The Politics of Worse for Worse Sake

On Monday, May 5, President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency announced that it would be eliminating divisions dedicated to climate change and energy efficiency, including the one responsible for overseeing the Energy Star program. Anyone who has taken a stroll through the appliance section of a Home Depot or Best Buy in the last 33 years will recognize the Energy Star logo from those big blue stickers affixed to the corners of fridge doors, washers, dryers and dishwashers. 

Put aside the program’s benefits to the environment — a fancy word for “where we live” — and focus on a pecuniary number: Over its duration, the Energy Star program has saved Americans half a trillion dollars on energy costs. Alliance to Save Energy president Paula Glover tells the New York Times that the program’s annual yield of $40 billion in savings comes with the scant outlay of $32 million per year — a rate of return to consumers 1,250 times greater than the initial investment. Put another way, for the cost of less than half of a single F-35 fighter jet, Americans get back the equivalent of the real annual income of about 500,000 households every year.

So, obviously, that’s gotta go. As with anything else under the Trump regime, if it ain’t broke, why have it? 

The light bulb moment that sent the EPA on course to bring good things to death almost certainly does not belong to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin. Nobody in the Trump administration is paid to think besides the Big Man and Reichsführer Miller. If somebody is going to break the mold by crafting new policy and establishing industry standards, it isn’t going to be Zeldin, a paste-sculpted weevil easily mistaken for the protagonist in the Onion’s classic article, “‘I Provide Office Solutions,’ Says Pitiful Little Man” when he isn’t busy losing elections to Kathy “The Dial Tone” Hochul.

It’s possible the Energy Star program fell victim to a random Department of Government Efficiency algorithm looking for the words “environment, efficiency and standards,” but it’s just as possible that it was caught up in the president’s crusade against any EPA program notionally dedicated to climate change. In that case, it must be removed to make sure nobody is reminded that climate change exists. Such cuts would be in good company: The Trump administration has already cut NASA’s science support to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research on climate threats, the National Climate Assessment, the State Department Office of Global Change, the U.S. Global Change Research Program and cut the funding of the National Weather Service and the funding and staffing of the EPA itself. This list is incomplete.

“If I put this blanket over my head, I become invisible,” has been Republican environmental policy for decades, but this move is stupid even under those terms, something traditionally conservative groups have made clear. At the industry level, over 1,000 U.S. manufacturers of everything from fridges to home air conditioners lobbied against cutting the Energy Star program when the Trump administration first floated the idea in 2017. Then, this March, industry groups, appliance manufacturers and the rabid Marxists at the chamber of commerce sent Zeldin a letter praising Energy Star as an example of “non-regulatory” public/private partnership, adding, “Eliminating it will not serve the American people. … It is likely that, should the program be eliminated, it will be supplanted by initiatives that drive results counter to the goals of this administration such as decreased features, functionality, performance, or increased costs.”

It is true, however, that the Republican donor class is not a monolith, and ordinarily this is the part where a detective looking to make sense of this mystery reveals the culprit and their elegantly mercenary motives to the rest of the suspects in the drawing room. Imagining the murder of Energy Star as a plot by electric utility owners makes sense. They are already a powerful special interest that — in between letting centenarian utility infrastructure do stuff like “burn down large portions of California” — cut enough candidate checks to skip inspections and maintenance and raise rates when they want to. On the other side of the equation are the chamber of commerce, home construction and people who make basically everything electrical about your house. It’s tough to see what benefits Trump draws from pandering to the former at the expense of the other conservative constituencies and all the conservative consumers they sell to.

Because, despite the MAGA movement’s animating principle of self-defeating spite, there is no consumer-level constituency who wants their household appliances to do what they currently do, only more expensively. Could you round up some coal-rolling red-hats ready to be apoplectically angry about the idea of a very helpful government website (for now) that allows them to plug in the specs on their fridges and find out that they could amortize half the cost of a replacement with identical features just in energy savings? Yeah, OK, probably. Are you going to wind up finding much more than one guy alone in a room delivering a hortatory monologue about chemtrails? Probably not. At the end of the day, very few people are going to the Ford dealership to say, “Yeah, gimme the F-150 with the identical towing capacity, horsepower and sticker price, but do you have it where it gets five miles per gallon less?” While they might not have the same culture war cred, a TV or a dishwasher or a heat pump are no different. 

Getting rid of Energy Star is a perfect parable for the Trump administration. It is something no one wants, that no one was sold, that will cost Americans money upfront and even more down the road, that will make any number of things worse without any discernible benefit, all with an origin the rest of us can only guess at. 

It could be seen as a targeted attack on climate change as an observable reality, sure. But it could also be that this is happening because of some fever dream the Big Man had — an imbalanced Whirlpool dryer wobbling away from the wall and rattling like Marley’s chains, chasing Trump through his Caesar’s Mind Palace until he awoke drenched by McDonald’s fryer-oil sweats. It does not occur to him that the players in this market welcome standards that apply to all, do not pocket the extra you pay on your energy bill and do not want to pay to retool their production lines. These are not Trump’s thoughts, because the subject is not himself.

For all we know, Energy Star’s efficiencies live in the same suite of demented fantasies he has about environmentally friendly water fixtures. A dishwasher that uses less water is just a few steps away from Trump’s persistent Freudian fecal anxiety of efficient toilets that he has to flush over and over and over, their low-flow hurling itself fruitlessly at another of his imperturbable Filet-O-Fish-composite logs. Apart from cranking the AC down to the demoisturize zone, Wet Donny probably hasn’t used a home appliance that isn’t the TV or his Coke fridge since the Beatles were still together, and real-life details like “dishwashers are amazing now” and “your fridge’s electricity bill is expensive” will never intrude on our #1 president’s #2 reveries. 

Cutting Energy Star sits somewhere between the tariffs and defunding federal science research on the pointlessness graph. Until now, though, most of this administration’s pointlessness has at least been bound by the explanatory connective tissue of racism or greed. They haven’t been good explanations, or morally tolerable, or intellectually bearable, but the fact that they had their own perverted consistency made them almost plausible. By their own reasoning, C flowed from B, which flowed from A, even if the flow chart was labeled “EXTERMINATE ALL THE BRUTES” in rabid grease pencil.

That Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has turned America into his own measles hatchery with a sideline in producing typhoid-infused raw milk and putting all people with autism On A List at least seems of a piece with his being a Dunning-Kruger-fueled maniac with conspiratorially racist notions about disease, whose brainwormed thought nests like a matryoshka doll within the administration’s and Trump’s overall eugenicism. People like Donny and Bobby can buy their way out of illness, and others are anthropologically intended to get sick and die. People with disabilities, disfigurements or dysphorias all should not be seen, even if it’s too early yet to make sure that they all should not be.

Likewise, destroying public infrastructure and public education is sensible if it’s your intention to privatize something, sell it back piecemeal at tremendous markup and grow wealthy by holding millions of lives hostage. We already have proof of concept in the form of private health insurance. Slapping tariffs on Canadian lumber while paying last-second-airfare prices to traffic migrant workers to Libya at the same time that you’re promising a boom in American home building might be catastrophically witless according to your own goals, but xenophobia and white supremacy have their own superseding reasoning. On that note, cataclysmically shocking the economy with tariffs and forcing America to reindustrialize its way to self-sustainability is like getting chocolate in your peanut butter and peanut butter in your chocolate: A bunch of bastards can grow even more offensively wealthy by believing just enough in anthropogenic climate change to create an autonomous eco-fascist ethno-island, safe from the great waves of unwelcome humanity chased toward these shores by rolling catastrophes.

But the Energy Star thing just sucks. It sucks for GE and LG and Samsung and home builders, and it sucks every bit as much for you and me as it does for a MAGA coal roller pacing in a room with no one to talk to about “Q” and “The Storm.” We’re going to make things worse, and the explanation might be dumb and political and pointless, and it might be because a demented old dumbass thinks your efficient TV substantially increases the likelihood that he will wind up futilely flushing and flushing and flushing as something he’s ashamed of refuses to wash away.

The promise of the first Trump administration was at least that things were going to get a lot better for rich guys and racists, and the promise of DOGE and the second Trump administration seems to be that a lot of things are just going to get worse for everybody, and there isn’t any reason for it at all. Literally all Energy Star did is make manufacturers offer to save you money via an alternative product, and they begged to keep it. The nice thing you could say is that this is what political scientists mean by fascism being a cult of the illusion of constant action! But in practice, it’s going to be a bunch of guys who could get in a head-on collision driving the go-karts at Disney World ruining things for reasons that can’t even be stitched together by racism and insane greed. Things are going to get worse, because then things will be worse. That’s it. That’s the explanation.