Free Republic

If you’re in the market for a new home appliance and you want that purchase to be as environmentally friendly as possible, you might look for options that feature a label from Energy Star, a symbol backed by the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Energy specifically to promote energy-efficient products. Each year, Energy Star puts out a list of the Most Efficient appliances, those that the program says “save you money and protect the environment.” The list also features the “most efficient, pollution-reducing products.” Until now, that list might have included gas-powered appliances such as gas dryers, furnaces, and...

The Department of Energy issued a proposal on Tuesday to repeal a Trump administration rule creating a new class of dishwashers that wash and dry in an hour. The Trump administration’s rule established a separate product class for dishwashers that clean and dry dishes within one hour, an action that excluded those appliances from current energy and water conservation standards. It had acted in response to a petition filed by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free market think tank.... ...The Biden administration’s Energy Department has already moved to overturn a Trump administration change to the definition of a showerhead meant...

Energy recommendations from a government-backed program have gone viral after suggesting that people should keep their home thermostats at least at 78 degrees for cooling. Energy Star, which works with the Environmental Protection Agency and the Energy Department to set efficiency benchmarks for appliances, electronics, building materials, lighting and other products, recommends that Americans program their thermostats to at least 78 degrees from 6 a.m. The program then recommends temperatures be raised to at least 85 degrees from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., at which point it recommends again setting temperatures to at least 78 degrees. Thermostats should be then...

Regulation: No longer the stuff of science fiction, a little-noticed change in energy-efficiency requirements for appliances could lead to government controlling the power used in your home and how you set your thermostat. In a seemingly innocuous revision of its Energy Star efficiency requirements announced June 27, the Environmental Protection Agency included an "optional" requirement for a "smart-grid" connection for customers to electronically connect their refrigerators or freezers with a utility provider. The feature lets the utility provider regulate the appliances' power consumption, "including curtailing operations during more expensive peak-demand times." So far, manufacturers are not required to include the...

This summer we enrolled our older one in a local half-day recreational camp. They use one of the public elementary schools in our town. As I was walking back through the hallway after dropping him off at the classroom, I stopped to notice this poster hanging on the wall: Note the URL at the bottom of the poster: Energystar.gov/kids. Dot-gov? Yup. This is a government-run—and therefore, taxpayer-funded—website that has evidently gotten together with whoever runs “Energy Star” and whoever owns the rights to Dr. Seuss’ “Lorax.” And lookie, the EPA is involved too! And you know if the EPA’s involved,...

WASHINGTON — When he ordered the Energy Department on Thursday to set new, mandatory efficiency standards for a variety of household appliances, President Obama projected how much electricity would be saved. “We’ll save through these simple steps over the next 30 years the amount of energy produced over a two-year period by all the coal-fired power plants in America,” Mr. Obama said. But two audits of a prominent 17-year-old program to conserve electricity used in consumer goods, a voluntary effort called Energy Star, have found that such estimates, however rosy, are not completely reliable. The Environmental Protection Agency and the...