Trump Seeks to Dismantle Popular Energy Star Efficiency Ratings

In their unending drive to reduce energy consumption and costs, most residents of New York City co-ops and condos, including the boards that govern their buildings, have pursued two linked strategies: improve the efficiency of all building systems and appliances, and eliminate waste whenever possible.

A valuable tool in this campaign has been the Energy Star program, which, by rating the efficiency of appliances, saves American consumers more than $40 billion annually on energy bills.

Now the Trump administration, as part of its all-out assault on measures designed to fight climate change, is moving to kill the Energy Star program. President Donald Trump has excoriated appliance standards for many evils, including their purported tendency to produce insufficient water pressure in shower heads. 

“Eliminating the Energy Star program is counterintuitive to this administration’s pledge to reduce household costs,” Paula Glover, president of the Alliance to Save Energy, a group that promotes energy efficiency, tells The New York Times.

The Energy Star rating system, which dates back to 1992, when George H.W. Bush was president, is jointly run by the Environmental Protection Agency (E.P.A.) and the Department of Energy. In the course of the past 33 years, according to The New Yorker, the system has reduced electricity demand by 5 trillion kilowatt-hours and cut greenhouse-gas emissions by 4 billion metric tons. It does this by rating the efficiency of a broad array of appliances and building systems, ranging from refrigerators (models with an Energy Star label are about 9% more efficient than those which just meet the minimum federal standard) to dryers (here, Energy Star models are about 20% more efficient) to air-conditioners, dishwashers, pool pumps, commercial water heaters — the list goes on and on. The system enjoys broad support from industry and from consumers of all political persuasions.

In April, more than a thousand companies, municipalities and organizations sent a letter to the E.P.A. administrator, Lee Zeldin, urging him to “maintain full funding and staffing levels” for the program. The letter noted that Energy Star costs about $32 million a year to administer, “yet saves American households more than $40 billion annually on energy bills.”

That's a 350-to-1 return — a “tremendous return on taxpayer investment,” the letter states.

“Energy Star has saved American families and businesses more than half a trillion dollars in energy costs,” said Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, the ranking member of the Environment and Public Works Committee, in a statement to the website Grist. “By eliminating this program, [Trump] will force Americans to buy appliances that cost more to run and waste more energy. This isn’t economic policy — it’s economic sabotage, sabotaging family budgets to pay off fossil-fuel donors.”

Steve Nadel, executive director of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, adds that the Energy Star program has enjoyed bipartisan support: “It’s had widespread support from all presidents (since George H.W. Bush) — except for Trump.”