[Greenbuilding] ENERGY STAR Clothes Dryers Program Launch

[Reuben Deumling]

On Sun, Jul 22, 2012 at 10:09 AM, Peter Kidd <peterkidd at shaw.ca> wrote:

>  ... Without the very impressive efficiency gains in appliances, our
> comparatively slowly rising household energy consumption would have been
> through the roof.
>

That is a hypothetical. We don't know--and may not be able to figure
out--whether that is true. The fact is that in the 1930s and 40s many of
our (US) household appliances were very efficient: water heaters,
refrigerators, kitchen stoves, toilets, etc. Why they subsequently ran off
the rails and into wastefulness is an interesting story, but one that is
rarely told because it upsets the tidy narrative about how clever experts
introduced energy efficiency into our lives and made everything better. Per
capita we use several times as much electricity for domestic refrigeration
in the US today than in the late fifties when saturation of refrigerators
had risen to within shouting distance of today: 97%.
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