The EPA Energy Star program which encourages and certifies energy efficient appliances and HVAC systems is, according to this LA Times story, voluntary, cost-effective and “immensely popular.”
So naturally the Trumpist free-market fanatics, led by energy-industry whore Myron Ebell, want to get rid of it.
Until Trump took office, the voices of a handful of free-market think tanks that dismissed the program as unnecessary government meddling had barely registered in Washington. Now they have the ear of the White House.
“I just think it is something government should not be doing,” Ebell said, “and therefore we should get rid of it. If it has value, private industry can pick it up.”
Everyone else in the story (except for another energy-industry whore from the Heritage Foundation) emphatically disagrees.
More below.
Like this guy from CBRE, a Fortune 500 commercial real estate firm:
“Never in my wildest thoughts have I considered something like this,” said Dave Pogue, who leads the sustainability efforts at CBRE. He said the program helped the firm cut energy use at its properties by 16% over the last decade.
And George W. Bush’s EPA Administrator Christie Todd Whitman:
“not in a million years” would she have targeted Energy Star. “There was no reason to,” she said. “It was a no-brainer. It worked, and it hardly cost any money.”
The article points out that Energy Star saves consumers and businesses an estimated $30 billion a year, at an EPA budget cost of just $60 million a year, making it “easily the cheapest and least burdensome initiative the federal government runs to help Americans lower their energy consumption.”
Whitman gets the last word, warning of the Trump extremists’ real agenda:
“If this administration really wants to reorganize around the importance of individual decision-making, getting government out of people’s lives and giving them what they want, then they shouldn’t be getting rid of this program,” said Whitman. “What they really want to do is get rid of the agency. The kinds of cuts they are making are scary.”
Most people, and even most Trump voters, appreciate modest government efforts to help them save money. And most would be, like the Republican Whitman, appalled at the Trump plan to kill Energy Star and eviscerate the federal role in environmental protection.
Hopefully that majority will make its voices heard loud and clear in the 2018 elections.