The Bulb Ban That's Really Only an Efficiency Mandate...That Amounts to a Ban
In her latest Bloomberg View column, former Reason Editor Virginia Postrel takes aim at the impending federal ban on conventional incandescent bulbs, which she says "makes sense only one of two ways: either as an expression of cultural sanctimony, with a little technophilia thrown in for added glamour, or as a roundabout way to transfer wealth from the general public to the few businesses with the know-how to produce the light bulbs consumers don't really want to buy." Postrel cites a recent New York Times piece in which Penelope Green condescendingly debunks the notion of a bulb ban, saying the law "simply requires that companies make some of their incandescent bulbs work a bit better, meeting a series of rolling deadlines between 2012 and 2014." But the upshot of the energy-efficiency mandate is that the least expensive, most commonly used incandescent bulbs will be banned—a point that Green obscures by citing a few examples of specialty bulbs that will remain legal, contrary to the expectations of bulb hoarders she interviews. And while it is true that the government is not forcing us to live in darkness, it is also true that all the alternatives to the most popular bulbs are inferior in some way: They cost more (in some cases a lot more), they take time to warm up, they don’t work with dimmers, they cast an unflattering light, or they don't last nearly as long as advertised. As Postrel shows, the government is imposing these tradeoffs on consumers without a logical, let alone compelling, reason. Tellingly, Green ends her piece by confessing that she too is stocking up on incandescent bulbs.
I criticized the bulb ban in a column a few months ago. Afterward I discussed the controversy on WHYY, the NPR station in Philadelphia. When I pointed out that the environmental argument for the efficiency mandate does not hold water, the host (echoing a caller) suggested the law is necessary to create a mass market for clearly superior products that consumers are not smart enough to appreciate, thereby bringing down the price. You can listen to that interview here. Reason.tv covered the subject last October.
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What's funny is that the technology is shifting on its own, so that when we do, eventually, move to other lighting technologies, this will be yet another case where statists pat their back and tell us how we'd never have done it without their mandates.
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That's not funny at all.
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Funny--strange, not funny--ha, ha.
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But not really funny--strange, either. More like funny--completely predictable-and-sort-of-depressing.
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Life's already hard enough, let the man find rueful humor where he can.
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What's strange is that we allow this scam to continue, year after year, decade after decade.
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This scam, along with so many others. 8-(
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It's scams all the way down.
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That's not how I would have put it.
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You're a clown.
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Your wig in My Cousin Vinny was ridiculous.
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What? I wasn't in that film.
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You were if, in fact, you are really Marisa Tomei.
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That's unsubstantiated.
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You're overrated. Oscar, schmoscar.
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You can't take it away fro--hey wait a second.
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That's unsubstantiated.
Don't deny us our fantasies.
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Ewwww.
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A Democrat congress crafted it, a Republican president signed it. Bipartisanship works!
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It's like that with trans fat too.
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The Obamacare individual mandate isn't really a mandate; it's simply an efficiency requirement.
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Just wait. In two years they'll come out with Incandescent Classic®.
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Powered by HFCS.
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HighFalutin Cock Suckers?
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Possibly. I've heard it had something to do with corn, but, really, how can corn be used to sweeten anything?
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It goes good with peas.
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Swigen! Cocksucka!
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+1 to any and all Deadwood references.
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How many government officials does it take to screw you.
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This many: ∞
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I have found that one (1) single government official can usually accomplish a good citizen-screwing.
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Just one, if he's the head of the IMF.
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The more efficient your energy usage, the more you use.
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Why is Virginia Postrel engaging in a dumbass culture war battle ?
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Why don't you ask her?
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http://reason.com/blog/2010/11.....nt_1990189
PapayaSF|11.7.10 @ 4:31PM|#
Yet another clue to how in the tank the media is to the Obamas is the regular fawning over her supposed fashion sense. I'm no expert but her fashion sense often seems questionable.
Funny to read this because I just suffered through a Time two-page piece of Michelle Obama's sartorial choices recently.
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"simply requires that companies make some of their incandescent bulbs work a bit better, meeting a series of rolling deadlines between 2012 and 2014."
Gotta love this phrasing. It's as though the writer thinks the words "simply" and "bit" can mask what the scent of a "ban".
You see, they didn't ban incandescents, they just made it illegal to produce them the way everyone likes them.
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Every intrusive regulation is not necessarily a "ban;" e.g. speed limits don't "ban" driving. Regulators are evil geniuses in the way they craft their mandates in smarmy "public good" language and tailor their impediments to noncompliance.
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"Last week, we should you how to be a gynecologist."
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"Electronic interference"
So, CFLs might cause CANCER?!
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I had heard some CFLers suffer from degenerative brain disease due to concussions suffered on the playing field, but had no idea they were at risk for cancer as well. Go Allouetes!
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I freaking hate the light from CFLs (I hate the Canadian Football League too, because it also sucks). In the long, dark Seattle winter, unnatural light is all we have- don't condemn us to cold, depressing fluorescent light, Feds. And Winter Is Coming.
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+1 reference, Mrs. Stark.
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If you don't like it, you are free to move to Miami.
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If you have the proper permits.
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I freaking hate the light from CFLs
You don't like looking pasty and somewhat green?
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And that headache-inducing flickering, that's fun too. This, plus the dishwasher phosphate ban - Progress!
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I wonder if it's possible to embed a subliminal message in that flickering.
Hey, wait a second!
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Don't even get me started on the phosphate ban. All my dishes came out of the dishwasher cloudy yesterday.
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As somebody who lives in an area with water harder than hell, that phosphate ban is quite unfortunate. I don't want to have to go to a fucking hardware store to spike my detergent so I don't have mineral residue all over everything.
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What are you spiking it with? It could wind up etching your glasses so they're permanently cloudy.
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I'm starting to see LED bulbs hit the market in reasonable numbers.
Expensive as hell and I have no idea what the color temp is, but at least they're out there.
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I'm holding out for fusion. Then I'm switching to a miniature sun.
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And that is why, inside a drab Silicon Valley office building belonging to a company called Lumileds, some of the industry’s most brilliant minds are plumbing the mysteries of light on an atomic level, working to devise the bulb of the future
They're working on it.
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In theory, they could make the color temp anything they wanted, right? Much more easily so than the Canadian Football League lamps.
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Color temp isn't the problem it's color rendition. Check the CRI on the bulb. The sun and incandescents have CRIs of 100. Anything below 90 is total crap. It has to do with a full light spectrum. The CFLs have spikes in the green spectrum in order to bump up the lumen number because humans perceive green as being brighter and lumens are a measure of how bright the light appears to the human eye.
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Most LEDs suck. The CRIs suck and they are less efficient than a normal fluorescent. The reason for the latter is that they overdrive the diode in order to get the necessary brightness. This results in a lot of heat and a shorter lifespan. The LEDs that everyone thinks of hat have super long lifespans are instrument type diodes that never needed to be very bright. If you pass a very low current through the diode it will last forever, but a can tell you from experience that a lot of current will release the spirits of a diode very quickly and spectacularly.
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Power LEDs can hit 50k operating hours to 70% brightness if you keep the junction temperature below 70C (e.g. Cree stuff). That can be a lot more difficult to do in a bulb rather than a actual LED fixture in terms of thermals.
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They cost more (in some cases a lot more), they take time to warm up, they don’t work with dimmers, they cast an unflattering light, or they don't last nearly as long as advertised.
And the process to manufacture them is extremely toxic.
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Likewise bacon.
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Actually, I like the light bacon casts.
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One
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It's my understanding that solar panels also have an extremely toxic manufacturing process.
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We need to reduce the population of dirty, global-warming producing humans anyway. Win-win, Baby!
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Maybe Congress should enact legislation to require lightbulbs to generate more light than can be generated by the amount of energy they consume - you know "simply require that companies make some of their incandescent bulbs work a bit better".
Once Congress mandates that the laws of physics must be violated, then we can have perpetual motion and free energy. It's just that simple!
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The law is the law. It would have to work.
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Particularly if it is enforceable with criminal penalties.
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The flickering fluorescence will add that extra little something to my basement office during the 8 month Michigan winter...
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That is a cheap magnetic ballast. A decent electronic ballast has no perceptible flicker. It's a difference between 60hz and 30kHz.
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In other news, the United States Coast Guard is preparing to publish new regulations that will mandate the use of PFDs on certain small watercraft. Sorta like a seatbelt/helmet law for the water.
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My dinghy is bigger than your whole boat.
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You have a 30-foot dinghy?
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Its the only one that looked proportially correct on his 300-foot yacht.
Economies of scale, friend... er, right?
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It's been a banner week for highlighting the complete idiocy of government imposed solutions to problems that didn't really exist in the first place, and this story seems like a nice tidy bow to end the week.
Oh, you want a cherry on top too? How about this op-ed from the WSJ by James Bovard about what he learned while doing government work for the summer-
My Summer Road to Perdition
What did I learn as a young man laboring for the Virginia Highway Department? How to work slowly to slipshod standards.Higlight from the article -
The goal with the Highway Department was to conserve energy, while the goal at the book bindery was to conserve time—to finish as quickly as possible and move on to weekend mischief. With government work, time routinely acquired a negative value—something to be killed.In the following decade, I hammered federal training and make-work programs in articles for this newspaper and other publications. Studies later proved that many of the participants in the two largest programs, the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (1974-1982) and the Job Training Partnership Act (1983-1997), earned less later in life than those who never received government training.
The government has always been radically incompetent at imparting job skills or good work habits. Unfortunately, as long as politicians can profit from handing out jobs and paychecks, the waste and character damage will continue.
Only 5 hours till beer 30. COME ON WEEKEND!!
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Argh. I can't see this lasting. I think the vast majority of people are still totally oblivious to this upcoming ban. Once people start to try buying bulbs and are unable to find them, they'll clue in. Maybe the law will be repealed ~2015. Until then, time to stock up.
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Also, the comments on Postrel's article at Bloomberg are pretty disheartening. People seem to have completely glazed over her facts and figures, and are parroting nonsense about incandescent lights being "a 100 year old technology" etc.
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Also a jaunty combination of antinuclear hysteria/hairshirtery and claims like "to resist [hope and] change is foolish. But then I know you hate science and progress" and that the federal government's power to regulate for the "common good" is totally unlimited. Sigh.
No dimmers on CFLs just kills them for me.
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Makes sense to me.
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Damn you and your 10,000 years old technology allowing you to roll your bike downhill.
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Nuclear energy is a 14.5 billion year-old technology.
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People seem to have completely glazed over her facts and figures, and are parroting nonsense about incandescent lights being "a 100 year old technology" etc.
So’s my Colt 1911. Still works just fine.
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Thanks for the mention, Jacob, and for the comments. My column, however, is on Bloomberg View (http://bloomberg.com/view), not Bloomberg News, which takes a "just the facts" approach and is headquartered in an entirely different part of town. Not that anyone at H&R cares or should care, but it's important internally.
Penelope Green, who's a good style writer but a policy naif, seems to have gotten completely snookered by the bulb lobbyists. But the NYT Magazine had a good reported piece on light bulbs Sunday: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06.....?_r=2&hpw;
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“Not only is it in alignment with the type of light that consumers like,” says David DiLaura, author of “A History of Light and Lighting.” “It’s commoditized and it’s cheap.”
And it puts off heat. Which is a feature, not a bug in some environments.
I know it sounds crazy, but objects which put off heat in your home... you know, during the winter... may actually be helping you, not hurting you.
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I know it sounds crazy, but objects which put off heat in your home... you know, during the winter... may actually be helping you, not hurting you.
Not down here in Texas.
OTOH I’ll take a little extra heat over having to shut down the AC and evacuate the house every time a bulb breaks.
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So some years ago, Philips formed a coalition with environmental groups including the Natural Resources Defense Council to push for higher standards. “We felt that we needed to make a call, and show that the best-known lighting technology, the incandescent light bulb, is at the end of its lifetime,” says Harry Verhaar, the company’s head of strategic sustainability and competition elimination initiatives.
Fixed.
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Hi Ginny! Reason was better when you were in charge.
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The primary reason it's not a ban is because the industry asked to not have any avenues closed in case of a technology breakthrough. And the next round of "not banning" products is in process by the DOE.
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what the heck does the fact that republicans voted for it and bush signed it have to do with the issue of people not wanting bulbs that sometimes don't brighten up when you want them, cost more than you want to pay, maybe save pennies on your indecipherable electric bill, and can't use because of my dining room dimmer switch. What does this woman think, that if republicans in congress vote for something and a republican president signs it, we should all be happy about it? WTF?
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Because "but but but Buuuuuush!" and referring to an argument as "talking points" means you don't actually have to make any sort of comprehensible rebuttal because the other person is automatically wrong (and a bad person to boot). They're magical words of power.
Just ask Naomi Wolf:
http://online.wsj.com/article/.....bs=article
We spotted this little gem from a Washington Post online chat with Naomi Wolf, the feminist author best known for her sartorial advice to Al Gore back in 2000. A reader asks: "Are you still sticking by your erroneous claim that anorexia kills 150,000 women annually?" Here is how she answers in the negative:
You know, right wing talking points are really something. This quite misleading claim resurfaces again and again even though I corrected that error the first moment I knew about it, in 1993 as soon as the first edition of the book [apparently "Fire With Fire: The New Female Power and How It Will Change the 21st Century"] came out.
There are two ways of reading this:
1. Wolf is defensive and graceless. Why not just say, "No. I corrected that error the first moment I knew about it . . ." and leave it at that?
2. Those right-wing talking-pointers are really on to something! -
It goes to an assumption that any ideological differences between the parties are just partisan. Anyone on the right side of the political spectrum cannot disagree with something a GOP leader supports. It's a strange postmodern view of politics.
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Next thing you know, they'll be "banning" cicada ice cream.
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Still own and operate a lava lamp?
Better stock up. They rely on the heat output of conventional incandescent bulbs to do their thing.
// Occurred to me out of the blue the other day
////Though I suppose I can build a board with a resistive element and some bright LEDs. Hey, I've got a new business model! Creative destruction for the win. Or something.
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Can't you just, like, use a can of Sterno or something?
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So buy a halogen. They're exempt, as are a bunch of other types of incandescents (rough-service bulbs come to mind).
I swear, people are such a bunch of crybabies.
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Criticizing environmental regulations on efficiency grounds is like criticizing communion wafers on nutritional grounds.
These people aren't concerned with reality, they're concerned with their piety.
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Any one interested in a franchise selling ceiling mounted space heaters with convenient on/off indicator light?
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CFL are not the only energy saving bulbs, I suggest you look at Vu1 bulbs. Vu1 bulbs don't have warm up time, no mercury, last for 11,000 hours, no electric interference, there dimable, light quality is just as good as an incandescent bulb and you can buy them now. Also in the long run Vu1 bulbs are cheaper to have compare to an incandescent bulb.
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Good at least to see Texas passed the local repeal ban law over the weekend
Gov. Perry signs the Repeal Bill into law
http://freedomlightbulb.blogsp.....bulbs.html
Updates on all US State Repeal Ban Bills:
http://ceolas.net/#li01inx
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Yeah, I don't think that the repeal ban is gonna fly. The whole Supremacy Clause thing and all.
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You gotta' love big government! I hate CFL's and I wasn't much of a fan of LED's but some of the newer advancements look promising. Toshiba's A19 is the only LED that i might consider putting in my house. They are just to expensive right now! What's bad is that lowered energy consumption due to more energy efficient lighting has forced energy coops to raise rates in order to cover their costs. So not only do we have a more expensive light bulb, but also higher rates!
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It is of course a ban on general service incandescents by 2020 - and the energy efficiency defence actually makes it worse....
http://freedomlightbulb.blogsp.....still.html
