Comment to the Department of Energy: Proposed Rule on “Energy Conservation Standards for Dishwashers”

Summary

The overwhelming bulk of the benefits asserted by the Department of Energy in its
proposed rule on energy conservation standards for dishwashers are “energy savings and “climate
benefits.” “Energy savings” are an illegitimate “benefit” of the proposed regulation, in particular
because the underlying analysis ignores the performance benefits of dishwashers not meeting the
proposed standards. Even apart from that reality, the asserted energy savings are so trivial — less
than $2 per dishwasher per year — that virtually any uncertainty attendant upon the DoE
calculations, ignored by DoE, would render the “energy savings” indistinguishable from zero.
Moreover, the DoE assertion that “the standards proposed in this document would not reduce the
utility or performance of the products under consideration in this rulemaking,” based upon the
observation that “Manufacturers of these products currently offer units that meet or exceed the
proposed standards” is deeply unserious, an utter non sequitur that has no place in a serious
analysis of regulatory policy.

The DoE attempt to justify the proposed rule on the basis of “the need to confront the global
climate crisis” is unsupported in the proposed rule. There is no evidence of a climate “threat” or
“crisis” as commonly asserted, in terms of temperature trends, polar sea ice, tornadoes, tropical
cyclones, wildfires, drought, flooding, or ocean alkalinity. The Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change is deeply dubious about the various severe effects often asserted as prospective
impacts of increasing atmospheric concentrations of GHG. Moreover, NASA reports significant
planetary greening as a result of increasing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, and data
from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization show that global per capita food
production increased 46 percent between 1961 and 2020, and 20 percent for 2000-2020.

The “crisis” narrative is derived wholly from climate models that cannot predict the actual
temperature record. In particular, the suite of climate models underlying the IPCC 5th and 6th
Assessment Reports overstate the mid-troposphere temperature record by factors of about 2.5.
Moreover, the models are fine-tuned in such a way as to deny the importance of natural influences
on climate phenomena, but that is inconsistent with a large body of evidence, in particular the
substantial warming observed from 1910 to 1945, and the close correlation between the satellite
temperature record and the El Niño/Southern Oscillation.

The cumulative emissions reduction of 418,000 metric tons asserted in the proposed rule
would be less than 5 ten-thousands of a percent of the total envisioned in the Biden net-zero policy,
which would yield a reduction in global temperatures of 0.173°C by 2100, a figure that would be
barely detectable given the standard deviation (0.11°C) of the surface temperature record.

Accordingly, the “climate benefit” of the proposed rule in terms of actual climate phenomena
would be zero, literally, and therefore the monetized climate benefits of the proposed rule asserted
by DoE are an illusion.

DoE attempts to circumvent this obvious problem by substituting in place of any such
analysis an application of the “social cost of carbon” to the asserted reductions in GHG emissions
attendant upon implementation of the proposed rule, as estimated on an interim basis by the Biden
Administration Interagency Working Group. The interim IWG estimates are deeply flawed, in that
they (1) distort the actual economic growth predictions produced by the integrated assessment
models, (2) base predictions of future climate phenomena on climate models that cannot predict
the past or the present, (3) incorporate “co-benefits” in the form of a reduction in the emissions of
other criteria and hazardous air pollutants already regulated under different provisions of the Clean
Air Act, (4) incorporate the asserted benefits of GHG reductions on a global basis, and (5) employ
discount rates that are inconsistent and inappropriate.

The “consumption rate of interest” is not the correct conceptual discount rate for regulatory
analysis because the regulatory reallocation of resources in pursuit of increased economic
efficiency is an investment, the opportunity cost of which is the marginal social return to
investment. The common argument that a low discount rate is needed to further the goal of
intergenerational equity is not correct. Future generations prefer to receive a bequest of an
aggregate capital stock both natural and manmade more- rather than less valuable, an objective
that requires efficient resource allocation by the current generation, and therefore the application
of the correct discount rate.

The proposed rule is fatally flawed, and should not be finalized.