Since its inception in 1992, the Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star program has helped save more than $500 billion in energy costs. Every dollar the EPA spent on it created $350 in consumer savings, and spurred $230 in investments by businesses and households. The new and rebranding agency apparently is struggling with the question: Is that good?
According to reporting from CNN and later the Washington Post, the EPA is planning to kill off Energy Star amid its ongoing and generally devastating reorganization/demolition. The public-private partnership began more than three decades ago, pushing industry to make more efficient appliances and helping consumers buy them with the ubiquitous blue stickers. The Trump administration, so rhetorically focused on “efficiency,” is abandoning one of the government’s most efficient programs ever.
A report from Energy Star in 2023 put some numbers on the program’s success: The annual market value of Energy Star-labeled products is $100 billion. Since 1992, the total energy cost savings have eclipsed $500 billion. And yes, it has an ROI of 350-1. The thing only costs less than $40 million per year, anyway.
So why end it? The GOP has been on a decades-long quest to push back against improving efficiency in everything from lightbulbs to car engines — the “right” to buy an energy hog of a dishwasher is somehow sacred, in spite of the consumer savings inherent to doing the opposite. Mix in Trump’s own weird obsessions, as well as some of Energy Star’s other accomplishments — it has also avoided 4 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions, along with billions in public health benefits by avoiding hundreds of thousands of tons of pollutants like sulfur dioxide and PM2.5 — and a semi-coherent vision, anti-progress and pro-climate change, starts to emerge.
As the reporting on EPA’s move has noted, there may actually be some bipartisan pushback here, as Energy Star has enjoyed some cross-aisle support and is pretty well entrenched in the consumer appliance world. “The ENERGY STAR program alone delivers billions of dollars in energy cost savings to U.S. consumers and businesses every year on a budget of just $32 million,” said Elizabeth Beardsley, the senior policy counsel at the non-profit US Green Building Council, in a statement. “Thousands of product manufacturers, utilities, real estate companies, and local governments rely on the program to create value, adopt energy efficiency practices, and manage energy use; shuttering it would only cause confusion and raise costs.”
“Cause Confusion, Raise Costs” might as well be a campaign slogan at this point.
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