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From the outrage factory that brought you Joe Biden’s War on Gas Stoves comes a new hit just in time for summer: Joe Biden’s War on Dishwashers.
Late last week, the Department of Energy announced new efficiency standards for household dishwashers, the result of a congressionally mandated regulatory review that nevertheless has sent conservative media into a tizzy. “As usual with environmentalist crusades, the target is poorly chosen and the ‘solution’ is likely to aggravate people, with no benefit to the planet,” The National Review slammed. Fox Business complained that the “war on appliances continues.” The Daily Mail deployed its signature scare caps to blare that “now Biden is going after your DISHWASHERS.” From the trenches, Reason wearily dispatched that “Joe Biden’s War on Dishwashers Rages On.”
When a commissioner for the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission, whose job it is to make sure the stuff in our house doesn’t kill us, pointed out last January that maaaaybe having methane-leaking gas stoves in our kitchens isn’t the healthiest of ideas, a similar conservative firestorm had also ensued. Never mind that a federal “ban” was never actually on the table: right-wingers and honorary right-wingers alike tripped over each other to profess that theylove their gas stoves the most.
I even sort of get it! A Wolf Gas Range is pretty sexy. But a Miele Lumen Ecoflex dishwasher is … not. In America, chefs are celebrities and gas is the aspirational cooktop featured on many a food and home renovation show; even refrigerators have become show-offy status symbols. But the humble dishwasher is tasked with handling our messes once the Instagramable #foodporn has been scraped away. Why, then, is right-leaning media acting like a SWAT team is posed to bust through our windows and spirit away our outdated dishwashers when we didn’t even realize we were supposed to love them in the first place?
The answer is that “news purveyors” have what Intelligencer calls “a strong incentive to keep consumers in a constant state of agitation” with “new fights that touch on such existential questions as who we are as Americans” since these “tend to light up amygdalae better than old, stuffy arguments over … jobs, wages, and the rising cost of living.” What this means in practice, though, is that the battle lines have been drawn before there are any battles to be had. “Americans with conservative views came to see driving a gas-guzzler, eating meat, and other climate-unfriendly practices as salient to their political and cultural identities,” explains The New Republic, “while recycling, eating vegan, and other environmental habits became coded as coastal leftist habits.” In other words, dishwashers have been recruited into the ongoing culture wars — because energy efficient = bad! — and may now take their seat somewhere between “masks” and “drag queen story hours.”
The dishwasher battle is especially supercharged, though, because former President Donald Trump has taken a keen personal interest in it. During a 2019 rally now best remembered for the president’s rant about not being able to flush his toilet, Trump also took aim at energy-efficient dishwashers: “Remember the dishwasher, you press it?” he’d regaled his audience. “Boom, there’d be like an explosion, five minutes later, you open it, the steam pours out, the dishes. Now you press it 12 times, women tell me. Again. You know, they give you four drops of water. And they’re in places where there’s so much water they don’t know what to do with it.” If you parsed that, congratulations.
A year later, Trump confirmed he’d lifted the “burdensome regulations” on dishwashers and subsequently boasted on the campaign trail that “now you can buy a dishwasher and it comes out beautiful.” (I, for one, don’t believe the former president has ever done dishes in his life — “now you press it 12 times, women tell me”??? — but I digress).
In truth, Trump actually hadn’t lifted a regulation on dishwashers so much as he’d written a new one, Wirecutter points out. Under Trump’s watch, the Department of Energy introduced a whole new product class for special dishwashers that run on short cycles, which are hyper-fast and usually energy- and water-intensive. These new speedy dishwashers wouldn’t be regulated and therefore could use unlimited water and energy. Huzzah! Only, hilariously, manufacturers didn’t exactly rush to make these new machines (the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers, an industry interest group, actually opposed them), and Biden eventually closed the silly little loophole.
The rules proposed by the Biden administration last week build on the Trump-era rollback by further calling for “conventional household dishwashers made in or imported into the U.S. as soon as 2027 … to use 27% less power and 34% less water — no more than 3.3 gallons during their normal, default cycles,” Bloomberg reports. “Normal, default cycles” is the key term here because it’s actually the only dishwasher mode that the government restricts; “short cycle” modes are still allowed on dishwashers sold in the U.S., and aren’t regulated by the new rules. The short cycles just can’t be the default modes on the appliances. Surprisingly, this actually makes a huge difference: A Consumer Reports survey found most people don’t actually push the “short cycle” button, and only 6% of people use it “most of the time.” Even with short-cycle optionsavailable on all future dishwashers, the DOE still expects its new regulations to amount to $3 billion in utility bill savings over 30 years, reduce CO2 emissions by 12.5 million metric tons, and save 240 billion gallons of water.
So what are conservatives so upset about? One complaint is that energy-efficient dishwashers take too long to run, and while it’s true many cycles top two hours, there is, again, still a short cycle option available on some machines if you want it (though what’s the rush? You’re in a hurry to unload the dishwasher?). There is also Trump’s complaint that energy-efficient dishwashers aren’t as effective at cleaning as energy-sucking ones, though “several of today’s models that already meet the [newly] proposed efficiency standards have five-star cleaning performance ratings from Consumer Reports,” the Appliance Standards Awareness Project (ASAP), an organization that advocates for more energy-efficient appliances, pointed out in a recent statement. Wirecutter likewise concluded that “crappy cleaning performance and long cycles aren’t an inevitable outcome of efficiency standard” and “if your dishwasher is slow and sucks (and a better detergent doesn’t fix the problem), blame the company that built it.”
Well, how about the cost, then? A representative from the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers, the aforementioned industry interest group, told Reason that “we’re seeing costs of new products going up dramatically” due to new energy regulations, but Bloomberg reports that the DOE estimates consumers will only pay “an extra $15 for a new standard-sized dishwasher but could take in potentially three times that in reduced operating costs over the device’s lifetime.” ASAP additionally notes that “most dishwashers that don’t yet meet the proposed standard could be modified to do so by making changes in their programming, rather than physical design modifications,” meaning lagging manufacturers don’t need to start from scratch, either.
Of course, rational arguments about the new standards aren’t really the point. The fury is because the Biden administration has the audacity to do something that kind of sort of maybe could be called “regulatory overreach” if you’re totally unmoored from reality. Again, these standards were required to be reviewed by the DOE, hadn’t been updated since 2012, and the vast majority of dishwashers on the market require only simple programming tweaks to comply with the standards if they don’t already. This isn’t going to ruin anyone’s kitchen, much less their life. But in today’s political environment, it all somehow still means war.
Just don’t tell the conservative rabble-rousers that the same DOE energy efficiency proposal for dishwashers also cracks down on another familiar piece of large equipment.
Otherwise a “War on Vending Machines” will be next.
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On Rewiring America layoffs, a FEMA firing, and Vineyard Wind
Current conditions: It’s heating up in the West, where temperatures could hit triple digits in parts of California’s Central Valley today• Despite a soggy start to Friday in the Northeast, conditions will clear up in time for a warm and sunny Mother’s Day• It’s hot and clear in Kerala, India, where forecasters expect a wetter-than-average monsoon season to begin at the end of the month.
Electrification nonprofit Rewiring America announced Thursday that it is laying off 36 employees — about 28% of its workforce — due to the Trump administration’s clawback of Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund awards, my colleague Katie Brigham reported. CEO Ari Matusiak wrote in a public letter to his employees that “the volatility we face is not something that we created; it is being directed at us.”
Matusiak added on LinkedIn that since February, Rewiring America has been “unable to access our competitively and lawfully awarded grant dollars,” some $2 billion of which were awarded through the GGRF last year to the organization and four other partners to help decarbonize American homes. The Environmental Protection Agency has tried to rescind $20 billion of the GGRF’s $27 billion in total funding, wreaking havoc “on organizations such as Rewiring America, which structured projects and staffing decisions around the grants,” Katie goes on. Read her full report of the layoffs here.
The acting administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Cameron Hamilton, was fired on Thursday, one day after defending the existence of the department he’d been appointed to oversee, E&E News reports. Testifying before a House Appropriations subcommittee on Wednesday, Hamilton had told lawmakers that “I do not believe it is in the best interests of the American people to eliminate” FEMA — a response to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s remarks that “the president has indicated he wants to eliminate FEMA as it exists today.”
Though Noem swiftly appointed Hamilton’s successor — David Richardson, a senior official at DHS with experience in the Marine Corps commanding artillery units — Democratic Senator Patty Murray of Washington slammed the move, telling Noem, “We have seen an upheaval at FEMA that is going to put lives in jeopardy. We are losing indispensable staff just weeks away from fire and hurricane season.” Hurricane season begins in fewer than 23 days, with the possibility of the first named storm of the year forming before then, and forecasters are also anticipating an above-average fire season. “There is a reason the law requires the administrator of FEMA to have state emergency management experience,” Chad Berginnis, the executive director of the Association of State Floodplain Managers, told E&E News.
The Supreme Court declined this week to hear a pair of challenges brought against Vineyard Wind, the offshore wind farm under construction south of Martha’s Vineyard. The petitions were brought by the fishing industry lobbying group Responsible Offshore Development Alliance, which argued the approval of Vineyard Wind violated protections against ocean users and endangered species, as well as the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which represents Rhode Island fishermen and a seafood company. “We will continue to pursue our goal of shutting down the Vineyard Wind project by filing an administrative petition with the Secretary of the Interior,” TPPF Senior Attorney Ted Hadzi-Antich said in a statement, per The New Bedford Light. To date, Vineyard Wind has — haltingly — installed 32 of the planned 62 turbines, with an anticipated eventual capacity of 806 megawatts.
The Japanese-flagged LNG tanker Energy Glory.Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
Energy groups and CEOs are seeking exemptions to the Trump administration’s rule requiring 1% of U.S. liquified natural gas exports to be shipped on American-made, operated, and flagged vessels within four years, with incremental increases up to 15% by 2047. There are 792 LNG carriers worldwide, most of which belong to South Korea and Japan; just five, dating to the 1970s, were made in U.S. shipyards and are not currently in use, Reuters reports.
As a result, energy executives and groups, including the influential American Petroleum Institute, argue that the Trump administration’s rule puts U.S. energy companies at a disadvantage. Exporters “have little control over their ability to comply with [U.S. Trade Representative’s] new requirements but ultimately face the consequences of not doing so,” API CEO Mike Sommers wrote in a letter reviewed by Reuters. Building five LNG tankers in the U.S. by the end of the decade to meet the 1% threshold is not doable, Sommers added, because it takes five years to make such a carrier at one of the two U.S. shipyards capable of such production.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Thursday that its database of extreme weather events “will be retired” as part of ongoing cost-saving cuts and reorganization at the agency. Though the database doesn’t explicitly focus on climate event attribution, it contains data going back to the 1980s, charting the upward trend of billion-dollar disasters in the U.S., including severe hail, flooding, wildfires, and hurricanes. “This administration thinks that if they stop doing the work to identify climate change that climate change will go away,” Democratic Representative and former meteorologist Eric Sorensen of Illinois told The Washington Post.
Though the Trump administration has made deep and sweeping cuts across the federal government, it has especially singled out climate-related programs and databases. Some grant seekers have been encouraged to reapply with climate-related language removed from their proposals, a rhetorical shift that has also made its way into business branding, as my colleague Katie Brigham and I have covered for Heatmap. In addition to obscuring the picture of how climate change is potentially increasing damage and deaths in the United States, sunsetting the database is also causing headaches for insurance groups and financial risk modeling firms like First Street, whose head of climate implications and co-founder Jeremy Porter told CNN, “without it, replicating or extending damage trend analyses, especially at regional scales or across hazard types, is nearly impossible without significant funding or institutional access to commercial catastrophe models.”
The new pope, Robert Prevost — now known as Leo XIV — is expected to follow in Pope Francis’ footsteps when it comes to calling for urgent action on climate change. Speaking last year, Prevost “reiterated the Holy See’s commitment to protecting the environment, enumerating examples, like the Vatican installing solar panels and shifting to electric vehicles,” Vatican News reports.
The nonprofit laid off 36 employees, or 28% of its headcount.
The Trump administration’s funding freeze has hit the leading electrification nonprofit Rewiring America, which announced Thursday that it will be cutting its workforce by 28%, or 36 employees. In a letter to the team, the organization’s cofounder and CEO Ari Matusiak placed the blame squarely on the Trump administration’s attempts to claw back billions in funding allocated through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.
“The volatility we face is not something we created: it is being directed at us,” Matusiak wrote in his public letter to employees. Along with a group of four other housing, climate, and community organizations, collectively known as Power Forward Communities, Rewiring America was the recipient of a $2 billion GGRF grant last April to help decarbonize American homes.
Now, the future of that funding is being held up in court. GGRF funds have been frozen since mid-February as Lee Zeldin’s Environmental Protection Agency has tried to rescind $20 billion of the program’s $27 billion total funding, an effort that a federal judge blocked in March. While that judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, called the EPA’s actions “arbitrary and capricious,” for now the money remains locked up in a Citibank account. This has wreaked havoc on organizations such as Rewiring America, which structured projects and staffing decisions around the grants.
“Since February, we have been unable to access our competitively and lawfully awarded grant dollars,” Matusiak wrote in a LinkedIn post on Thursday. “We have been the subject of baseless and defamatory attacks. We are facing purposeful volatility designed to prevent us from fulfilling our obligations and from delivering lower energy costs and cheaper electricity to millions of American households across the country.”
Matusiak wrote that while “Rewiring America is not going anywhere,” the organization is planning to address said volatility by tightening its focus on working with states to lower electricity costs, building a digital marketplace for households to access electric upgrades, and courting investment from third parties such as hyperscale cloud service providers, utilities, and manufacturers. Matusiak also said Rewiring America will be restructured “into a tighter formation,” such that it can continue to operate even if the GGRF funding never comes through.
Power Forward Communities is also continuing to fight for its money in court. Right there with it are the Climate United Fund and the Coalition for Green Capital, which were awarded nearly $7 billion and $5 billion, respectively, through the GGRF.
What specific teams within Rewiring America are being hit by these layoffs isn’t yet clear, though presumably everyone let go has already been notified. As the announcement went live Thursday afternoon, it stated that employees “will receive an email within the next few minutes informing you of whether your role has been impacted.”
“These are volatile and challenging times,” Matusiak wrote on LinkedIn. “It remains on all of us to create a better world we can all share. More so than ever.”
A battle ostensibly over endangered shrimp in Kentucky
A national park is fighting a large-scale solar farm over potential impacts to an endangered shrimp – what appears to be the first real instance of a federal entity fighting a solar project under the Trump administration.
At issue is Geenex Solar’s 100-megawatt Wood Duck solar project in Barren County, Kentucky, which would be sited in the watershed of Mammoth Cave National Park. In a letter sent to Kentucky power regulators in April, park superintendent Barclay Trimble claimed the National Park Service is opposing the project because Geenex did not sufficiently answer questions about “irreversible harm” it could potentially pose to an endangered shrimp that lives in “cave streams fed by surface water from this solar project.”
Trimble wrote these frustrations boiled after “multiple attempts to have a dialogue” with Geenex “over the past several months” about whether battery storage would exist at the site, what sorts of batteries would be used, and to what extent leak prevention would be considered in development of the Wood Duck project.
“The NPS is choosing to speak out in opposition of this project and requesting the board to consider environmental protection of these endangered species when debating the merits of this project,” stated the letter. “We look forward to working with the Board to ensure clean water in our national park for the safety of protection of endangered species.”
On first blush, this letter looks like normal government environmental stewardship. It’s true the cave shrimp’s population decline is likely the result of pollution into these streams, according to NPS data. And it was written by career officials at the National Park Service, not political personnel.
But there’s a few things that are odd about this situation and there’s reason to believe this may be the start of a shift in federal policy direction towards a more critical view of solar energy’s environmental impacts.
First off, Geenex has told local media that batteries are not part of the project and that “several voicemails have been exchanged” between the company and representatives of the national park, a sign that the company and the park have not directly spoken on this matter. That’s nothing like the sort of communication breakdown described in the letter. Then there’s a few things about this letter that ring strange, including the fact Fish and Wildlife Service – not the Park Service – ordinarily weighs in on endangered species impacts, and there’s a contradiction in referencing the Endangered Species Act at a time when the Trump administration is trying to significantly pare back application of the statute in the name of a faster permitting process. All of this reminds me of the Trump administration’s attempts to supposedly protect endangered whales by stopping offshore wind projects.
I don’t know whether this solar farm’s construction will indeed impact wildlife in the surrounding area. Perhaps it may. But the letter strikes me as fascinating regardless, given the myriad other ways federal agencies – including the Park Service – are standing down from stringent environmental protection enforcement under Trump 2.0.
Notably, I reviewed the other public comments filed against the project and they cite a litany of other reasons – but also state that because the county itself has no local zoning ordinance, there’s no way for local residents or municipalities opposed to the project to really stop it. Heatmap Pro predicts that local residents would be particularly sensitive to projects taking up farmland and — you guessed it — harming wildlife.
Barren County is in the process of developing a restrictive ordinance in the wake of this project, but it won’t apply to Wood Duck. So opponents’ best shot at stopping this project – which will otherwise be online as soon as next year – might be relying on the Park Service to intervene.