A New Frontier In 'Murcan Freedumb! Cutting Efficiency Rules For Dishwashers! Yay, Murca!!
I'm just tingling with pride this morning!
Of all the conservative efforts to persuade the Trump administration to weaken the nation’s environmental rules, the dishwasher lobby might be the most peculiar.
“Dishwashers used to clean a full load of filthy dishes in under an hour. But now they take an average of two and a half hours and STILL leave dishes dirty!” reads one online petition promoted by FreedomWorks, a libertarian offshoot of a group co-founded by the late David H. Koch and his brother Charles Koch, who made their fortune in fossil fuels. The decline of American dishwashers, the site says, is “all thanks to crazy environmentalist rules.”
The petition, titled “Make Dishwashers Great Again,” is just one part of a broad campaign coordinated by conservative organizations with ties to fossil-fuel companies. Trump administration emails made public as part of a lawsuit filed by the Sierra Club shed new light on the effort, designed to persuade the Trump administration to weaken standards on a long list of home appliances.
One such email, sent in June 2018 to supporters of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think tank, urged them to write to the Department of Energy supporting the creation of “a new class of ‘fast dishwashers’ that can complete a cycle in an hour or less.” “This will require more electricity and more water and so D.O.E. will have to relax the efficiency standards,” the email said, adding that hundreds of comments had already been filed “with the help of FreedomWorks and several other groups.” (The D.O.E. is accepting comments for or against the move until Oct. 16.)
EDIT
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/17/climate/trump-dishwasher-regulatory-rollback.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fclimate&action=click&contentCollection=climate®ion=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront