Did DOE “flip the bird” to the DC Circuit?
By Mark Krebs -- August 8, 2023
“All three Notice of Proposed Rulemakings demonstrate the same anti-consumer biases of the Executive Branch’s Department of Energy: to ban non-condensing appliance products. Each suffers the same analytic and procedural defects that caused the Circuit Court to vacate DOE’s Final Rule for commercial boilers. DOE’s continued flaunting of its authority, despite the Court’s action inspired my post title (above).”
On July 10, 2023, MasterResource published Energy Appliance Victory! (DC Circuit vs. DOE). The “victory” was overturning a DOE Final Rule that would have banned non-condensing commercial boilers. In so doing, it also rejected the long-standing assumptions with the administrative state’s super weapon; its cherished “Chevron Deference.”[1]
The opening paragraph of my July 10th article read:
“The ‘wheels of justice turn slowly,’ but they indeed turned, even within the District of Columbia’s ‘uni-party.’ As for holding on to this victory, it is far from a slam-dunk for preserving consumer choice and free markets. I expect the struggle to escalate in Biden’s all-of-government war against natural gas and other fossil fuels.”
I had a gut feeling DOE would do something reactionary, and it didn’t take long. The DC Court vacated DOE’s commercial boiler efficiency rule on July 7. On July 28, DOE issued three notices for more stringent appliance efficiency mandates. One of these has been published in the Federal Register as a Docket EERE-2017-BT-STD-0019: Energy Conservation Standards for Consumer Water Heaters; Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NOPR), thus starting a comment period (closing August 28, 2023). The other two are pre-publication versions yet to be published in the Federal Register. Once final versions of these are published in the Federal Register, they become official and posted to regulations.gov under their corresponding Docket ID. Then, the comment period starts.
https://www.masterresource.org/krebs-mark/doe-dc-circuit/
