It does not matter. The correct way to reduce electricity consumption is to increase the price of electricity, aka a tax. No need for politicians to selectively pick and choose which products to gimp.
For those who will retort with “but those are regressive taxes and hurt the poor”, I will say that if you want to fix people being poor, then give them cash. It is unrelated to the goals of reducing electricity usage, and there is no need to mix the two.
For those who will say there is no money to give poor people cash, I will say that the difficult task of enacting even more wealth transfers is the only solution there.
Edit: It is the same exact thing with fuel efficiency in cars and gas taxes. There is no need for CAFE standards or mandated fuel efficiency if a simple gas tax was ratcheted up until usage dropped. Then we would not have pickup trucks twice the size they were 20 years ago consuming even more gas.
Of course this does not happen, because it is politically unpopular to enact legislation that broadly forces people to lower consumption. So we end up with these discriminatory band aids where you get screwed if you do not have sufficient political clout.
The objective is presumably to incentivize increased electrical efficiency in devices, by banning inefficient electrical devices. The goal wouldn't be to decrease consumption; it would be to increase the amount of useful work done while holding consumption constant.
That is semantics. The market of buyers will automatically reward sellers who develop more efficient devices once it starts hitting their wallet. If you want consumption to stay constant, then increase taxes a little. You can keep adjusting it up and down as one’s consumption goal changes.
> The market of buyers will automatically reward sellers who develop more efficient devices once it starts hitting their wallet.
The point is that it's not "hitting their wallet." Idle power draw is an externality — it's negligible per individual (i.e. something people neglect to care about), yet adds up to real money at the municipal level.
And yes, you can make electricity cost more until it's not nelgigible. But you (as a tax-code legislator) don't want to do that. With economic "force-multiplier" utilities like electricity or gasoline, you don't want consumption to stay constant — you actually want it to increase, because consumption of such utilities is in the direct causal chain for GDP growth. Spending energy is necessary-but-not-sufficient to drive your country's economy; disincentivizing your population as a whole from spending energy, is disincentivizing them from driving the economy!
An electricity tax is like a corporate income tax: it indirectly disincentivizes people from making money. Which, as a tax-code legislator, is the last thing you want.
The point of this weird and arcane approach to incentivization that you object to, is to simultaneously incentivize useful electricity consumption, while also disincentivizing useless electricity consumption. To ramp up productivity, by saying "use as much of this as you can — but only in such a way as to drive the economy!"
> the difficult task of enacting even more wealth transfers is the only solution there
What? Haven’t you heard of tax brackets? If you are so keen to tax electricity more than it already is , and are concerned it would affect the poor, then use tax bracketing just like income tax does. The poor pay less by being in a lower bracket.
Having said that, higher taxes on electricity may affect businesses in a way you don’t intend.
The same way that income taxes are calculated and paid. You pay tax once per year based on your income. But anyway, I don’t like the idea. It wasn’t mine.
For those who will retort with “but those are regressive taxes and hurt the poor”, I will say that if you want to fix people being poor, then give them cash. It is unrelated to the goals of reducing electricity usage, and there is no need to mix the two.
For those who will say there is no money to give poor people cash, I will say that the difficult task of enacting even more wealth transfers is the only solution there.
Edit: It is the same exact thing with fuel efficiency in cars and gas taxes. There is no need for CAFE standards or mandated fuel efficiency if a simple gas tax was ratcheted up until usage dropped. Then we would not have pickup trucks twice the size they were 20 years ago consuming even more gas.
Of course this does not happen, because it is politically unpopular to enact legislation that broadly forces people to lower consumption. So we end up with these discriminatory band aids where you get screwed if you do not have sufficient political clout.