Obama Orders Costly Energy Standards on Appliances

Obama Orders Costly Energy Standards on Appliances Thursday, February 5, 2009 12:56 PM WASHINGTON –

Eager to show action on the energy front, President Barack Obama ordered his government on Thursday to establish higher efficiency standards for everyday household appliances such as dishwashers, lamps and microwave ovens.

"This will save consumers money, this will spur innovation, and this will conserve tremendous amounts of energy," Obama declared during a visit to the Energy Department, where he touted his economic jobs plan.

Obama announced he had signed a presidential memorandum directing the Energy Department to get moving on energy standards for appliances, including a first batch he will order to be finalized by August.

The fact that Obama is getting directly involved in speeding up household appliance standards underscores how much he wants to show quick, clear progress on energy — part of a broader campaign promise to deal with economic and energy concerns all at once.

Laws on the books already require new efficiency standards for household and commercial appliances. But they have been backlogged in a tangle of missed deadlines, bureaucratic disputes and litigation. In essence, Obama's intent is to say that legal deadlines must be met, with priority being given to those standards that are likely to yield the best pocketbook savings for consumers.

Obama's memorandum orders final rules to be in place by August that require energy-efficiency standards for a series of products: residential dishwashers, lamps, ranges and ovens, microwave ovens, commercial air conditioning equipment, commercial boilers and beverage vending machines.

There are two approaches to things, the leftist approach and the smart approach.

The leftist approach is to always strive for shortage and rationing. And if no shortage exists, then they manufacture shortage and propagandize that it exists anyway. This is because they want to use shortage to get political power and control over others.

The leftists are always dead-set against the smart approach, because it leads to abundance for everyone, freedom of choice, and it diminishes the control of others over people’s personal lives.

I saw a very good example of this many years ago, when leftists were propagandizing in favor of water shortage in my western State. As such, they were beating the drum for “raising public awareness” (a euphemism for “propagandizing”) of the public about the residential conservation of water.

However, a short time before, it was noted that mining, agriculture and industrial uses of water were 98% of the water use in our State, *and* that the mining industry had decided to recycle its water, which overnight raised our State water availability by ONE THIRD.

But when this was pointed out to them, they insisted that the public still had to conserve water, because they needed their “awareness raised” about the important of water conservation.

Bull crap.

Now, I say this in context of what Obama is proposing, for a different reason. He is up to serious no good with this. Why?

Among the appliances he talked about, he mentioned “lamps”.

Lamps are not an appliance. In fact, they are the simplest electronic circuit. Power in, power out, and a resistor - a light bulb, in the middle.

If you “conserve” energy in a lamp, it means that you are either using a smaller resistor, such as a dimmer bulb, or you are running less current through the bulb.

Congress has already mandated that incandescent light bulbs are to soon no longer be produced. Starting with 100 Watt light bulbs, in 2012, and ending with 40 Watt light bulbs in 2014 (SO STOCK UP NOW!)

So how the heck else could lamps conserve energy?

But rest assured, this nonsense is going to be like the low water use toilets that don’t work, we are now forced to use. And the low water use shower heads, that make showers last twice as long to get clean, that we are now forced to use.

So it would be a good idea to invest in a few extra lamps to have around the house, before whatever stupid idea they come up to screw them up comes out.

Yes, black marketeers now import real toilets from Mexico, and you can tear the entrails out of a low water use shower head to make it work right. And yes, you can stock up on hundreds of incandescent light bulbs, and lamps that work like they’re supposed to.

But we shouldn’t HAVE to do this. It is just more hassles these power hungry fools want to lay on our shoulders.

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