The Department of Energy announced Thursday that it has finalized the new and higher energy efficiency standards for several classes of appliances which they decided upon last year. Those standards can be found here.Warning! Keep your seat belts on, this is going to be a bumpy ride.The announcement from DOE Secretary Steven Chu says that these changes will save 164 Million Metric Tons of CO2, from entering the atmosphere due to our use of more efficient electrical appliances.Damn that's a lot of CO2............. Or is it?There's a total of roughly 800Gt (Gigatons) (798Gt actually) of CO2 in our atmosphere, of which roughly 27Gt comes from man's activities.164M (Million) Mt (Metric Tons) over 10 years = 16.4MMt per year = 1.6% of 1Gt = 1.5 billionths of 1% of the atmosphere every year.And this is going to cost us how many billions of dollars?Even if there were any ill effects of adding more CO2 to the atmosphere, which there aren't, anyone who does the math here has to...(Read Full Post)