Laws require showerheads to restrict the flow of water, making it harder to get a good shower. People compensate by taking longer showers, which results in overall water use going up rather than down. This not only wastes water, but also wastes people’s precious time.
This is what researchers have found, notes Professor Ian Walker: “There’s a clear negative relationship between water pressure and consumption. More powerful showers used less water overall. A LOVELY TINGLY SHOWER MIGHT BE *BETTER* FOR THE ENVIRONMENT THAN A WEAK DRIBBLE. I know, right?”
290 people in a recent English study “burned through an extra” 4.4 million liters of hot water, and about 15 tons of CO2, over the course of 39 weeks, due to showerheads that restrict the flow of water.
In the U.S., showerheads restrict water use due to regulations adopted under a federal law known as the Energy Policy and Conservation Act (EPCA).
Thanks to EPCA, dishwashers and washing machines take much longer to run than they used to, and get clothes and dishes less clean, due to federal regulations. These regulations aim to save water, but it is not scarce in most of the country, and does not need conserving. The regulations do this by making washing machines use ridiculously little water, too little water to get many clothes and some dishes clean. As a result, some people run their washing machine or dishwasher multiple times rather than just once, increasing energy use. The Trump administration attempted to roll back these regulations to the extent that they were counterproductive and actually increased energy use. But the Biden administration undid the Trump administration’s steps toward fixing this situation.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute, which is trying to get rid of the Biden administration’s counterproductive regulations, explains:
The Biden administration recently learned that it does not have an easy, unobstructed path to regulating your home appliances under the pretext of “green” goals. Last month, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the administration’s attempt to prohibit faster dishwashers.
Decades ago, consumers enjoyed a one-hour wait for a clean load of dishes. Today, you wait more than two and a half hours, and likely often find dishes that need rewashing. Still the Biden administration insists on mandating appliances that use less energy and water, restricting manufacturers from making more efficient options. In 2022, the Department of Energy (DOE) tightened the existing rule, further pushing painfully slow and inefficient dishwashers into the market.
However, in Louisiana v. US Department of Energy, the Court of Appeals invalidated the DOE’s rule. The court found that, instead of leading to ecological gains, the rule forces more rewashing, prewashing, and handwashing, thus more energy and water usage that nullifies the purpose of the regulation.
If you think the rule sounds “arbitrary and capricious,” the court would agree. It scolded the DOE in these terms and highlighted regulators’ inability to justify the regulation. In fact, the court suggested that the DOE may be entirely without authority to regulate dishwasher water use at all.
This victory stems from CEI’s presence at the frontlines for home appliance deregulation. In March 2018, CEI petitioned the DOE to consider new standards for dishwashers with cycles of one hour or less. The government granted our petition and adopted our proposed standards in 2020. However, President Biden reversed the measure through executive order on his first day in office. Biden’s DOE then reinstated and tightened previous regulations. Several states sued. CEI filed an amicus brief in the Fifth Circuit case that culminated in the court’s decision last month.
Now, the agency must either restart the process to promulgate a rule allowing one-hour dishwashers or at least come up with a more convincing rationale for not doing so.
George Will of the Washington Post features the DOE’s dishwasher regulations as “a dirty joke” in a recent column. He adds:
“This issue was catnip for the admirable Competitive Enterprise Institute, which was founded 40 years ago to be a nuisance to government that makes a nuisance of itself. CEI’s prodding in 2018 produced the Energy Department’s 2020 ruling permitting dishwashers that were better at washing dishes than were machines that complied with the 2012 regulations.”
The Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist also says, the Energy Department’s regulators seem to have an “unsleeping search for reasons to boss us around for our own good.” CEI doesn’t let them. We paved the way for this latest deregulation, and we will continue to do so with other unwanted mandates on home appliances.
Effects of this court decision may ripple into clothes washers and dryers, which have struggled with decreased efficiency thanks to similar restrictions. Moreover, the court found that the regulators had taken such an expansive view of their own authority that the DOE may have been improperly regulating consumer appliances beyond dishwashers for decades.
