Even if this does lead to a higher price, “could this be cheaper at the cost of being more disposable” doesn’t seem like a good standard for consumer harm. If we’re paying more because we get longer-lasting more repairable products, we’ll still probably end up ahead.
> Easier repair could also lead more consumers to use old, energy-inefficient products, resulting in a higher environmental impact, especially with cars, trucks, refrigerators, or other major appliances.
Just impose carbon taxes to make sure that the ecological damage doesn’t get externalized and then let the market sort it out.
Anyway, every time we talk about replacing gas cars with electric cars, there’s a lot of worry about the embodied carbon of a new electric car. So I guess by that argument, we should prefer to keep old devices running rather than replacing them, or at least people who want to replace the old devices need to prove that the benefit of cleaner running is higher than the cost of replacing the device.