Why does
Trump want to cancel the Energy Star program?
By Basav Sen
It’s summer and the
mercury is soaring.
Temperatures are
higher than ever, it turns out. Last year was the hottest year since humanity started
recording temperatures, and it’s going to get much worse in the years to come,
as a recent University of Hawaii study shows.
The relentlessly hot
conditions in many parts of the country this summer mean that our air
conditioners and refrigerators are working harder — and burning through more
energy — to maintain a comfortable temperature for our families and a safe
temperature for our food.
And we pay for this increased energy use in our utility bills every month.
And we pay for this increased energy use in our utility bills every month.
For me, it’s
comforting to know that both my air conditioner and my refrigerator come with a
little blue Energy Star label. Those labels indicate
that they use less energy than comparable models without it.
If you’re like me, you like to save money on your bills, and you probably look for that blue label when you buy household appliances.
Energy Star is a
government program that costs about $50 million a year to operate. It saves
consumers about $34 billion (with a
“b”) in energy costs annually.
Put another way, every
dollar in government spending on Energy Star produces $680 in broadly shared
public benefits. That’s quite a return on investment!
Why, then, is the
Trump administration proposing the complete elimination of the Energy
Star program? That’s right: The proposed White House budget allocates precisely
$0 for the popular label.
From the standpoint of
serving people’s actual needs, this should be a non-starter. It would almost
literally take $34 billion every year out of the pockets of regular people and
businesses — and hand that windfall revenue to the utility companies who sell
them electricity.
It also means those
utilities will burn more coal and natural gas, propping up the dirty energy
industries this administration apparently loves.
We’ll all be the ones
paying for this love-fest between the administration and coal, oil, gas, and
utility companies — in the form of higher energy bills, higher medical bills
for asthma and other illnesses, and damages from heat waves, flooding, droughts,
wildfires, and other impacts of releasing more climate-altering greenhouse
gases.
The administration
routinely cites “jobs” as the justification for its attack on sensible energy
and environmental policy. But energy efficiency employment totaled 2.2 million jobs last year, compared
to 522,000 for coal and natural gas
combined. That’s a difference of more than 4 to 1.
So the administration
wants to undermine energy efficiency, a proven job creator that saves consumers
money, to prop up polluting industries with far weaker job creation potential.
The excuse of “jobs” is just that — a flimsy excuse.
The excuse of saving
public money isn’t tenable either. The $50 million cost of the program is chump
change for the federal government, given that overall federal discretionary
spending is more than $1 trillion, and pays for
itself 680 times over.
Apparently, the Trump
administration’s real intent behind eliminating Energy Star is to Make Utility
Bills Rise Again, without regard to the very real harm it does to your
household budget and to the environment.
Basav Sen directs the Climate Justice Project at the Institute for
Policy Studies. Distributed by OtherWords.org.
