Bureaucrats To Force Europeans To Drink Cold Coffee To Save The Climate…EU Directive Aims To Limit Coffee Machines!

Europe’s regulation bureaucrats are going out of control once again.

Citizens, they feel, aren’t grown up enough to responsibly operate their own household applicances. They need to be nannied, the EU bureaucrats believe.

So out they come with the European Ecodesign Directive, which originally was intended to regulate electric appliances like flat screen televisions, dishwashers or lamps. But the power to intrude into people’s lives and tell them how to live was just too irresistible – Brussels bureaucrats wanted more. In 2009 the directive was expanded to include all appliances that “can impact natural resources.” All the intrusion and regulation are justified by the need to “protect our climate”.

Last October I wrote about how the EU was gearing up to restrict household vacuum cleaners. Next in line are coffee machines.

The Austrian daily Der Standard here reports that a new European eco-design directive will switch off coffee machines already after five minutes. The directive will go into effect on January 1, 2015. Commercial coffee makers will be exempted.

Already harsh criticism is mounting. Some German conservative politicians say that the EU “should focus more on really important issues.” Moreover, the German business association UV Nord criticizes the “regulation madness” of the EU.

But the EU commission defends the move, claiming that it does not regulate the coffee machines in general, but rather only their warming function.

Der Standard writes:

The manufacturers can decide whether they wish to allow the consumers to decide if they want to deactivate the automatic switch-off function of the hot-plate function.”

 

14 responses to “Bureaucrats To Force Europeans To Drink Cold Coffee To Save The Climate…EU Directive Aims To Limit Coffee Machines!”

  1. Bernd Felsche

    They don’t have a clue that this makes the simple (numerous) machines more complicated, requiring more energy input to incorporate timers. The incremental cost to manufacture will also have to be borne by consumers; as will the environmental cost of billions of litres of cold coffee poured down the drains every year.

  2. DirkH

    Age of clean energy starts to look more and more like a sea blockade.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_blockade

  3. John F. Hultquist

    Will they next shut of refrigerators? Reminds me of the thermos joke that explains why such things took a long time to catch on:
    A person shows up at work with a large thermos and tells the lunch crowd it is a new device and the store clerk told him it would keep cold things cold and hot things hot. When asked what he had in it, he replied: I’ve got a pint of ice cream and 3 cups of hot coffee.

    1. DirkH

      There is the idea of a smart fridge that automatically gets shut off during times of peak demand and low wind/solar production.

      Modern high end German fridges already have 6 cameras that you can query over the Internet so technically, it’s nothing challenging.

  4. Windy2

    Can it be much longer before Europeans will be prohibited from wiping their own bottoms without a government controlled TP dispenser that limits the number of sheets per BM?

    1. DirkH

      Don’t give them ideas!

    2. gary turner

      Windy2
      17. April 2014 at 19:46

      Maybe not that bad an idea. We had a niece stay with us for a while. I’m certain she went through a roll of TP every two to three days all by her lonesome.

      I’d have loved a dispenser that limited the number of sheets per wad and the total number of sheets in a given period. Enforced by a bear trap over the roll. Bwa-ha-ha.

  5. DirkH

    After making electricity ultra-expensive, the leftists of course now demand free electricity for the poor.
    (article mentions number of electricity cutoffs per year:
    2012 : 321,539
    2011 : 312,500
    So, rising with 3% a year; at about 40,000,000 households total)
    http://www.n-tv.de/politik/Verbaende-warnen-vor-Energiearmut-article12685471.html

    Destroying markets step by step; like painting by numbers.

  6. Svend Ferdinandsen

    How about they stop the moving circus between Brüssel and Luxemburg.

  7. Kevin Marshall

    For many years the EU has been legislating about household appliances to make them more. Two years ago, in the name of energy efficiency I replaced my 20 year-old washing machine, with a good quality A+ energy efficiency one. On standard settings, the new machine takes twice as long on the cotton cycle and does not get “my whites white” nearly as well as the old one. The reason is that it uses less water and washes at 10 degrees lower. Even using a pre-wash (with extra powder) and the “aqua-plus” settings it does not wash as well. In other words, I try to replicate the inefficiencies of the old machine.

  8. Walter H. Schneider

    The EU and its bureaucracies merely comprise the army and its foot soldiers. The powers directing them are in the shadows, or perhaps not so much, e. g.: Maurice Strong.

    >>>…Strong’s three sources of evil are really just one source — Western civilization. Although he has reaped enormous personal profits from the Western ways of business and life, Strong has been a lifelong biter of the hands that feed him so well. In 1990, he even mused about a possible revolution against “industrialized civilizations.”

    What if it were concluded, Strong romanticized, “that the principal risk to the earth comes from the actions of the rich countries? … Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring this about?” <<>>THE Kyoto Protocol was the work of thousands of bureaucrats, diplomats and politicians. But no one person is more responsible for it than a Canadian named Maurice Strong.

    Strong organized the UN first-world environmental summit in Stockholm in 1972 and has never stopped pressing for a world where UN resolutions would be enforced as law all over the Earth.

    Strong went on to chair the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio and to become senior adviser to Kofi Annan, the UN’s secretary general. Not bad for a kid from Oak Lake, Manitoba, who dropped out of school at age 14….

    Strong sits on boards with the Rockefellers and Mikhail Gorbachev and chairs private meetings of CEOs, including Bill Gates. He hobnobs with the world’s royalty, too – and with dictators and despots….

    He told Maclean’s magazine in 1976 that he was “a socialist in ideology, a capitalist in methodology.” He warns that if we don’t heed his environmentalist warnings, the Earth will collapse into chaos….

    …in an interview with his own Earth Charter Commission, Strong said “the real goal of the Earth Charter is it will in fact become like the Ten Commandments. It will become a symbol of the aspirations and commitments of people everywhere.”….

    Maurice Strong: A Dr. Evil-style strategist. Owner of a 200,000-acre New Age Zen colony. Designer of a proposal to “consider” requiring licences to have babies.

    The architect of the Kyoto Protocol.<<<
    More: http://web.archive.org/web/20030224114735/http://ezralevant.com/EzrasArticles/Strong_Dec202.htm

  9. Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup | Watts Up With That?
  10. Jens K

    Strassbourg, you Dummkopf – not Luxembourg!

    1. DirkH

      Is there a difference?

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