Energy Regulators Think You’re Crazy
21st August 2012
Federal regulators evidently believe that Americans are irrationally choosing to spend hundreds of billions more on energy than they should. Consequently, benevolent bureaucrats have imposed regulations to guide hapless consumers toward making the proper energy saving choices when it comes to purchasing cars, air conditioners, clothes dryers, refrigerators, and light bulbs. A new study finds that the regulators are, in fact, the ones being irrational.
Jonathan Adler chips in:
While most of the fuel standards were adopted in the name of the environmental protection, many are actually the result of special interest pleading. Producers of various products, ethanol in particular, sought fuel content mandates or performance requirements that would benefit their particular product. (I detailed part of this history in “Clean Fuels, Dirty Air,” in Environmental Politics: Public Costs, Private Rewards (Greve & Smith eds. 1992).) Worse, some of the content requirements are irrelevant for new cars due to modern pollution control equipment. Federally imposed boutique fuel requirements have outlived whatever usefulness they ever had.