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Death By a
Thousand Cuts
By Kate Burch
Last week, our dishwasher went on the fritz and, before the repair was
accomplished, the water heater sprang a leak! There’s nothing
like washing dishes by hand in cold water and taking cold showers to
make one appreciate modern conveniences.
When we went to look at water heaters, we were surprised at how much
the prices had increased. The salesman and the installer shook
their heads and said that, yes, the prices had increased by 25% due to
EPA regulations. They added, “Everything’s going up except
wages.”
My daughter, coincidentally, lost air conditioning in her condo, and
also had a water heater failure. Because of the new EPA regs, she
could not get an air conditioning unit that would be compatible with
her furnace, so she had to get both replaced, to the tune of $8000
plus. The price for her new water heater was even more than the
price for ours. She was not happy.
We do not have choice about paying more for dishwashers that don’t use
enough water to clean the dishes; gasoline with ethanol that gives
considerably lower mileage and harms engines to boot; toilets that give
only a mini-flush—I could go on.
So it was with chagrin that I read about findings reported in a recent
National Bureau of Economic Research document. The authors point
out that implementation of Energy Efficiency policies in no way yields
expected results in terms of economy and emissions reductions.
The predicted desirable results are based upon projections from
engineering models, you see (similar to the way predicted warming of
the globe comes from computer modeling). In the real world, as
exemplified in the reported sampling of more than 30,000 households in
Michigan, upfront added costs for “energy efficient” appliances, house
weatherization, and such were about twice the actual energy
savings. The energy savings projected by the engineering model
were about 2.5 times the actual savings. The investigators
checked for “rebound effect,” or increased use of energy in response to
decreased costs, and they found no evidence of significantly higher
indoor temperatures in weatherized homes. Bottom line: costs
outweigh benefits, with an average annual rate of return of about -9.5%.
Some of you will recall the era when American auto manufacturers, in a
cozy collusion, built monster cars that guzzled gasoline and were in
the shop every other week. Then, Japan got into the market with
smaller, more efficient, and better quality cars, and Detroit got into
line. Free markets really do work, calling upon human ingenuity
and the forces of competition to produce products that are not only
better, but more affordable. Government types, I’m sorry, just
want to take your stuff and control your life.
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