PrintApril 9, 2010
Onerous New DOE Regulations Headed Our Way
The Department of Energy announced Thursday that it has finalized the new and higher energy efficiency standards for several classes of appliances which they decided upon last year. Those standards can be found here.
Warning! Keep your seat belts on, this is going to be a bumpy ride.
The announcement from DOE Secretary Steven Chu says that these changes will save 164 Million Metric Tons of CO2, from entering the atmosphere due to our use of more efficient electrical appliances.
Damn that's a lot of CO2............. Or is it?
There's a total of roughly 800Gt (Gigatons) (798Gt actually) of CO2 in our atmosphere, of which roughly 27Gt comes from man's activities.
164M (Million) Mt (Metric Tons) over 10 years = 16.4MMt per year = 1.6% of 1Gt = 1.5 billionths of 1% of the atmosphere every year.
And this is going to cost us how many billions of dollars?
Even if there were any ill effects of adding more CO2 to the atmosphere, which there aren't, anyone who does the math here has to see how utterly insane this is. I've heard some of the real experts say that doubling the CO2 in the atmosphere of 387ppm Parts Per Million) would raise our average temperatures less than 1°C, and even if that happened, so what... warming is good !
They say this is going to save us $10BB over 30 years, that's $300 million per year, but even though our government now talks about billions, as if they were hundred dollar bills, those numbers are still deceiving.
This insanity won't be hard to measure in economic terms, but there's another measure of how much this will cost other than dollars, and if the real environmentalists knew about this, they might think somewhat differently.
Rather than just asking how much it will cost us to retrofit these appliances in our homes, we should ask how energetic that retrofit is. To do that, you have to add in all of the energy costs involved in making the changes. For example, when you replace your water heater, you have to ask how much fuel will be used by the plumber who brings your new water heater to your home? How much fuel was used in shipping the water heater from the manufacturer to the retail outlet where you bought it? How much fuel was used in producing and transporting all of the parts used to make the water heater to the manufacturer? And how much fuel was used to produce and transport the raw materials used to make those parts by the parts manufacturers. And that's just the fuel used.. What about the electricity used throughout the process?
I'm guessing that many will not get too upset over this. Their thinking will be that since their water heater is probably going to last for no more than another 5 years, it's no big deal. Since they'll have to replace it anyway, why not replace it with a more efficient one when they do? Unfortunately there's more beneath the surface, and it's another Obama land mine, because like everything else this administration has told us thus far, they're only telling us part of the story. What's actually going to happen is that anyone who tries to sell their home is going to need to replace that perfectly good water heater, and lots of other electrical devices in their homes in order to legally sell their home.
What was that you said?
If that last sentence surprises you, then you're not aware of the fact that the Obama administration is planning to force us to register our homes, just like our cars, and get them inspected by an authorized agent of the DOE in order to get an "Inspection Label" for the home. So I suggest that you all read the Cap & Trade bill which was passed by the House last June, and which President Barack Obama is probably going to try to ram through the Senate shortly. That abomination of a bill requires us to bring our homes into compliance with each of the new standards for all regulated appliances, in order to legally sell them.
And if that's not enough, it's not just about water heaters, or home heaters either:
"Since President Barack Obama came to office, the DOE has issued or codified new efficiency standards for more than twenty different products, which will save consumers between $250 and $300 billion on their energy bills through 2030:
March 2009 - 14 consumer and commercial products with standards prescribed in the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (EISA 2007), including dishwashers, general service incandescent lamps and residential clothes washers

April 2009 - Microwaves, kitchen ranges and ovens

July 2009 - General service fluorescent lamps and incandescent reflector lamps

July 2009 - Commercial heating, air-conditioning and water-heating equipment

August 2009 - Beverage vending machines

December 2009 - Commercial clothes washers

February 2010 - Small electric motors

March 2010 - Residential water heaters, direct heating equipment and pool heaters"
Watch out for the second to the last item listed above, because almost every electrical device you use has a "small electric motor" inside.
When you add the value of the millions of perfectly good appliances that are going to wind up on the trash heap, to the other costs of this bill, you'll realize how damaging this is going to be to our country.
Jeffrey Immelt must be licking his chops!
