A Parting Insult to American Households from Joe Biden

 January 8, 2025 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty

Environmental zealots and meddling politicians are undermining our quality of life.

• They have given us substandard toilets
• They have saddled us with inadequate washing machines
• They have forced us to use dribbling showers
• They have endangered us with dysfunctional gas cans
• They have tormented us with crummy dishwashers
• They have moved to curtail and ban gas stoves
• They have compelled us to use inferior light bulbs

Courtesy of the Alliance for Consumers, here’s an amusing depiction of how these types of policies have increased the cost of living.

Unfortunately, Joe Biden is trying to make a bad situation even worse.

In the final days of his administration, federal bureaucrats want to make hot water heaters more expensive.

Here are some excerpts from a report in the New York Post by Ryan King.

A Biden administration ban on certain natural gas water heaters as part of the lame duck president’s climate agenda could send prices soaring for the elderly and the poor. Under the policy, new non-condensing, natural gas-fired water heaters will be prohibited for sale starting in 2029… The policy comes during President Biden’s twilight days in the White House and was quietly announced without a press release. …Customers will be pushed towards buying models that are more expensive or lean on non-instantaneous storage tank water heaters, which are generally cheaper but tend to be less efficient than the ones that are facing a ban… “Forcing low-income and senior customers to pay far more upfront is particularly concerning. DOE’s decision to go ahead with a flawed final rule is deeply disappointing,” Matthew Agen, the American Gas Association’s chief counsel for energy, told the outlet. …President-elect Donald Trump is set to take office on Jan. 20 and has expressed interest in reversing some of Biden’s climate change policies.

Trump has a decent track record on regulatory issues, so my fingers are crossed that this policy (and others like it) will be reversed.

I’ll close by observing that our leftist friends generally have two motives when pushing these types of policies.

• The first motive, which is somewhat logical though overtly paternalistic, is that people should be forced to buy energy-efficient appliances that cost more to buy but are cheaper to operate, thus presumably saving them money in the long run.
• The second motive, which is ideological, is that energy consumption is bad and must be discouraged.

I can understand the first motive, even though I don’t believe in one group of people imposing their preferences on another group of people (even though I agree it’s smart to buy appliances that are cheaper over a lifetime of use).

However, I obviously disagree with the left’s religious-like hostility to energy consumption (which leads them laughably preposterous choices).

Government’s War on Dishwashers

February 17, 2024 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty

Bureaucrats must have a knee-jerk desire to make citizens miserable. That’s the most logical explanation for their various initiatives to lower our quality of life.

• Inferior light bulbs
• Substandard toilets
• Inadequate washing machines
• Dribbling showers
• Dysfunctional gas cans
• Crummy dishwashers
• The existence of gas stoves

Let’s focus on one of those examples today.

George Will has a new column in the Washington Post about the bureaucracy’s war against dishwashers that…well…actually clean dishes.

The Energy Department’s busy beavers, with their unsleeping search for reasons to boss us around for our own good, decided that dishwashers use too much water and energy… Responding to the Biden administration…, a slew of states sued the Energy Department… This dispute reached the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, which, in its Jan. 8 ruling,swatted away what it tartly called the department’s “government-always-wins” argument…the court said, not only has the Energy Department acted in excess of statutory authority, but the record also contains “ample evidence” that the department’s new rules reduced efficiency in both energy and water use because “purportedly ‘energy efficient’ appliances do not work.” People “may use more energy and more water to preclean, reclean, or handwash their stuff before, after, or in lieu of using DOE-regulated appliances.” …DOE itself estimated in 2011 that handwashing consumes 350% more water and 140% more energy than machine washing.

The case involves the Biden Administration basically reversing some deregulation that took place during the Trump Administration.

The Wall Street Journal editorialized about this issue last year.

…the Energy Department dropped a sweeping proposal for “efficiency” mandates on dishwashers. Did you enjoy last night’s spaghetti, still crusted on the plate? Now you can taste it twice. …Americans have learned the hard way that stricter efficiency rules on already efficient appliances translate into higher costs, inconvenience, and ultimately waste. The Obama Administration’s dishwasher regulations raised the average price of a machine nearly $100, while producing a new norm of dirty forks and smelly glasses. …Machines can only meet much higher efficiency standards by recirculating water in longer cycles, meaning run times of two or three hours. Yet if the dishes aren’t clean, owners run them again, undermining the argument about conservation. The U.S. Energy Information Administration says that in 2020 nearly 20% of American households that owned a dishwasher never used it. That means they hand washed, which is as inefficient as it comes. The Biden …Energy Department plan gives manufacturers only until 2027 to produce the miracle of costlier washers that do a worse job.

This issue is ridiculous. I’m not sure what’s worse, the fact that bureaucrats are making our lives less pleasant, or that they’re making our lives less pleasant in a way that doesn’t actually save water or energy.

I’ll close on a related note. I was in Mexico City last week and was happily surprised at the quality of the hotel’s shower.

But then I realized that I was enjoying strong water pressure because Mexico presumably does not impose (or does not enforce) the stupid water-flow regulations we have in the United States.

This type of red tape is supposed to save water, but I wonder if that happens since you have to spend twice as long in the shower?

P.S. To its credit, the Trump Administration also tried to deregulation shower head regulations.