Every couple of years someone makes a legislative proposal to Congress to impose regional efficiency standards on heating and air conditioning equipment. On the surface the argument makes sense. Of course an air conditioner in Florida is going to perform differently from an air conditioner in Maine. However, once you go beneath the surface and see the nightmare that regional efficiency standards would create in the manufacturing and distributing aspects of heating and air conditioning you soon come to understand that whatever efficiency might be gained by the regional standards would be made irrelevant by the effect it would have on the efficiency of the manufacturing and distribution processes. The end product would no doubt use less energy but the costs required to manufacture equipment to the specifications of eight different standards versus one standard would far offset the savings. The same goes for the distribution process. Distributors shift inventory from one location to another based on demand. With different regional standards a distributor would no longer be able to pull inventory from a North Carolina warehouse if Florida has a hot summer. This would result in each local distributor having to carry more inventory. So not only has the cost of manufacturing increased but the cost of distribution has also increased. In the end you are left with a significantly more expensive specialized product that does not even come close to saving enough energy to balance out the excess cost required to produce and distribute it.