Natural resources and infrastructure are a shared resource “owned” by everyone, collectively known as the nation. Protecting that value is what the government should be doing.
I, and I would guess most consumers, are perfectly fine with the trade off of taking longer at lower cost (energy and water). I run mine overnight so it doesn’t matter. This is what I want as the default.
On the few occasions I need it to run faster and am fine with the trade off of higher cost, I press a button and it’s there.
What’s the problem?
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The difference between appliances in 1970 vs now is immense. My dishwasher is so quiet we double check if it’s on. It uses less water than handwashing. Even the Chamber of Commerce (big business lobby) asked them to keep Energy Star.
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https://www.gao.gov/assets/files.gao.gov/assets/gao-10-470.p...
What would be more interesting would be a historic examination on the amount of fraud and abuse that actually takes place in the Energy Star program and whether the various decade plus old recommendations:
proved useful in finding such fraud or in decreasing any occurance.Showing that a system has flaws doesn't necessarily prove that a system is useless. You have to look at the overall impact. In cases where you have an imperfect but useful system (such as most government regulation and enforcement) finding vulnerabilities is an important part of improving the system. A police department which only catches some murderers should work on catching more criminals rather than deciding it's hopeless and we might as well make homicide legal.
They're just no substitute for things like Energy Star
How do you compare three hot water heaters when all three brands are "refreshed" each year, so the specific models aren't listed on CR?
It's easier for consumer groups like CR to back-stop the regulatory agencies by identifying and reporting fraudulent self-reports.
If there are products that don't have reviews at all, just don't buy them in favor of those that do. In markets where consumers are choosy (e.g. films) companies often ensure reviewers have early access to products to ensure reviews are plentiful.
You're failing to consider the alternative no-EnergyStar scenario -- higher aggregate electricity demand, requiring more power plants, so everyone pays more for power.
Either you pay pennies to promote efficiency, or you pay quarters for energy infrastructure.
Not sure this is the elastic droid that paradox is looking for.
Household energy use is not such a good, because most uses have fixed utility.
Very few people are going to cool their house down to 10C because the price of cooling to 15C decreased.
Nor is their overall energy use budget-capped. (Outside of low income AC and/or heating use cases)
Example: as a regulated utility it will often cost more per unit if underused vs optimal generating supply (which has already been passed through into rates)
Additionally, the generating source heavily influences ultimate cost.
When you need to pay the king's taxes with the king's money as otherwise the king's men will beat you up, which is why you'll give the king's soldiers food in exchange for the king's money.
> companies often ensure reviewers
LOL! Of course they do! Companies pick reviewers who give good reviews, and spurn those who are critical. You every wonder why most game reviewers are so fawning?
Consumer Reports knows this, which is why they buy their products on the market, which is why they can't have reviews with the product first comes out.
Which is why when a product is first released you'll rarely find honest negative reviews.
Who rates the reviewers? Are they shilling for the manufacturer? Are they the marketing arm of the manufacturer? How do you know?
Yes, companies can choose who gets to review pre-release products. Negative pre-release reviews come out anyway, and if you don't trust them you can wait, as you say. Reviewers who aren't trusted by people looking for reviews rapidly lose their audience and stop being given product access.
You guys are talking as if product reviews are some theoretical thing that don't exist today, that only a government can supply. Reviews obviously do exist and billions of people rely on them every month. There is just no problem that specifically requires the US government to step in here.
Yes, and so can Canadian Tire money, but try paying your taxes in scrip or Bitcoin.
> and if you don't trust them you can wait
Nope. Models numbers are cheap. Each chain can get their own model number, updated every six months. You wait and the numbers all change.
> Reviewers who aren't trusted by people
You're smoking the good stuff!
"Up to 30% of online reviews are fake and consumers can't tell the difference", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33472922
"Big media publishers are inundating the web with subpar product recommendations", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39433451
See also the comments of HNers who find it hard to find trusted reviewers.
How do you find a trusted reviewer for air purifiers, which that last link concerns?
There are even claims that Black Friday products are even special runs that are slightly different to lower cost.
(if you can't tell whether that is sarcasm that might be because I also don't know)
First: Those numbers are all BS and have been for decades. If you want damp clothes, dirty dishes and refrigerated to within a blond one of the legal minimum food then you can trust the numbers. If you want your appliances to do their jobs in a satisfactory manner you're going to find yourself turning them up (whatever that means will vary by appliance) and consequently using a lot more energy.
Second: Those yellow stickers are from the FTC, not the EPA.
I have had zero of these issues. Can you be more specific about when you have encountered them yourself?
This article is about the blue Energy Star sticker program, which is managed by the EPA.
I googled, and you are right. Here's the description of Energy Star from the EPA website [1]
[1] https://www.energystar.gov/products/ask-the-experts/whats-di...Across the board though, PC PSU quality has gone up quite a bit in the last 20-25 years though.
Im so tired of the arguement of its not perfect guess we should get rid of it, start from scratch, and the new system will have none of those problems.
This isnt about government excess spending either. If the government was really concerned about excess spending they would take a real deep look at DOD spending and the number of cost plus contracts
When I needed a new washing machine a year or so ago there were many machines that were very similar except for large variations in energy efficiency. If it weren't for the Energy Star labels I almost certainly would have ended up with a machine with higher operating costs.
> Plus, a private certification program could easily fill in the void.
Ah there’s your problem. It turns out private solutions actually cost money, and relying on a private certification program to “fill the void” as you say, is what actually changes the costs.
Alternatively if you believe that private corporate actions are always free when comparing it to government services, then this is a net zero change
Private industry cannot be trusted to act in any interest but their own bottom line.
And while we are the world's largest producer of oil, we're also the world's 2nd largest importer of oil as well!
Even more reason to reduce our oil dependency if the real economic goal is to improve our trade deficit.
(As opposed to efficiency/power cost/TCO in general, specifically refusing to buy non-logoed goods)
Do you have any examples of such products? I don't believe I've ever seen one.
> it was cheaper to warm the outside of the fridge to avoid condensation
A refrigerator has an evaporator inside the fridge to get cold but it must have a condenser on the outside to discharge heat. The outside of the fridge is going to get warm no matter what you do. The only time I've seen an actual heater used is when a fridge is placed outside where temperatures go below freezing.
> but the parts cost was a few dollars lower.
The labor cost was also significantly lower and the rate of production was higher.
> than it was to install adequate insulation inside the fridge
They used to be insulated with cork and then fiberglass which were the common technologies for their time. As soon as foam became more prevalent they switched to that.
> Energy star and those yellow power consumption stickers changed that.
It normalized the patchwork system that existed before it. California, as always, experienced the initial problem and created it's own standards on refrigerators sold in the state. Other states followed, the federal government picked at it slightly, and finally Energy Star came into existence mostly by industry demand.
That's all in theory though. I wonder if this could be a confusion arising from the use of heating coils to defrost the evaporator coil (auto-defrost). that's a different thing though.
What is accurately? The efficiency of the product will depend on how full it is. The less mass you have inside it the more often it turns on and the more energy it consumes.
So do consumers even understand this particular point of their device? Or how their use case may impact the displayed numbers?
The Energy Star Test Procedures for refrigerators and freezers is defined in this document:
<https://www.energystar.gov/sites/default/files/specs/ENERGY%...> [PDF]
Refrigerators and freezers are tested unloaded. Which suggests that the Energy Star programme should report a less efficient energy usage as compared with normal loading of a refrigerator/freezer, which will reduce air exchange and the need to re-cool air.
See: Bud Light.
The lower the skill needed to evaluate something and the more well defined the problem space is, the easier it is to crowd source. For example Open Street Map works because the barrier to entry is relatively low and new cities aren't coming out every day. Similarly IMDB has a section that allows users to give their own parental rating to movies with their own explanation. That can compete with MPA film ratings because again the barrier to entry is low and movies don't change after they are released (in general).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benson_Leung
A historic example is things was Linksys WRT54G wireless routers. The exact same product number had completely different amounts of memory and core chipsets.
Another one that's common is the first batch of particular SSDs in a model contain more/faster/any cache which gets good benchmarks and great reviews, but later neutered releases of the same 'model' perform like crap.
Even with regulations like Energy Star, you can't just assume they're being followed accurately. It's much easier for companies to game one government-run system than a whole ecosystem of reviewers who are competing on the accuracy of their reviews.
…only it’s better than a tax because it preserves the freedom to get ripped off if you choose. Yay freedom.
Versus asking the manufacturer ("very efficient sir") or the government ("efficient and we ignored every other aspect of the product so it might not actually work", see the dishwasher discussion).
We need actual regulations in place to display accurate information because otherwise you can just lie, and that's that. How many people do you think are actually testing the power usage of their appliances under different scenarios?
If Billy Joe says it's efficient and you trust him, you could be getting ripped off and never know it.
It's very similar to nutritional information as required by the FDA. Testing food is expensive, and even if you could, since you're not the manufacturer you'll never know what ingredients actually go into it. Only they know.
It's just significantly cheaper in aggregate to have the government tell manufacturers to list information they already have. Rather than have a potentially infinite number of random parties try to figure it out with their limited information.
You want to talk about word of mouth? I’ve never heard anyone complain about dishwashers except from the people on here who have a libertarian axe to grind.
Because of Energy Star that gap has generally shrunk, but that just means it’s working well.
The most obvious difference left is on fridges. The amount of power consumed varies quite a lot and in ways that are not obvious. Small fridges use a shocking amount of power because they use less efficient coolers without compressors.
This is only true of the tiniest fridges, the peltier effect ones that are about the size of a milk crate. Your typical mini fridge has a compressor.
It sounds like a more important step (if you're plumbed into the hot line) is to run your water just before the first cycle so that the machine fills with the hottest water it can get, as not all of them will heat initially.
I don't understand how the tablets could be in rinse cycle but powder in wash cycle? They both go to the same container that fully flips open during the wash cycle. Or do you have a device that has some different compartment for powder?
I don't live in the US. He does talk about some differences. For example, I've never had a dishwasher here that didn't heat it's own water.
I did live briefly in the US and I recall that there were a bunch of subtle differences around appliances. Europe, Australia and New Zealand use the same models and the US gets different models.
https://www.tampaelectric.com/residential/saveenergy/energys...
Not sure actively subsidizing recreational novelty uses of electricity is doing anything to save the planet
Energy efficiency is why US electric consumption has been flat for so long (since 2008). Besides lighting, most residential load are appliances (refrigerator, washer, dryer, stove, microwave, pool pumps, TVs, water heater) or HVAC. So, those are the efficiency targets. The cheapest kWh is the one you didn’t have to generate and deliver. Very similar to demand response, where you pay consumers to shed non essential electrical loads (nest thermostat rush house rewards is an example of this) when the grid is at capacity.
Similar incentives exist for heat pumps, water heaters, and dryers, as well as for disposing of an old inefficient fridge you might be hanging on to in your garage as a second unit.
https://www.gdsassociates.com/electricity-use-flatline/
Even if you don't want to use the pool, if the house has a pool the pump needs to run regularly with filtration and chlorination or else you end up with an expensive, putrid mess to clean up.
And of course in most parts of florida you can't drain the pool long term because of how high the water table is. An empty pool is just a concrete shell so without the weight from the water inside it, the pool essentially becomes boyant and tries to float upwards out of the ground, causing potentially thousands to tens of thousands of dollars of damage.
So a lot of people are stuck with pools with the water in them. So they are stuck with the pumps running.
And regardless of how recreational those pools are, that means a lot of pumps running across the state and that translates into a lot of power usage during the day.
So rebates for upgrading to more efficient pumps is an easy way to reduce power usage, reduce costs for people, reduce environmental costs, and reduce unnecessary overall load on the grid.
It's an incentive that just makes sense for everyone involved because it provides benefits across the board.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Star
> More than 75 product categories are eligible for the ENERGY STAR label, including appliances, electronics, lighting, heating and cooling systems, and commercial equipment such as food service products. In the United States, the ENERGY STAR label often appears with the EnergyGuide label of eligible appliances to highlight energy-efficient products and compare energy use and operating costs.
> One of the most successful voluntary initiatives introduced by the U.S. government, the program has saved 5 trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity, more than US$500 billion in energy costs, and prevented 4 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions. Elements of the ENERGY STAR program are implemented in Canada, Japan, and Switzerland.
If that recreational novelty is going to happen regardless, isn’t it better to entice people to do it with lower energy use?
No - your utility used energy star compliance as an easy yes/no for giving you a rebate, but it could still give out rebates without energy star based on a couple of simple specs.
One particular example was a tradeoff calculation for water heaters. I forget what the exact TCO tradeoff point was but it was ridiculously short (between 1-2 years). I was replacing a leaking/failed heater and expected it to be shortly thereafter replaced due to a basement remodel we had planned. I bought the best insulated one as it saved money if we used it for just 2 years. 16 years later, that unit failed (we didn’t do the planned remodel). That was based on the FTC sticker only (plus my actual gas rates).
Edit to add: we then replaced that water heater with an electric heat pump water heater (which is eligible for the IRS tax credit scheme, which requires they "must meet or exceed the highest efficiency tier (not including any advanced tier) established by the Consortium for Energy Efficiency (CEE)") and all of the EPA Energy Star rated heat pump ones do, but I'd argue that the heater would still carry the highest CEE rating with or without the Energy Star program, so I still didn't purchase based solely or primarily on any factor that the star under-pinned, but if there was a heat pump water heater that didn't have the sticker, I'd have had to look to be sure it was still eligible for the rebate.
When I tapped this two years ago, it was for a ducted heat pump system replacement where the only immutable requirement was that the system had to have earned the ENERGY STAR label. SEER2 rating was a mere secondary consideration that had no impact on credit qualification; 14.8 was my saddle point.
At the time, ductless mini-splits had to be ENERGY STAR certified and SEER2 > 16 to qualify.
[1] https://www.energystar.gov/about/federal-tax-credits/air-sou...
Energy Star is the blue and white label stickers granted to products meeting some energy efficiency levels and is managed by the EPA.
This includes every major appliance in my primary home...and HEPA air cleaners too.
[1] https://www.energystar.gov/about/federal-tax-credits/air-sou...
I honestly don't remember for sure, but I have a vague impression of "significant difference in energy star rating is outweighed by significant difference in purchase price". Could be that was just the particular type of appliance years ago, though.
Since there's no numbers attached to the energy star certification itself, it's a meaningless label that doesn't really tell what the difference is. With the energy guide labels, at least there's a point of comparison.
Even then, the difference between models of a few types of appliances I checked were typically in the 1-3% of the product cost range. The single biggest I could find online happened to be in TVs, where one brand's 65" was half the estimated annual electric cost of another- a savings of $20 per year! It'd pay for the difference in price between the models in 3 years, and pay for itself in 25!
Granted, I didn't see numbers for the likely worst offenders: central air conditioning and electric ovens.
The energy guide (yellow label with cost estimates) is mandatory for most appliances. The energy efficiency is quantified as an estimated annual cost of operation.
Energy star certification is a voluntary and binary thing. There's no readily visible difference between appliances with or without the energy star certification, short of going back to the energy guide label to compare.
There are knock on effects like economies of scale making energy efficient parts cheaper to source, marketing the latest technology driving consumer expectations, and manufacturers flat out copying each others’ designs.
I was originally looking for a mini fridge like what you’d think of belonging in an American dorm room. In the store, I noticed the medium sized fridges (more akin to what one might think of in a European studio apartment) actually used less energy according to the yellow sticker, so I went with that.
This was a case where I wasn’t really looking for anything very specific, though, so it’s not like I was already limited in options and limited more by that sticker.
Sometimes I do a TCO analysis by subtracting the energy savings over 7 years (or 5, or 10 or whatever I estimate the useful life to be) from the more expensive price of the more energy efficient product. Occasionally it comes out less than the cheaper product.
Energy costs over the lifetime of many appliances types are many multiples of initial purchase price.
But it also seems like one of those things that surely doesn't cost much to keep around either. Getting rid of it is just virtue signaling to anti-climate people.
Institutional collapse is a thing.
Working in the manufacturing space, I have no doubt designs will change and energy consumption will go up. They will be able to remove sensors, heat water hotter in dishwashers and clothes washers, run cycles more aggressively, and use cheaper motors (such as HVAC fans). Any item you can remove from the bill of materials adds to the profit directly.
Capital expenditure versus operating expenditure is a common tradeoff discussed in a business sense, and the Energy Star gave a pretty darn good comparison for opex for consumers. Taking that away (even with some of the games that have been played over the years) is a huge loss for consumers.
This, of course, is exactly the kind of chaos and uncertainty that the APA and all those agency processes are supposed to prevent, but it’s a roller coaster for the next few years at least.
I'd agree Energy Star requires presenting that, but I feel like a lot of manufacturers would want to.
Just like there was a right-wing grievance attack on education, science, water quality, air quality, due process, food inspections, being bound by the constitution ... Basically anything that seeks to make things better.
They feel oppressed by all of it.
But don't worry. When your food is full of mercury and you're breathing in lead in a few years, the right wing will be there to blame DEI and wokeism for it because that's how they operate: destroy things, blame scapegoats, win elections, repeat.
There's people like Chris Rufo that openly state it's their strategy. None of this is speculative.
But to be honest, I'm not even sure how efficient Energy Star is these days. It feels like the US is behind Europe and East Asia by a decade, at least from a consumer perspective.
However, isn't it better to implement this A -> G scale we have in the EU? It's easier to read than EnergyGuide.
As with gutting the EPA in general, dropping this is another step towards trying to remove any regulatory pressure on companies so they can focus on maximizing profits for shareholders.
Idiots.
Am I just personally oblivious or is it more prominent in the US?
I need that Energy Star logo showing up while my PC bios is doing a memory test
Meanwhile, logging old growth forests, drilling more oil, scoffing at renewables and EVs, and building power-hungry data centers for marginal-utility AI owned by a handful of billionaires. Flu vaccines are in doubt, the chaos and riots will begin around June/July when the shelves are empty and prices double.