Essay by Eric Worrall
“Freedom to choose” is bad?
Appliance efficiency standards save consumers billions, reduce pollution and fight climate change
Published: April 17, 2025 10.41pm AEST
David J. Vogel
Professor Emeritus of Business Ethics and Political Science, University of California, BerkeleyPresident Donald Trump has said he wants to reverse decades of regulations about energy efficiency in American household appliances, claiming doing so will provide Americans with “freedom to choose” products that meet their needs.
In an April 9, 2025, statement, Trump claimed he could alter government regulations on his own, without the legally required process of public notice and comment.
But as a scholar of environmental regulations, I know those regulations were created to save energy and lower utility bills for consumers. I also know that many companies and consumers have supported federal regulation to strengthen energy efficiency standards and generally have opposed weakening them.
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These appliance standards have reduced American energy use, including electricity. The existing national standards are projected to reduce overall national energy consumption by 10% between 2025 and 2035.
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Making appliances more energy efficient has proved popular. A national survey released by the Consumer Federation of America in 2018 found that 71% of Americans “support the idea that the government should set and update energy efficiency standards for appliances.” Significantly, 72% of those surveyed named lowering electrical bills and 57% stated that avoiding construction of new power plants to keep electricity rates from rising were important reasons to increase appliance efficiency.
Read more: https://theconversation.com/appliance-efficiency-standards-save-consumers-billions-reduce-pollution-and-fight-climate-change-253673
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I don’t understand why greens like David Vogel have such a problem with freedom.
If 71% of Americans prefer more efficient appliances, there is no need for a law to enforce appliance efficiency – most people will choose energy efficient appliances of their own free will.
The 29% who have other priorities likely have good reasons. Sometimes the low energy choice is a problem.
For example, in 2021 California introduced laws banning stationary generators and gasoline powered fire pumps, everything has to be solar and batteries.
Some Californians might be fine with battery power for when the grid fails – I fully support their right to choose batteries if they prefer. But people in remote areas, where power outages are measured in weeks or months rather than hours, perhaps not so much.
Whatever is or has happened in the USA on the energy efficiency front, Britain, Europe and Australia have it far worse.
When Britain first introduced compliance efficiency standards, the only lightbulbs on sale for a while were compact fluorescent lightbulbs which contain mercury. At the time my kid was just a baby, and on one occasion I accidentally broke two fluorescent bulbs in one day in our bathroom. Appliance efficiency standards exposed my baby to mercury pollution.
I would not of my own free will have chosen mercury containing appliances, especially when my kid was so young – young children are particularly vulnerable to mercury exposure. But the British State took away my right to choose.
EU appliance efficiency standards also robbed Brits of decent lawnmowers – the only lawnmowers available to ordinary consumers are underpowered, and made mowing my lawn an ordeal of restarting the mower every time it got stuck. My Aussie lawnmower is far more powerful, it hardly ever gets stuck even when the grass is wet. There are energy appliance standards in Australia, but they were applied with a lighter touch, at least when it comes to lawn mowers.
Gasoline automobiles are where the real madness manifests:
Australia is also threatening to phase out gasoline, but with Australia’s vast empty spaces and poor road and electricity infrastructure, that isn’t going to happen, regardless of what ignorant city based politicians think they can force people to accept.
My point is, I’m happy to choose energy efficient appliances when they make sense – I love my energy efficient refrigerator, it is quiet, keeps the food cold, and costs very little to run. My LED lightbulbs last forever and cost nothing to run. But nobody should have to tolerate bureaucrats dictating what they can and cannot choose when it comes to home appliances, automobiles, and how to live their lives.
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Some of the “efficient” appliances
do do not work all that well. And things like electric chainsaws are an atrocity, given recharge times. And they were fragile, beside
Electric motors burn up when stalled. Been there, done that. Gas motors just stop. You clear them and go again. Not so with burning brushes and over stressed electronics.
It was my brother-in-law’s chainsaw, and it was homeowner grade at best. The chain tensioner broke on the second charge.
I rather like my 36v whipper-snipper. (2x18V batteries)
The batteries run out at just the right time for a rest and a coffee or beer..
… with a nice long time between, while the batteries recharge 🙂
And I like my Ryobi 40v.
Many light duty battery-powered tools are great! I appreciate my battery screw drivers, drills, hedge clippers, weed whacker, etc. For small yards, I expect electric mowers would be fine (not mine, I mow 1/2 acre). As others have said, one-size-fits-all government efficiency standards can’t account for the vast variety of brands, models, consumer uses, needs and economic status, and setting (urban, rural, arid, wet, hot, cold, etc.).
it is as foolish as if governments were to try and set climate policy based on average global temperature anomaly .. oh wait, …
For lightweight back yard cutting, electric saws are nice. Mine will run for about an hour of stop and go cutting. They are much quieter. I have 2 batteries so I could go longer than an hour but that’s enough for this geezer. It’s also nice that I don’t have to fight it to get it started. And I don’t have to drain and clean it at the end of the season to avoid gumming it up with the additives in the gas. For any serious cutting of course they’re just not practical. Mine doesn’t seem any more fragile than the many gas saws I’ve owned- I don’t know why they would be.
Been using battery weedeater and leaf blower for 2 years now and actually like them. Craftzman to be exact. The weedeater surprised the hell out of me, cuts heavy grass and weeds, can handle some fairly thick brush. And no vibration issue as with my gas ones, motor is on the bottom of shaft. Leaf blowers eat batteries, are powerful for their size. I got my right arm broken in January 2020 and come summer I was totally unable to start my gas weedeaters, could barely start pushmower using left hand, so electric it was.
True. We have a so-called ‘efficient’ washer made by a major manufacturer. Not only is it NOT efficient, but it never really gets the clothes clean. There is no agitator, it just swishes the clothes around, in a mInimum amount of water. One advantage it does have, though, is that it doesn’t wear our clothes out so fast. I guess that’s the trade off?
If they’re substandard in the first place, they’re unlikely to last as long as whatever they’ve replaced. In addition, their energy efficiency is likely to be lower so they’ll consume more power than their predecessors. As a result, consumers will have to spend more money to replace them earlier, and the old models will wind up choking the landfill sites. So it’s a losing proposition all around, except the manufacturers and salesmen should benefit from more people looking for replacements earlier than normal. Somehow all this will save the environment.
Everything that has been tried to “Fight climate change” has failed miserably. Atmospheric CO2 PPMV continues to increase and has shown absolutely no signs of decreasing whatsoever.
Not everything.
Govts haven’t ordered deisel and petrol cars (the main culprit so they would have us believe) off the roads. They did that with Covid, so it’s easy peasy to do.
But it still didn’t reduce C02 ppm which in fact stubbornly increased during the Scamdemic.
Absolutely right. COPs 1 to 29 have not affected the Keeling curve one whit
What the **** is a “climate friendly” appliance ?
No appliance can have even the remotest effect on “the climate”.
I don’t mind something being “efficient” so-long as it does the job properly !
Soon they will ‘save us money and be more energy efficient’ by limiting or banning travel.
‘Pollution’ will also be reduced so what’s not to like?
Smart people safe money buying used “old stuff” that still can be repared…although it’s getting harder to find over time. Repair shops are slowly dying out as well.
Not a long term solution, sadly
“I don’t understand why greens like David Vogel have such a problem with freedom.”
I do. They are know-it-all totalitarians. It’s not fascist when they want to impose themselves.
Climate change = Communism rebranded.
I find it quite ironic that the party that pushes government control over the appliances, vehicles, lawn equipment and other tools that people can buy and use is the same party that demands that a woman must have an unfettered right to choose whether to have her unborn child killed. So, a woman in California can eliminate any offspring she might conceive, no questions asked and no limits. But, if she goes to buy any sort of gasoline powered lawn tools, or a generator, she’s out of luck…. Either you have personal choice or you do not. In a logical world, if one is to allow (and encourage) the former, then it should go without saying that there should also be no restrictions whatsoever on the latter. Such hypocrisy is totally lost on the left!
I’m pretty sure Nature’s climate isn’t bothered one way or another with what kind of light bulbs I use.
In Winter here in chilly Great Britain, incandescent light bulbs made a significant contribution to ambient room temperature reducing energy consumed by the central heating boiler. Or rather they did when we were still allowed them.
The elephant in the room here is the overwhelming presumption that energy use is bad. Why? In any properly free competitive market the suppliers want you to take more, constantly innovating to improve capacity and reduce cost. Only when politicians are involved does supplying enough become a challenge.
The climate panic room is crowded with elephants. One is the “energy bad” elephant you mention. Another is the presumption that carbon dioxide is poison. (Preposterous to anyone who paid attention in high school biology.) Another is the presumption that summer is bad and winter is good. (Who really HATES it when temperatures rise in spring, migratory birds arrive, and dormant plants leaf out?).
Another elephant is that anyone would notice a change of a degree or two per century. Even tropical islands vary about 15°F from day to night. The mean temperatures of the mid-latitudes vary about 40°F from January to July. The extreme high and extreme low for each year is about 100°F in vast swaths of the world — Beijing, Moscow, Chicago, and more. The worst-case scenario of 5° per century is SMALLER than the mean difference between Nashville, Tennessee and Columbus, Ohio. The mean difference between Moscow and Mumbai is close to 40°F (43° vs. 82°) yet both rank among the world’s largest cities, and continue to thrive.
The notion that storms are getting more frequent and severe, floods and droughts more extreme, etc. is unsupported by data. In the U.S. for instance, the worst flood by far was in 1927 when the Lower Mississippi Valley flooded a the size of New Hampshire and Vermont placed end-to-end. Where I live in the northeast suffered five Category Three hurricanes between 1938 and 1960, and none since then.
Weather-related deaths have declined by more than 90% worldwide since 1920, despite a five-fold increase in population.
When it’s relentless enough, propaganda can make people believe the opposite of the truth.
Without the hysterical drumbeat of climatista propaganda, people would welcome summer, put on their overcoats when it snows, wax poetic over changes in the weather, and rejoice that crop yields continue to rise.
And how’s that working out?
It appears they were designed to allow utilities to invest less in infrastructure, and thus be more profitable.
Given Green enthusiasm for wind and solar,saving consumers money is not a concern
As I’ve mentioned before, the fundamental bases of our prosperity are:
1. The true cost of energy and availability of that energy.
2. The efficient use of that energy.
3. The ways in which we use that energy.
For example, a country which has expensive energy, but uses that energy efficiently and sensibly, can have a higher standard of living than a country which has cheap energy but uses that energy inefficiently and stupidly.
The problem with a ‘freedom of choice’, is that many people do not bother to check, or do not have the nous to check, the efficiency of the products they buy. The appearance of a product often over-rides the efficiency of a product.
For example, if people like the styling of a particular car, many will likely buy that car without any concern for the efficiency of the engine, in terms of kilometres per litre of fuel, or miles per gallon for you Americans.
If we could just BAN stupidity, BAN overeating, BAN overhousing, overcarring, overwashing, overdrying, and overjaunting, then everything would be hunky-dory. Ration everything. Take all the styling out of cars, clothes, houses, hair, and sports, so people wouldn’t waste time and energy on vanities. Forbid the dumb peasants from selecting any activity or thing that climatistas disapprove of.
Then Paradise would arrive.
I think you mean: “Forbid the dumb peasants from selecting any activity or thing that is dumb, wasteful, and non-productive.”
A fascist paradise indeed!
You seem to be conflating work efficiency with cost efficiency – they are different.
And I see you are not familiar with the free market system which is regulated by price – a rationing mechanism – which quickly shows the relationship between supply and demand.
The market IS people making choices and decisions based on all the little pieces of knowledge they have about their own circumstances, requirements and local conditions – “Countries” which are a pieces of land with political boundaries, cannot make choices.
Start point: all resources are scarce, there cannot be a market economy with businesses which can only operate due to that scarcity – that anything they produce can be reduced to zero.
Energy then is scarce, and if it is cheap, demand will be high and exceed scarce supply, so prices will increase which signals consumers to use less and signals producers to produce more to turn that scarcity into abundance. This assumes an elastic market.
But. For example: in the 1970s oil crises (Middle East goings on), oil, petrol/gas prices surged due to short supply. Oddly, oil/ petrol/gas market is not very elastic, these things are not fungible so demand did not reduce substantially, people just switched funding from other consumer items to pay higher motor fuel prices.
However, motor manufacturers saw an opportunity to develop more energy efficient car engines, use lighter materials, and thereby increase mpg. Motor fuel prices did not fall, but your money spent (cost efficiency) got you further on the road and motor manufacturers had fuel efficiency as a great selling point.
Oil producers invested to produce more – horizontal drilling was one development, exploitation of oil from under the sea-bed another. Supplies increased, prices eased.
However politicians – and the bien-pensants in our society – believe they can have far more knowledge than the people with freedom of choice, and therefore are much better placed to start making choices on behalf of the people to relieve them of the bother of making their own choices and decisions.
The ultimate example is Socialist, command and control economies, but our free democratic Governments have a go too, which is why economies are always in trouble.
I suspect they think that “they know best”, and the rest of us are too stupid to make informed decisions.
The fact that they are unable to grasp that peoples circumstances vary, and that not everyone is a city dwelling eco-academic perhaps shows where the real stupidity lies.
On energy efficient appliances, a few years back there was a serious proposal by the EU to introduce “energy efficient” (i.e. low powered) kettles, in clear defiance of the laws of physics.
Except that you pay $500 more for a refrigerator to save $10 annually on electricity. Not a good deal?
Vacuum cleaners are a disaster these days. Dishwashers need 3 hours. If a product is in it’s total is cheaper then people will buy it.
It only takes me 20 or so minutes to wash dishes and I use WAY less water.
And the refrigerator is far less durable, crashing in half the time as older models. Total cost of ownership (purchase price, finance cost, maintenance, energy cost) greatly outweighs the relatively insignificant energy cost savings.
For appliances, except for the wealthy, most people run their old ones until they break or when the repair cost rivals the cost of a new one. They then buy a replacement that suits them and their budgets. I doubt that many buyers put much stock in relative efficiency, because the difference in energy and water (e.g., clothes washers, dishwashers, faucets) use between the top and bottom models is rather small. They want the product to work as intended (performance) and for it to last (durability) for a reasonable price.
Government efficiency standards quickly confront the law of diminishing returns, where insignificant gains in efficiency compromise performance, durability and price. Unfortunately, the efficiency police wear blinders and generally don’t care about performance, durability and price. They tout energy savings but don’t tell the whole cost-of-ownership story. In other words, they lie.
Before efficiency an appliance must function and properly. I live remotely, where repairmen fear to tread, so my appliances must be repairable by me.
What I’ve seen- energy efficient appliances are junk- especially refrigerators and dish washers.
When they are weakened, these fanatics can still buy theoretically but not really efficient junk appliances. They’re not efficient if they don’t last as long.
I had an old Sunbeam Automatic toaster. The date stamp on it was November 5, 1955.
Somebody was throwing it away. I put a new cord on it (adding a ground wire) and adjusted it.
It finally died around 2010.
(One of the nichrome wire elements wrapped around a mica insulator finally burnt out.)
I noticed with our last clothes washer purchase, an EPA Energy Star unit, there is a setting that lets the washer pass the Energy Star hurdle. However, it uses so little water on that setting that clothes aren’t cleaned and fabrics wear out faster.
So, the dial has four other, deep water settings that do get clothes clean. I never use the Energy Star setting.
Likewise, our Energy Star Bosch dishwasher has to be set inefficiently on max (>3 hrs runtime) to clean the dishes.
I have the same experience with my high-efficiency clothes washer. I must use the “deep fill” water setting to ensure the laundry is properly cleaned and rinsed. On the plus side, the washer has a much larger capacity than the unit it replaced.
Perhaps 50% of folks are smart enough to realize that repeated flushing overcomes government limitation on toilet functionality.
The regulators who came up with the plan are from the other half…
“I don’t understand why greens like David Vogel have such a problem with freedom.”
They have a fundamentally negative view of humans, which comes from the fixed-pie economics and drive-to-bottom ethics taught by Karl Marx. (Check the view on economics of most climate catastrophists.)
They evade what is all around them – people producing, people cooperating, people taking care of their property.
The Climate Cult is apocalyptic.
“….have such a problem with freedom…”
The aphrodisiac of power over people is very strong with politicians and bureaucrats. The need for hall pass forms to be filled out and people to administer hall passes and other people to keep stats of hall pass abuse…are wired into their psyche…when really verbal permission for a quick trip to the bathroom was all that was needed 99% of their time….
What is “energy efficiency” really, when it forces obsolescence on appliances that work well? Many engineers have looked at electricity consumption of certain appliances and found that the supposedly new/better ones use marginally less electricity but fail ever so much faster.
“I know those regulations were created to save energy and lower utility bills for consumers.”
And I know my electricity bills keep going higher and higher, that washing machines and dishwashers don’t get things clean, so often have to be run twice, laundry additives are required to get stains out that “eco-wash” and detergents “can get out even at low temperatures and short cycles” – but don’t, that electric bulbs require a mortgage and fail much quicker than advertised, bread has to be done twice in energy saving, low wattage toasters and still looks anæmic.
So a case of theory meets reality and as usual reality wins.
“..bread has to be done twice in energy saving, low wattage toasters and still looks anæmic.”
Cooking bread twice is not ‘energy saving’. If you want to save energy, get rid of your toaster. Your bread will also be more nutritious if you don’t burn it on a toaster, especially if it’s wholemeal bread.
A lot of academics know little or nothing of the real world but insist that they know better than the rest. They get paid for that. They like the idea of forcing others to do things.
Very nice Eric, as for professor Vogel political science professors are among the last people I would turn to for advise on anything.