This is point of governments. To change the incentives for individuals so markets optimize for global good. This is not a hard concept.
Huh, this whole time I thought the point of governments was to protect individual rights. TIL /s
The reason the current approach is a failure is that everyone who doesn't care about efficiency can skirt the whole mandate by buying a truck/suv that gets a whopping 15mpg in town[1]. The popularity of trucks in the US speaks to how bone-headed the approach of mandating efficiency in cars is.
The even worse part about not correctly taxing the actual externality is that people think they are doing good things for the environment by buying new high gas mileage cars and then unwinding that whole thing with a cheap flight to Paris or by constantly having things shipped across the country for them.
>To change the incentives for individuals so markets optimize for global good. This is not a hard concept.
Yep, not a hard concept but the implementation is where everything went completely to shit.
1. https://fueleconomy.gov/feg/bymodel/2017_Ram_1500_Pickup.sht...
This makes assumptions about one's ability to even make such a decision given their environment/situation. There's a theoretical vs practical difference in taxing consumers for otherwise cheap yet harmful products. Theoretically you'd be right, but practically it's regressive.
People make decisions along more than one axis. I'd say there's a demand, it's just that it's not prioritized the most highly.
And I don't think this can be blamed on consumers. Have you seen any marketing that touts repairability? Companies have judged that they profit by selling products that are less reliable and less reparable, since that means they can make more sales. I can't find the link now, but I read an article that explained that Whirlpool has a cleverly designed racket to sell unreliable, unrepairable products and keep customers coming back: they own almost all the washing machine brands. If you hate your Whirlpool because it broke down after a couple years, you vow never to buy that brand again. So you buy a Maytag and it's the exact same machine from the exact same factory, just with different markings and styling.
Well then, I guess we'll have to watch as this problem will remain unsolved. If you want an unregulated market, people will do what they want, and they happen to want to give money to corporations whose only motivation is profit, because they get direct benefit from those transactions. Like cheap disposable halloween costumes, to take your own example.
Government has addressed economic externalities countless times with laws restricting various types of pollution, funding public transit, public health, education, etc. It is most definitely the government's job to fix such externalities by adjusting incentives on third party effects. No one else can achieve that.
Maybe you think this disposable-products externality is somehow special, but I don't really see a case for that.
That sounds very nice, but I see a few practical implementation problems that reinforce each other:
1) Market demand for a product that doesn't exist is an undefined value, and estimating its hypothetical value ranges in reliability from back-of-the-envelope to astrology
2) Economies of scale often require that total demand reach a threshold for a product to even have a chance to be profitable/competitive, i.e. there is some demand below which vendors are effectively forced to round it down to zero.
3) For high-tech products especially, a handful of big vendors agreeing on the way things are done can create massive network effects among suppliers that make it unduly expensive or outright infeasible for an erstwhile competitor to do things any other way. For example, good luck building a smartphone with leaded chip packages instead of leadless (a decision having a great deal to do with concerns about reliability, repairability, and component reuse).
We get what we are willing to accept and so far we keep buying unrepairable materials that quickly become trash. I made that statement in my original comment.
We must be willing to pay niche creators more for doing work that reduces our impact on the world, and so far people haven’t been willing to do much of that. Sadly though the corporations control our communication mediums and everyone is taught to blindly consume. It’s hard to fight the programming.
[1] and natural gas tends to be cheaper than electric heat pumps, especially nowadays
Here's their top of the line current offering in the USA: https://www.mieleusa.com/domestic/tumble-dryers-1575.htm?mat...
Natural gas dryer I never even heard of, but I am not surprised - when I visited Pennsylvania I saw quite a lot of clever uses of natural gas.
I stand corrected. I'd be curious if it's actually any more efficient, especially if the heat it's pumping comes from gas, oil, or resistive heating (in the winter, assuming cold climate). It can appear more efficient, of course, if one only measures the dryer itself, but that wouldn't be apples-to-apples.
> Here's their top of the line current offering in the USA
$1800 is an eye-watering price. That'd buy me 3750 hours of 4kW [1] dryer usage, so buying it for long-term savings alone is hardly an obvious choice.
> clever uses of natural gas
Raising temperature by burning it seems like the least clever use of natural gas (or any combustible).
[1] I figure the least efficient resistive heating dryer is 5kW and that Miele is 1kW.
For my case, I figure it has in recent years started to give a return. I had to repair it (myself) with parts for $40 once. It has certainly been running for much more than 4000 hours.
Looking at the greater picture, the power mix here is about 50% nuclear and hydro, the rest from burning garbage in combined heat (heats the whole town) and power.
You can tell it's not using as much power as our previous dryer, the bathroom would get sauna hot if you closed the bathroom door and also the clothes would take longer to dry - with the Miele there isn't much difference with the door open or closed either in drying time or room temperature. It's also less wear and tear on the clothes. The clothes come out consistently "dry" instead of between "humid" and "extra crisp" with the old dryer.
Stepping away even further from the picture, I actually prefer hanging to dry (clothes don't wear out as fast and I actually enjoy the slight stiffness of textiles hung to dry, a childhood thing I guess) but my (soon to be ex-, thank God) wife swears by the dryer, so... a dryer it was. And I have to admit, it's damn useful at times.
And for the record, the heat pump is used to dehumidify the processing air. The air is still heated using electricity. It just doesn't waste as much heat.
Again, this is not necessarily a fair comparison, if what's being pumped actually costs something that can't be measured at the dryer's plug.
$500 would likely be worth it, even at $.12/kWh, but the market may not think so if they're not available for that price in places with cheap electricity (and/or cheap enough natural gas, which can be much cheaper, ranging between $.04/kWh and $.06/kWh, equivalent, on my last bill).
> the heat pump is used to dehumidify the processing air.
This seems a bit strange to me, but it makes sense, especially if there's recirculation going on.
> The air is still heated using electricity. It just doesn't waste as much heat.
This is pretty clear from the efficiency only being 2:1, which is much worse than what I'd expect from a heat pump being used for heating.
However, I'm getting the impression that the heat pump in this case is entirely internal to the machine, which is not what I had in mind when mentioning heat pumps (thinking of their coefficient of performance of 3-4) [1]. Were I aware of these machines, I would have specified:
It's not as if modern dryers are using a heat pump with an outdoor source to raise the temperature of the clothing instead of burning gas or "burning" electricity with resistive heating.
That said, a 2x efficiency gain, by whatever method, is more than I expected, though still falling into what I would categorize as "not much room", especially if the gain comparison always assumes the oldest, least-efficient 5kW model only ever running at its highest setting. The other key assumption in all these comparisons is that all these dryers can finish the same sized load in the same amount of time, which can't possibly be true in the real world.
If my $40-to-repair machine already has some efficiency tweaks such that its worst-case is only 4kW, the $500 machine's worst-case is 2.5kW, but my actual behavior averages out to running them at 70% power, I'm saving barely over a kilowatt per hour, and I'm back up to 3500 hours to break-even at $.12/kWh electric rates. $1800-for-1kW is nearly 14k hours, or nearly 18 hours a week over fifteen years, and I don't do that much laundry.
[1] If this is so, it strikes me as odd to call it that, just as it would strike me as odd to call out a free-standing dehumidifier having a "heat pump", even though that's the crucial to the device functioning.
And the town's buses are running on biogas but are on schedule to be replaced with electric buses.
That's usually only if the gas is natural gas, and that's not available. Even then, "far more" can be misleading.
My experience in California is that it's on the order of 4x cheaper than using resistive heating in a residence (i.e. buying naively from the utility at retail rates).
My latest PG&E bill shows "procurement" costs (which I assume are the wholesale energy-only part of the bill [1]) of $.009-$.01/kWh [2], and, IIUC, wholesale electricity is about 4x that.
This is to say that an efficient enough electric heat pump (which I believe is plausible for whole-house heating, not high-temperature use cases like a dryer) could at least get close to gas in operating cost.
[1] only about 1/7th of the retail total, something which would likely surprise most consumers. This seems true for electricity, too, where, IIRC, the energy costs $.04/kWh, but PG&E charges upward of $.24/kWh at the highest residential "tier".
[2] converted from $/therm using 29.300111111111 kWh/therm