The U.S. Department of Energy is planning to use an expanded way of estimating the energy savings of appliances. It would incorporate the costs of everything from fuel extraction to distribution and also estimate the greenhouse gas impacts of the machine.
But the DOE made a strange choice; jettisoning the environmental data from the sticker to an obscure website that most shoppers will be unlikely to consult before heading out to the store.
Today, we submitted comments to the DOE expressing support for their plan to integrate this more detailed approach to rating household machines but critiquing the decision to only offer GHG emissions data online.
Citing both behavioral economics and the experiences of other environmental labeling programs we refute DOE’s twin claims that adding GHG emissions data will add no useful information to the Energy Guide label and render the label overly complex.