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TODAY Thursday 24 April 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site. |
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TODAY Thursday 24 April 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site. |
TODAY IN THE WORLD: Refrigerator Wars
The best environment story of yesterday may be Carl Quintanilla's report in the Wall Street Journal about a feud between refrigerator makers. The moral is elusive, but the details are intriguing.
The feud pits Whirlpool against everybody else. And the cause of the dustup is energy-efficiency standards. Whirlpool was naive enough to take them seriously.
Three years ago, reports Quintanilla, refrigerator manufacturers banded together and decided that they could live with stricter efficiency standards so long as they were all equally obliged. So they recommended that the Department of Energy discharge its responsibilities under the National Appliance Conservation Act by requiring 30% energy-efficiency improvements by 1998. DOE was enthusiastic, amid talk of win-win strategies and corporate good-citizenship. Whirlpool thereupon embarked on an expensive redesign to conform to the new standards.
Their industry competitors pursued a cheaper approach. They lobbied the new 104th Congress to stop DOE from issuing standards in the first place. Sympathetic congressmen couldn't muster the votes to actually repeal the National Appliance Conservation Act, but they did manage to impose a legally suspect but politically effective moratorium on DOE's authority to issue new standards. The moratorium now having expired, the industry trade group -- the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers -- recently asked DOE to postpone the effective date of the standards until 2003, basing its request on the uncertainty occasioned by the moratorium it had lobbied for earlier. This brings to mind the case of the boy who murdered his parents and then asked for the court's mercy on the grounds that he was an orphan.
Anyway, DOE caved and decided to postpone the standards until 2001, which made poor Whirlpool go ballistic. They had poured in all that time and money to meet a 1998 deadline, only to find that they were done in by their industry partners. Whirlpool resigned from the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers and didn't bother to conceal its pique. "The industry signed off on an agreement, then walked away from it," said a spokesman. "That's a lousy way to run a business."
All this matters, environmentally. In most households, refrigerators are second only to dryers as electricity-eaters (dryer standards are to be considered next year). It's not very hard to make refrigerators dramatically more energy-efficient: insulation and seals, mostly. What's hard is doing it in a way so that the showroom price doesn't rocket up. Even though super-insulated refrigerators quickly recoup their extra costs through lower utility bills, consumers are slow to adopt long-term investment tendencies when it comes to picking household appliances. Convenience, size, reliability, color -- those are the things that count at purchase time.
Answers, please. A carbon tax on fossil fuels so that consumers are induced to demand efficiency? Government regulations that impose uniform standards that increase the price tag on the machines? Probably both. At this point, I'm skeptical only about a "public education" campaign with brochures and toll-free numbers and a corporate volunteerism strategy with solemn references to the public interest.
TODAY ON THE SITE
Anyone wanting to explore the connections between energy and ecology will find ready resources on this Website. Among the High Fives you can find "Energy (& Environment)"; "Energy (Renewables)"; "Solar"; "Wind" and a variety of pertinent entries on transportation and buildings.
And if you want to see how energy use -- more particularly, the combustion of carbon fuels -- may be literally changing the face of the earth, sift through the rich loam of information to be found in the Climate Change portion of In The Trenches. As Bill McKibben says, it's the problem that won't go away.
-- New York, 24 April 97, 07:00
4/16: Coca-Cola and the Merrit Parkway
4/17: Our White Guy Problem
4/18: Victims of Extremism
4/21: Toyota Steps Out
4/22: Doorman Ecology
4/23: The Day the Earth Day Stood Still