Steve Benen puzzles over the Trump Administration’s move to erase light bulb regulations that were designed to lessen overall power consumption:
There was no good reason for the Trump administration to roll back lightbulb energy-efficiency standards, but that’s exactly what happened this week.
Under one action, the Energy Department will repeal a regulation enacted under President Barack Obama, set to take effect on Jan. 1, 2020, requiring an expanded number of lightbulbs in the U.S. to be in compliance with stricter energy efficiency standards. That regulation change was spun off of a 2007 law signed by President George W. Bush that aimed to gradually phase out energy inefficient bulbs like incandescent and halogen bulbs.
The regulation that’s being eliminated would have redefined four categories of incandescent and halogen bulbs so that they would be subject to existing energy efficiency rules from which they were previously exempt. It would have applied to about half of the 6 billion lightbulbs used in the U.S., experts have said. […]
Trump’s Energy Department also nixed new energy efficiency standards for all pear-shaped lightbulbs that were also scheduled to go into effect Jan. 1, 2020.
I can appreciate why no one uses the phrase “lightbulb energy-efficiency standards” as click-bait, but this isn’t trivial. As The Hill’s report added, the Trump administration’s new rule “will increase U.S. electricity use by 80 billion kilowatt hours over the course of a year, roughly the amount of electricity needed to power all households in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, according to an analysis by the Appliance Standards Awareness Project.”
Benen forgets that the only metric of success for Trump is profits, in this case the corporate profits of the energy companies. The more they sell, the higher their profits. And since climate change is a “Chinese hoax,” the consequences of higher energy consumption are immaterial.
Trump does not share in the general public project to reduce energy consumption. It’s not even on his radar unless someone yells a question at him in the roar of Marine One.
So this measure, initiated by the Republicans themselves, should come as no surprise. Gotta prop the economy at the expense of the biosphere. And the hell with all the babies it kills. Measuring that is difficult and Trump and his successors can merely scoff at any such measurement.
Hopefully, these useful bipartisan measures can be reversed when Trump is out of office, and his movement discredited.
