Thursday, February 05, 2009

Obama Wants Appliances to Use Less Energy

Reuters reports Obama wants appliances to use less energy.

Here's the first paragraph:

"U.S. President Barack Obama on Thursday ordered the Energy Department to set energy efficiency standards for a broad range of common household appliances, which will save Americans billions of dollars in electrical costs and reduce power plant emissions. The department was charged with slashing the energy use of more than 30 product categories."

This is a good thing, but of course it's longer term. It doesn't help until people replace existing appliances which does cost money.

Here's the last paragraph:

"A U.S. District Court approved rolling deadlines for backlogged standards in 2006, after environmental groups and 14 states sued the Bush administration for not meeting efficiency deadlines."

Ugh.

1 comment:

DKB said...

One good thing about the general bumbling of the Bush buffoons... they didn't actually manage to derail the overall efforts that were already in place to improve the efficiency of appliances in general.

When I bought my front-loading washer 8 years ago, I had few choices and had never seen one in an American home. Now I see ads for them all the time and they seem to be relatively popular, though I don't know if it's as much fashion as it is efficiency... they use less water (therefore less energy to heat water) and extract more water from the clothes (therefore the clothes require less energy to dry.)

Energy Star refrigerators seem to be more or less the norm now, and reputedly use a small fraction of the electricity a 20-year-old model does. I think it's at least as important that a few Americans are waking from the "we deserve to be wasteful" trance and doing something about it on their own.