In economic life, trade-offs are a constant problem for everyone. Maybe you want to buy some better clothes, so you decide to save on groceries. Or you postpone a bathroom upgrade because the kitchen needs an upgrade first. Or you skip a vacation this year to buy a new car. Everything you buy means other things you can’t buy, so every buying decision necessarily involves trade-offs. And the same principle applies to your use of time: every hour you spend on one thing you can’t spend on another. Learn Spanish this year or train for a marathon — you’ll never have time for both.
Governments face a similar need for trade-offs, but unfortunately are subject to bad incentives that often make making reasonable trade-offs nearly impossible. The government is divided into independent bureaucracies, each of which considers its own sector to be the most important. Nowhere is this phenomenon more evident than in environmental regulators, including not only the EPA but also as broad as the Departments of Energy and the Interior. These bureaucracies are run by environmentalists who want to save the planet, and they find the whole concept of trade-offs repulsive. What about things like people’s prosperity, people’s convenience, or comfort? Somehow those don’t count for anything for the environment function.
This phenomenon of remote inability to make reasonable trade-offs has been on full display in some of the environmental news over the past few weeks.
Take an example new dishwasher rules, announced May 5. This one comes from the Department of Energy. It imposes on dishwasher manufacturers what they call a “new standard for water and energy efficiency”. In the press release, the main selling point to people is that this will save you money — lots of money — along with reducing “carbon emissions” and “saving water.”:
The DOE hopes the new rule will save consumers nearly $3 billion in utility bill savings over the next 30 years of transportation and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 12.5 million tons—a roughly equivalent amount. with the combined annual emissions of 1.6 million households. The DOE also expects the new rule to save 240 billion gallons of water, the same amount as in 360,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
3 billion dollars – that’s a huge amount! Actually no. That’s $3 billion over 30 years, or $100 million per year. There are 123 million households in the US, so this is good less than a dollar per year per household. Likewise, the reduction in CO2 emissions is said to be less than trivial: 12.5 million tons over 30 years is 417,000 tons per year. That compares with some 6.34 Billion tons of emissions for the United States in 2021And 37.12 Billion tons for the world. So the reduction in CO2 emissions, if actually achieved, would be 0.0066% of US emissions, or 0.0012% of world emissions. But isn’t US electricity production supposed to be carbon-free 10 years from now? If so, most of the supposed reductions in emissions from more efficient dishwashers will never happen.
Meanwhile, it’s been widely recognized that the Department of Energy’s previous water and energy efficiency standards for dishwashers have had the effect of making them run longer and not clean dishes. New standards, which require even less water and electricity to be used to wash dishes, can only make things worse. All to save less than a dollar a year? Most people are willing to pay an extra dollar a year — or maybe even five dollars — for a dishwasher that actually works. Why can’t we have that option? Because the environmental freaks at DOE don’t care about making you waste time washing the dishes first or waiting for an endless cycle to end before you have the dishes to cook dinner.
On a much larger scale, consider the rule with the title “Multi-pollutant emission standards for vehicle models from 2027 onwards for light and midsize vehicles,” also published on May 5th. This one comes from the EPA. That’s the rule that effectively calls for phasing out gasoline-powered cars around 2032, making way for electric cars.
The success of gasoline-powered vehicles on the market to date has been the result of countless trade-offs made by consumers for their own good. These trade-offs include things like: the initial cost of the new vehicle, the vehicle’s range on a single refueling, how long it takes to refuel, the repair of the vehicle if damaged. how easy and costly it is to break down, how much value the car is kept for resale, how difficult or dangerous it is to keep the vehicle, and many other factors.
Well, now the EPA has decided, in its sole discretion, that none of that matters more than what it focuses on, which is CO2 emissions from the vehicle when it’s operating. Note that vehicle emissions while in operation are not at all the same as vehicle lifetime emissions, including emissions from the extraction and manufacturing processes that make the vehicle, and also in the field. In the case of electric vehicles, emissions from sources are used to generate electricity to power the vehicle, which is largely fossil fuel in most cases and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
In a sane world, there are many important trade-offs to be made to decide what type of vehicle to use, the EPA never even cared about that. Their sole focus is on reducing carbon emissions. If that means spending twice as much on a car, or spending hours a day at a charging station, or risking your car catching fire in the garage and burning down the house, it doesn’t matter. important to them.
What are the chances that the EPA or Department of Energy regulation could trade off important issues like these that actually make sense for consumers to improve their well-being? Space. They have a single focus and if that means destroying your lifestyle, then they are more than happy to do so.
Related
