First of all,the consumer will likely have less money to spend because of “high efficiency” appliances. Electric rates continue to rise. The appliances are only efficient in the area of the rated amount of power they are supposed to use. Highly efficient vehicles are another example of where this is all going. Sure,they get small engines to develop high horsepower & are at least somewhat fuel efficient,but this costs money to do,so they are expensive to buy,expensive to repair,& are dead weight on a used car lot in a few years,because they are not cheap to repair EVEN IF parts are available.
As you wrote, high efficiency is high tech and high cost. That doesn’t mean it isn’t worth pursuing, but in engineering, there’s always a balancing act. Increased performance typically comes at the expense of some other area, like durability or cost. One rarely (never?) has all the money one needs.
What’s that saying? Pick any of the following two features you want: inexpensive, high quality, and fast delivery. You can never have the third.
All of these government mandates come at a very real cost, and we citizens are apparently not considered smart enough to make these hard choices on our own. That’s really one of my biggest gripes with the left. The so-called tolerance crowd has zero tolerance for any views different than their own, and they like to use the full weight of government to have their way.
Myself? I’m pretty much a live and let live kind of guy (as are most conservatives I know). The true test of a free society is tolerance for views other than one’s own.