On occasion, it is my duty and privilege to dig deep into established facts, figures, and other inconveniences so that you might gain a greater understanding of just how forehead-slapping stupid everything is.
This is one of those occasions, and it starts where so many things end: with your toilet.
Everything went wrong — as so many things did — during the administration of President George H.W. Bush, who put his signature on the Energy Policy Act of 1992, passed by the Democrat-dominated Congress. It was one of those feel-good laws that didn’t feel so good once its provisions kicked in, particularly those low-flow toilets that didn’t, you know, flush.
The law slashed the legally allowed water volume for new toilets from the standard 3.5 gallons (or even more for older toilets) to just 1.6. Early models were so bad that people often resorted to flushing three or four times to get the job done, using more water than the original models that worked.
Things got so bad that Americans started smuggling toilets in from Canada. From there, things got worse.
The 1.6-gallon designs improved over time, but then some states (cough, Colorado, cough) enacted even stricter mandates. I learned about what the Democrats had done to bathrooms in my state when we had to call in a plumber last year for what my wife and I feared might be a toilet replacement.
“You have one of the good toilets,” the plumber told me. “Don’t replace it until you’re ready to move, and take it with you.”
“But this toilet sucks,” I said.
“Not as bad as anything I’m allowed to replace it with.”
A plumber refused a pricey plumbing job because the government-mandated results would be so awful.
A PLUMBER REFUSED A JOB. IN A NICE NEIGHBORHOOD.
So that’s where we are after three-plus decades of Big Government making your toilets better.
Then there are the low-flow showerheads that people love so much that the first thing they do when installing one is remove the flow restrictor. There’s good news on that front, as my PJ Media colleague David Manney reported on Tuesday: “Eleven House Democrats crossed party lines to support Republicans in overturning the Biden-era regulation that restricted water flow in household showerheads. The resolution targeted a rule that capped gallons per minute, regardless of how many spray nozzles or settings a showerhead used.”
The bad news is that repealing the Biden-era rule leaves the Obama-era rule in place, so new showerheads won’t really be any better than the older ones.
We also have dishwashers that don’t use enough water to get the food off. Basically, if you have an Obama-era dishwasher or newer, it’s good for drying the dishes — most of the way, anyway — after you’ve done a decent job of handwashing them yourself. My dishwasher is pre-Obama, and it remains a cherished (and lovingly maintained) possession.
But the point of all of this meddlesome government is that we’re saving water, right?
WRONG.
Residential water use, including indoor and outdoor needs like drinking, bathing, laundry, toilets, and keeping those lawns watered, accounts for just 8-12% of total freshwater use in the United States, depending on location and weather conditions. So let’s keep it simple and call it 10% on average.
Agriculture, industry, and power generation use almost all of the rest. Golf courses, I was surprised to learn, use just 0.5% of our freshwater.
While per-capita water use has declined since 1992, residential mandates’ direct contribution to overall savings is tiny — maybe 2-3% at best — while other sectors did the heavy lifting. Meanwhile, appliances keep getting more expensive, shorter-lived, and more difficult to repair as we rely on more and more technology to compensate for less and less water.
Dishwashers and washing machines never required computer chips, but now they do — and do you have any idea how much water is used in chip manufacturing? A typical semiconductor fab consumes 5–10 million gallons per day of water, much of it “ultrapure.”
Granted, very few of those chips end up in dishwashers, but the totals do add up over time, and somehow never get mentioned in government statistics about how well their mandates work.
You’ve been sold an expensive bill of goods for stuff that doesn’t work as well as before, costs more than it used to, and needs replacing much more often.
All to reduce maybe — maybe! — 3% of our water use.
Years ago, my friend (and sci-fi author/Instapundit colleague) Sarah Hoyt shared her theory about that with me. “The point,” she said, “isn’t to save water or electricity.”
“It’s to make people get used to everything always getting a little bit worse instead of better. They’re conditioning us for socialism.”
That’s a trick so dirty that I feel like I need a shower.
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