Posted on May 21,
2023
This Is Why We Can't
Have Nice Things
by
Daniel
Clark
If you've ever bought a new television that was set by
default to energy saving mode, you probably thought it was broken until you
figured out what the problem was. While
it is on this setting, the picture dims and flickers to the point of being
unwatchable. Obviously, there is no
demand for such a feature, at least not from consumers. The manufacturer has created it in order to
earn an Energy Star certification from the Department of Energy, on the basis
that it saves electricity by reducing the brightness of the picture. In other words, it has been deliberately made
not to function.
Once you realize this, all you need to do is find the
place on your on-screen menu where you can switch the TV out of energy saving
mode, and the problem is solved. What if
this wasn't an option, though? What if
it was the way the set was required to behave all the time? That's basically what it will be like to buy
a dishwasher, if the Biden DOE is able to impose its new efficiency standards.
This
proposal would reduce the current maximum amount of electricity usage by 30 percent,
and water usage by 36 percent. That
would indeed be efficient, if the new dishwashers still worked, which they
won't. The people whose job it is to
produce appliances are being forced to adhere to standards created by
bureaucratic wonks, who are naturally less knowledgeable on the subject, and
unaccountable to the consumers. Anybody
who could produce a dishwasher that works just as well while using less
electricity and less water would be at a distinct competitive advantage, which
is all the incentive that is necessary.
For the federal government, on the other hand, to arbitrarily cut
electricity and water usage without accountability to the marketplace is not
efficiency. It's simply a withholding of
the things that make things work.
The Energy Department has also proposed stricter
regulations on clothes washers, even as it acknowledges that, "Improving one
aspect of clothes washer performance, such as reducing energy and/or water use
as a result of energy conservation standards, may require manufacturers to make
a trade-off with one or more aspects of performance, such as cleaning
performance."
Not to put a fine point on this, but "cleaning
performance" is the whole purpose of the machine. It would be nonsensical to trade this for a
reduction in those things that do the cleaning.
If you have purchased a machine for the purpose of cleaning your
clothes, and it does not get your clothes clean, that is totally inefficient,
no matter how much it may lower your water and electric bills.
On the subject of efficient water usage, do we even
want to get into government regulating the capacity of our toilet tanks? Suffice it to say that there are good reasons
why TV viewers across America envied Al Bundy's Ferguson ("Bah-WOOSH").
New York has become the first state to prohibit newly
constructed houses from being equipped for the use of natural gas. That means all stoves, dryers and furnaces
will have to run on electricity. The city
of Berkeley, California had a similar law, which has recently been thrown out
by a federal appeals court. What will
make such laws doubly inconvenient is the government-mandated transition to
electric vehicles. When every vehicle on
the road and every household appliance is powered by electricity, brownouts are
going to be commonplace. Already, during
a heat wave last summer, the state of California asked its citizens not to
charge their vehicles during certain hours of the day. A dramatic increase in our reliance on
electricity will make this scenario the norm.
On the regular occasions when the grid goes down, we'll all have to just
stay in our houses, where nothing works, until we are allowed out again.
It's
not coincidental that every one of these governmental actions has the effect of
reducing our standard of living. Regulations
such as these are predominantly written and championed by Democrats, the same
party that, not many years ago, embraced the Occupy movement in its hateful
campaign against the "one percenters."
Whom do you suppose the "one percenters" are on a global scale? Americans, of course, which accounts for this
relentless effort by the Democrats to thirdworldify
us. Only when the people of South Dakota
are living like the people of Somalia will they have succeeded in imposing
"social and economic justice."
Democrats inflict deprivations on the American people
with such zeal that one might wonder if they have been afflicted with
Munchausen syndrome by proxy, the psychological disorder by which one
deliberately induces illness upon somebody in his or her care, in order to gain
attention. In the world they are busily
creating for us to live in, we would transport our groceries in reusable cloth
bags that are breeding grounds for bacteria, and then store them in refrigerators
that are frequently out of order due to the unnecessarily created energy
shortages. We would drink through
aluminum straws, which (spoiler alert) taste like aluminum. We would eat insects instead of meat, and
would have fewer vegetables and dairy products to consume, thanks to "sustainable
farming."
In 2008, presidential candidate Barack Obama said, "We
can't just drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72
degrees at all times ... and then just expect that every other country is just
going to say, "Oh, okay." The premise
behind that statement is that the American standard of living should require
international approval. In reality, it
will, just as long as Americans continue to elect leaders who agree with that
point of view.
So, when the juice from the crickets you cooked on
your electric range are visible on your insufficiently washed shirt, and the
exoskeletons have been permanently baked onto your dinner plates -- when you
stink, not only from the dirty shirt, but because the central authority has
shut off your thermostat, and you're trapped in your hot house because your car
is uncharged -- when you find yourself returning from the grocery store with
lots of things you never wanted to eat, balanced in a wicker basket on your
head because you need both hands to steer the bicycle -- then maybe, just maybe,
you'll have gained permission from some amorphous global consensus to go on
living your life.
The Shinbone: The Frontier of the Free Press
Mailbag . Issue Index . Politimals . College Football Czar