Trump wants to bring back incandescent lightbulbs. And burn more coal.
Don't get me wrong, being an electrical engineer, doing a lot of DIY repair, and taking note of what goes into appliances I've got zero faith in manufacturers to come up with more efficient solutions on their own. But at a certain point the ever-advancing regulations stopped being productive as well. You can only switch to ECM/brushless motors one time.
(Also a meta issue - if the actions of the Trump administration were limited to only executive branch domestic policies like this, we could at least readjust in four years)
I actually don't think companies will go backwards on improvements they've already adopted. The mechanism I see is a reluctance to spend design time on changing things (ie keep selling the same old shit), rather than pure cost optimization with newer technologies costing more.
I'd say a big cause of the problem here is the handwavey nature of regulations focusing on "high level" goals like efficiency and expecting that engineers can magically find it somewhere [0], rather than more direct things like "all appliance motors that consume more than 5% of the energy used by the appliance must be brushless ECM"
[0] similarly, see the repeated calls for magical encryption backdoors that don't weaken security
Even if you disagree with that for some reason, it doesn't really affect my point. It's a tradeoff and they want different rules about what options on the tradeoff curve are valid.
It has nothing to do with quality tradeoff curves.
You don't even have to do a lot of critical thinking to get this; Trump has made it pretty clear.
So do you think the claim that it's cheaper to build to looser standards is a lie, or do you think cheaper appliances did not play any role in motivating this order and only came up after the fact?
I'm pretty sure at least one of those has to be true for your claim to be true, and I'm quite skeptical of both.
(If you said it was mostly about climate change spite I'd be a lot more likely to believe you.)
