The nonpartisan U.S. Government Accountability Office recently issue a blistering report on the Department of Energy's delinquent treatment of energy efficiency standards. Despite a mandate from Congress, DOE has missed all 34 deadlines for issues standards covering everything from consumer products to power transformers. Only 11 sets of standards have been completed; 23 remain unfinished.
Guess who gets screwed by this? Hint: it's not industry:
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimates that delays in setting standards for the four consumer product categories that consume the most energy--refrigerators and freezers, central air conditioners and heat pumps, water heaters, and clothes washers--will cost at least $28 billion in forgone energy savings by 2030.
This is a travesty. Energy efficiency is the fastest, easiest, and cheapest way to fight global warming and achieve energy security. Greens have finally begun to unite around that message, but obviously there's a long way to go to beat it into the heads of the feds.
(AP coverage here.)
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GRLCowan Posted 6:01 am
02 Mar 2007
Fund the DOE in proportion to this number. You will see a motivated bureaucracy. They'll roam the countryside searching for leaky old houses, buttonholing the owners, offering to get some contractors in there that very afternoon, offering hotel accommodation for the duration of the work if it will cement the deal.
The proportionality might sensibly be something like 10 percent. So if, next year, (US$200B minus net annual fossil fuel tax revenues) has increased to US$44 billion, funding will increase from US$4 billion to US$4.4 billion.
--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around B fire, car goes
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