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The Trump administration’s assault on long-standing reforms now has energy efficiency standards in its crosshairs. The rollback is potentially devastating for global environmental targets and is being described as the ‘largest deregulatory effort in history’.
Donald Trump is still ploughing through federal laws at full throttle. The latest attempted unravelling will be met with sizable resistance, however.
The US Energy Department is reportedly steadfast on rolling back energy efficiency standards for appliances which have been in effect for decades. These pertain to household machines and battery charges, and the agency is trying to rollback 47 regulations currently limiting their standard energy usage.
Proving a thorn in Trump’s side is the Energy Policy and Conservation Act (EPCA), which contains a crucial anti-backsliding provision. In laymen’s terms, changing the standards for the energy efficiency of home appliances in the US is patently illegal and has been since 1987. If it will remain so after the Trump administration’s assault remains to be seen, though.
‘If this attack on consumers succeeds, President Trump would be raising costs dramatically for families as manufacturers dump energy and water wasting products into the market,’ said Andrew deLaski, executive director of the Appliance Standards Awareness Project.
The law’s anti-backsliding provision asserts that any acting energy secretary can’t introduce new standards that ‘increases the maximum energy use’ or ‘decreases the minimum required energy efficiency’ of any household appliances sold on US soil. This, in theory, allows for more efficient technologies to be introduced as they’re created, but prevents a regression to more energy-hungry iterations.
