EPA Plans to Shut Down the Energy Star Program

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This is so frustrating.<p>Energy Star has been a huge success over the past 30 years. It&#x27;s (now) widely supported by industry, has reduced the TCO to consumers for most household appliances, and results in hundreds of billions of kWh of electricity saved every year.<p>Energy Star is not some tree-hugging, drum-circle, feel-good program.<p>The US urgently needs to expand and modernize our grid. Every GW of power saved, is GW of generation and transmission capacity that we don&#x27;t have to build and maintain.

The GAO wrote a report on fraud, waste, and abuse potential of Energy Star in 2010. They were able to get a gas-powered alarm clock (and 14 other fake products) marked as Energy Star compliant. Worth a read&#x2F;laugh.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gao.gov&#x2F;assets&#x2F;files.gao.gov&#x2F;assets&#x2F;gao-10-470.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gao.gov&#x2F;assets&#x2F;files.gao.gov&#x2F;assets&#x2F;gao-10-470.p...</a>

The best part about energy star I think was that it allows me to clearly see the energy consumption of the product. Without that it might not be as straightforward to find, and I&#x27;d probably be more skeptical of its accuracy

NB: the yellow Energy <i>Guide</i> stickers are managed&#x2F;required by the FTC.<p>This article is about the blue Energy <i>Star</i> sticker program, which is managed by the EPA.<p><pre><code> FTC - Federal Trade Commission EPA - Environmental Protection Agency</code></pre>

It seems like everything this administration thinks will make America better somehow also involves making everything I buy and use more expensive. Except maybe gasoline, although not as much as one would think.

Serious question: has anyone here ever based a purchasing decision on energy star labelling?<p>(As opposed to efficiency&#x2F;power cost&#x2F;TCO in general, specifically refusing to buy non-logoed goods)

The purpose of this is obviously to end tax breaks for businesses that meet energy star certification.

Besides information to consumers, the biggest benefit of programs like this is the pressure that they put on manufacturers to make their appliances more energy efficient. This drives innovation. Will some manufacturers obfuscate and lie? Sure, but overall it&#x27;s effective in pushing industry in a certain direction that is important for the country and consumers.<p>As with gutting the EPA in general, dropping this is another step towards trying to remove any regulatory pressure on companies so they can focus on maximizing profits for shareholders.<p>Idiots.

When it comes to reducing emissions, increased efficiency has been a bigger factor than green energy production, at least historically. Perhaps that&#x27;s changed by now with the rapid growth of wind and solar in recent years. But energy efficiency technology isn&#x27;t performative or &quot;woke&quot;, it equates to power plants that didn&#x27;t have to be built and money you and me saved on our electric bills every month our whole lives.<p>But to be honest, I&#x27;m not even sure how efficient Energy Star is these days. It feels like the US is behind Europe and East Asia by a decade, at least from a consumer perspective.

Very disappointing, although not unexpected. The energy star program was a very useful. It is very easy for a manufacturer to save a couple of bucks on some voltage converter circuits and saddle the customer with hundreds of dollars of electricity bills. And it was very difficult for the average consumer to weight what the energy efficiency of their appliances is. Energy star kept everyone honest and provided an accurate and comparable metric as to electricity usage.

A general war on anything that improves the quality of living.

I can understand, I guess, preferring fossil fuel energy to renewable. There is an argument to be made about the economic impact of depending on one thing for a long time and then switching over to the other. But shutting down a thing whose job is to promote efficient use of energy regardless of the source is just making things worse because you can.

As a European this thing brings more nostalgia than practicality.<p>However, isn&#x27;t it better to implement this A -&gt; G scale we have in the EU? It&#x27;s easier to read than EnergyGuide.

A carbon tax has its problems, but it is very attractive in how many incentives it would automatically align without explicit bureaucracy.

This is so fkn stupid. None of the energystar items I&#x27;ve looked at have suffered from any issues over the years and no doubt have saved me a lot of money. Now things will just be even more opaque and the environment will be made all the worse for it. I can&#x27;t wait until this clown circus is out of office. Sure the midterms will overturn most of the clown show or at least put a wall around it to stop the damage.

RIP the Energy Star logo in some bioses.

Unacceptable<p>I need that Energy Star logo showing up while my PC bios is doing a memory test

It&#x27;s good thing Trump wasn&#x27;t president after the Montreal Protocol or he would have pulled out of that (FAKE SCIENCE!!!) and let US companies continue to produce CFCs. Think how depleted the ozone layer would be by now.

My first reaction was &quot;huh?&quot; - I very much remember this logo as a thing of the 90s, apparently I didn&#x27;t pay attention since it vanished from the BIOS screens.<p>Am I just personally oblivious or is it more prominent in the US?

Hide the ability of consumers to make informed choices.<p>Meanwhile, logging old growth forests, drilling more oil, scoffing at renewables and EVs, and building power-hungry data centers for marginal-utility AI owned by a handful of billionaires. Flu vaccines are in doubt, the chaos and riots will begin around June&#x2F;July when the shelves are empty and prices double.

Can we get rid of LEED Certification levels next?