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Donald Trump has been boasting on the campaign trail about his “rollback” on plumbing standards — taking credit for making it possible to wash hands (huh?) and for making dishwashers faster and even for a more powerful toilet flush.
Why This Matters: Trump claims to have “freed” water and as a result, women in the suburbs “like him a lot.” Well, that is not true either.
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Air travel, according to Green Biz, is a growing source of carbon emissions, accounting for 2% of all global carbon emissions, and it is expected to increase to 70% above its 2005 levels by 2020, despite the fact that airlines have been successfully working to improve fuel efficiency and put more passengers on planes to improve fuel efficiency per passenger. The challenge is that passenger traffic is up so much that efficiency efforts can’t keep pace.
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The Trump Administration’s anti-environment policies are so extreme, they are now even proposing to roll back energy efficiency standards for light bulbs. In 2017, the day before President Trump took office, the Energy Department issued a rule to expand the types of light bulbs required to meet stronger efficiency standards. According to the web site Utilitydive.com, experts at the Appliance Standards Awareness Project calculated that the changes would cause consumers to lose $12 billion a year in electricity savings by 2025.
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Last week, two major trends made news in energy. The Wall Street Journal reported that Google and Amazon are hoping to expand the market for home energy efficiency products like smart energy devices and internet-connected devices like Amazon’s Alexa that are used to manage energy demand by incentivizing consumers to use less electricity during peak hours, and also collect information about individual energy use.
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