Energy Star Program Gets The Kiss Of Death

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In 1992, during the term of George H. W. Bush, the Energy Star program was created to promote more energy efficient appliances — air conditioners, water heaters, dishwashers, washing machines, and clothes dryers. ABB has even introduced an Energy Star rated EV charger. Entire homes that feature Energy Star rated appliances can also earn an Energy Star rating. Steven Nadel, executive director of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, told Inside Climate News this week that Energy Star grew out of Bush’s Thousand Points of Light program.

1992 was the year of the Earth Summit in Rio, where nations around the world first joined in a framework convention to address climate change. At the urging of the Bush administration, that treaty relied on voluntary action rather than targets and timetables for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The Energy Star program was viewed as a way to encourage, but not force, energy savings. “It was kind of one of his Thousand Points of Light,” Nadel said. “He didn’t want to do serious things about climate change, but a voluntary program to provide information and let consumers decide fit very nicely into his mindset.”

At first, it was primarily focused on personal computers, monitors, and printers, but over the years, it expanded to cover more than 50 home appliances. Beginning in 1995, Energy Star certification expanded to include homes and commercial buildings. It is now used by homeowners to obtain rebates on products they buy that are Energy Star rated. Some of those rebates are federal, but some are provided by states or local authorities. Utility companies also offer rebates and incentives for some products that meet higher energy efficiency standards.

Energy Star ratings have become an important advertising tool for manufacturers. When the Washington Post reported recently that the program was under attack, groups including the US Chamber of Commerce, the Air Conditioning, Heating, & Refrigeration Institute, and the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers wrote to the federal government to protest. The Chamber of Commerce is one of the most powerful lobbying organizations in the US. To get on its bad side, you really have to do something monumentally stupid.

The letter called Energy Star “an example of an effective non-regulatory program and partnership between the government and the private sector. Eliminating it will not serve the American people. In fact, because the Energy Star brand is highly recognizable to consumers, it is likely that, should the program be eliminated, it will be supplanted by initiatives that drive results counter to the goals of this administration such as decreased features, functionality, performance, or increased costs.”

Our favorite Democratic Senator, Sheldon Whitehouse, told Grist this week, “Energy Star has saved American families and businesses more than half a trillion dollars in energy costs, By eliminating this program, [the president] will force Americans to buy appliances that cost more to run and waste more energy.” In addition to the energy savings, it is estimated that all those more efficient appliances have prevented more than 4 billion tons of carbon dioxide being pumped into the atmosphere over the past 30 years.

Why Is Energy Star Being Targeted?

Let’s see. A half a trillion dollars and 4 billion tons of carbon dioxide saved. Who could be opposed to that? We’re glad you asked. In a posting by conservative news site Reason, deputy managing editor Jeff Luse wrote, “Despite having a relatively small budget — the program costs about $50 million per year and represents less than 1 percent of the EPA’s spending — and being one of the ‘most innocuous’ government programs,” there are reasons to reconsider the program, claims Nick Loris, vice president of public policy at the free market energy think tank C3 Solutions. Interestingly, Luse’s biography says he previously was a policy analyst and deputy editor at C3 Solutions, where he focused on free market policies to accelerate energy innovation and emissions reductions.

“In an age of information and where the cost of getting that information is pretty low, consumers readily have access to the many different attributes they value in the product. And the product manufacturers can still advertise the energy savings from their products” without a federal program, says Loris. Maybe AI has made the Energy Star program obsolete?

Luse goes on to say that a white paper from the Competitive Enterprise Institute on modernizing the EPA in March claimed that “green purchasing programs assume the federal government needs to meddle in the marketplace by providing its seal of approval on what it deems to be environmentally satisfactory products. If consumers demand certain information, then businesses will respond by disseminating this information to them.” If a labeling system is needed, “then private certification organizations should play such a role.”

The Cato Institute called the program “a very coarse piece of energy information that may crowd out efforts” to develop more accurate ways to measure energy operating costs. Conveniently, it neglects to mention any such efforts. “Despite the benefits that Energy Star has provided to consumers and the environment, the program is yet another example of the government doing a job that the private sector could do better. Cutting the program may not substantially reduce federal spending, but it would reduce federal creep in consumer choices,” Luse concludes.

Steven Nadel told Inside Climate News he thinks the program simply had the misfortune of being located inside EPA’s Climate Protection Partnership Division. “I’m not sure they totally thought it through,” he said. EPA administrator Lee Zeldin is determined to eliminate any offices within the agency that have the word “climate” in their names, which is in line with his boss freaking out about the “green new scam.”

Joseph Goffman, who was the head of air pollution programs at the EPA during the prior administration, thinks the decision aligns with the Trump administration’s other actions — its regulatory rollbacks, its cuts in personnel, and its clawing back of clean air and water grants. “What I think we’re looking at here is an absolute distillation of the ideology of this administration, which is a thorough going hostility to anything that the government does that helps people. If you want to destroy the relationship between the public and government, you’re going to target the Energy Star program.”

CleanTechnica readers, being generally well informed and keenly aware of what is going on in the outside world, will recognize this as just the latest in a long line of “the government can’t do anything right” policies espoused by so-called conservatives who are wedded to the idea that we should burn more fossil fuels, not less, and that the government is wasteful, slow moving, and infested with do-nothing employees who spend their whole day at the beach while sucking on the government teat.

Sadly, through the auspices of Faux News, X, Meta, and a host of online sources, a majority of Americans have swallowed this load of tripe and so gladly vote for representatives whose primary mission is destroying the federal government. It is hard to imagine any program that is more innocuous than Energy Star. If it has incurred the rage of free market fundamentalists, the demise of a civil society is at hand. Nothing says “free market” like being able to force your ideas down the throats of those who disagree with you.