The Government Accountability Office Punk’d Energy Star recently by submitting fake products and companies for certification. The Environmental Protection Agency’s arbiters of efficiency standards rubber-stamped 15 out of 20 bogus products and a handful of fake firms became Energy Star Partners. Here are three of our favorite fabrications.
1. Tropical Thunder Appliances
To perform this investigation, the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) March 26, 2010, report states that it “used four bogus manufacturing firms and fictitious individuals to apply for Energy Star partnership…”
Dummy websites emblazoned with Energy Star Partnerships remain online for each of the four front companies—Cool Rapport (HVAC equipment), Futurizon Solar Innovations (lighting), Spartan Digital Electronics, and Tropical Thunder Appliances.
2. The Feather-Duster Fly-Strip Air Freshener
Ostensibly an indoor air purifier, this item is actually a standard space heater spangled in strips of flypaper, with a feather duster perched up top.
The product was submitted without a standard safety file number from the Underwriters’ Laboratories. Plus, the product’s website did not include a disclaimer required for Energy Star certification. Last but not least, the garish photo submitted with the product’s application portrays what is clearly a feather duster rigged to space heater. Nevertheless, these obstacles proved surmountable—the product was approved in 11 days and became listed on the Energy Star website…
3. The Gasoline-Powered Alarm Clock
On the application for Energy Star certification, this product’s description stated that “the item is the size of a small generator and is powered by gasoline.” The GAO never devised an image of this piece of nonexistent indoor power equipment, which would presumably make enough noise to temporarily wake consumers before carbon monoxide fumes sent them back to sleep for good. The dimensions are listed as 18 inches tall, 15 inches wide and 10 inches in depth. “Gas-powered clock radio is sleek, durable, easy on your electric bill, and surprisingly quiet,” the product’s marketing description states.
No one in government gets to have more fun than GAO investigators.
LOL pwned!
You expected something different?
They are testing Cap And Trade Phase I Integration, give ‘m a break.
Yeah, silly government doing silly things (Energy Star). Er, but wasn’t the group that discovered this (GAO) also the government? No one in the “private” sector had ever noticed this? Huh. The government figured this out first. Good for them.
Someone needs to do a lot of explaining.
When a good idea is deliberately sabotaged, it does incalculable harm.
#5, what about when it’s sabotaged by apathy? same amount of harm?
So the solution you would be happy with is:
EPA to recruit 1000s of engineers to certify each application.
To pay for this application fees are a $10,000-$100,000
To ensure people pay, you make it mandatory like the FDA
Then you have the current situation that the same $5 LCD thermometer used in a hospital costs $500.
The point is not that the Energy Star program needs fixing. Its that the Energy Star program needs to be scrapped.
Its not government’s job to rate appliances for energy efficiency. Obviously, all Energy Star ratings up to this point are worthless. Energy Star is just government-sponsored advertising hype for manufacturers.
It might have been a good idea. Its now highly questionable that any energy was saved. Its time to get rid of it.
I’ve got to admit the thing on the top of my mind is “Why?” (for a bunch of things).
I’m from “Rest of World” (Australia), so I don’t really get the point of the US Energy Star programme. It seems to be a “buy the badge” deal with no quantifiable definition of what the badge means (Other than “We’re conspicuous trend-followers”).
Here we have an energy star programme where each device category has a standardised way of rating the energy efficiency of an item. The numerical rating is mapped to a five-star band covering the normal ranges of those devices energy efficiencies. For example refrigerators are rated according to kilowatt-hours per unit volume. So for every fridge submitted, we get a range of possible efficiency values and this range is sliced into 5 bands, each corresponding to a sequential star-rating. It follows that smaller fridges are less efficient than larger ones, even though they may use less energy overall due to fixed energy needs of any refrigerator.
The idea is you send your new product to a lab and they tell you how cost effective in is in terms of the amount of energy it uses. It isn’t being done. They just hand out approvals to any hunk of junk and buyers are cheated.
I didn’t think “energy Star” was a government thing… no more than UL is (Underwriter Laboratories)
And people wonder why there are skeptics of global warming? And other things government scientists swear up and down to have gotten right, without a doubt. But then later… they hadn’t. Like finding a coding mistake in their computer models. Or those months of Russian weather data, that were duplicates of a previous period.
And then there are things the government simply refuses to test. Because they’re sacred cows, or something. Such as Polygraph machines. I’ll bet not a single model has ever gone thru standard testing. Nor has their operators’ training be certified, the way say an jet aircraft pilot’s training has. Because if they had, then all polygraph machines (even the PC based models) would join the museum of bogus inventions. But the FBI and CIA need their little toy of intimidation. So it’s hands off the magic lie detector box. But that and dowsing rods, should go the route of all the disproven junk science of the last century.
The hill reports that EPA and DOE have released changes to the Energy Star program to try to deal with GAO’s criticisms. Hopefully this will alleviate some of the fraud.
http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire/677-e2-wire/92193-epa-energy-dept-announce-energy-star-
revamp-after-negative-report