I wasn't the first person to mention the losbter tail thing. Someone else here mentioned it first. The government should NOT be passing any kind of energy efficiency requirements on appliances, cars, or anything else. Liberals are always talking about the supposed benefits of these things, but they never look at the costs.
Every policy has costs and benefits.
The best thing to do is to let each consumer make up his own mind about the kinds of products that he wants to buy, and let businesses respond to the demands of the customers. The long term trend of energy prices is that, adjusted for inflation, energy gets cheaper and cheaper. This is because of better and better technological discoveries. Thus, to claim that the people of today should conserve energy for the people of tomorrow is equivalent to saying that the poor should subsidize the rich. What a ridiculous idea.