The signing of the federal budget for 2012 marked the latest effort by Republicans to forestall the coming legislation that will begin the phase out of the traditional incandescent bulb. The time and energy spent on debating a law that was signed into being 4 years ago under a Republican President exemplifies the misdirected focus of our elected officials not to mention their blatant disregard (or ignorance) of efficiency’s importance. Thankfully, their tribulations are unlikely to have any material effect on the movement that the forces of American capitalism have been welling behind for years now.
Despite not being able to actually repeal the legislation that was signed into law by President Bush in 2007, conservatives were able to attach a rider to the budget bill that restricted the Department of Energy to no spend any money on the law’s enforcement. Very tricky. So essentially they are trying to send the message, “It’s okay small business owners. Go break the law and sell 100w incandescent bulbs because no one can come after you for it.” Despite the odd spin on the duties of our legislative branch the republicans have likely missed their window.
“Bottom line, the standards are moving forward unabated,” said Noah Horowitz, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, which has promoted the standards. A NY Times article touches on industry officials saying that momentum has been transforming the industry for years and turning the ship around now would cause more harm than good. The industry has spent time and money on new products to meet the upcoming regulations. Revoking the law would simply create uncertainty in the retail marketplace for suppliers and distributors. According to NPR, Jaclyn Pardini, a spokeswoman for Lowe’s home improvement stores, said the company “is committed to abiding by the [original] legislation and it does not change our plan” to stop selling 100-watt incandescent light bulbs.
Why Are We Having This Conversation Anyway?
It may be par for the course for disgruntled politicians to make something out of nothing in order to start a debate, but in this case they are making something meaningless out of something incredibly positive. The evolution of our lighting technology is a win-win situation for Americans. For a society that is loathe to become more sustainable if it impedes the normal ebb and flow of daily life this represents an opportunity to make a meaningful difference in energy consumption that carries no residual burden on consumers or their lifestyles. According to the Department of Energy, lighting makes up 6% of the energy we use in our homes and 10-15% of the electricity. Lowering that number by 28% for the country is something worth pursuing.
We are not the only ones making the move either. In fact, we are pulling up the rear of the pack. Brazil and Venezuela started their phase outs in 2005. In 2009, the E.U., Switzerland and Australia started peeling the incandescent out of circulation. In 2012, China, Russia and Canada will be joining our movement away from traditional bulbs. I’m struggling to see the logic in the preservation of a wasteful, antiquated technology while the better part of the world is stepping ahead. For all of the fingers we point at China for their lethargy in sustainability it would be unfortunate if they could make this change but we could not.
This is all in addition to the fact that manufacturers have already solved the problem of appearance and light quality for American consumers. Not up to making the jump to CFLs or LEDs yet? No problem. This is America. If there is something that people are willing to pay money for then corporations are here to make it happen. Halogen bulbs, now in full scale production, give people exactly the same light quality and color as their older brethren so that most people could never tell the difference.
Save Personal Freedoms!
Supposedly, this is being touted as an affront on personal freedoms because it restricts the choices of what light bulbs people can freely purchase. Presidential candidate Michele Bachmann had to say:
“Let me tell you, President Bachmann will allow you to buy any light bulb you want in the United States of America.”
Bold words, Congresswoman. I am curious though… would President Bachmann also allow me to buy whatever hot water heater, boiler or air conditioning unit I wanted? How about whatever car or gasoline? These are all items that carry efficiency standards by the federal government in order to promote energy savings for the country. The fact that the Department of Energy regulates these items for quality and performance is the only thing that has kept our average household energy consumption stable for the past 40 years. If having ethanol content in gasoline is not strangling American freedom, then why are light bulbs exactly? Government regulation put in place to help the free market progress from pure consumption is as old as it is necessary. Why? Because the market doesn’t take us there on our own; because we are a country of avid consumers, not informed consumers.
The free market is adept at finding ways to produce anything for as little as possible, but it’s not quite as good at finding the most responsible solution and turning it into a product. The low cost solution for anything is low cost for a reason and unless consumers want to bother to get educated about what the repercussions of low-cost solutions are then the market has to be tempered with regulation to balance out the results. Whether it is EnergyStar, CAFE or light bulb efficiency standards, their purpose is not to hinder business, but promote the evolution of the marketplace.
Image Credit: Keesta.com
December 27, 2011 at 11:05 am
Interesting article. Your last line is most important about how regulations are designed to “promote the evolution of the marketplace”. The whole idea of a free market is that consumers (citizens) know what they want and drive the market, not a few individuals in the government. Sure, on its face this argument over light bulbs may seem unnecessary. What does a couple extra dollars on a light bulb really matter to most people? Furthermore, people will undoubtedly get used to the new bulbs and won’t care a couple months from now. But is that really the way our market should work? Why not outlaw fast food as a way to fight obesity? The fact is that our society is based off of choice and every attempt to limit the choices people have removes some of their freedom. Truth be told, the market is solving this problem already. That’s why companies like Lowe’s, and others, are eliminating incandescent bulbs. The burden with any new innovation lies on the producer. It is the job of companies like GE, and others, to produce a product and educate the public about how it saves money and/or helps the environment. Just the same way that organic farmers have to convince shoppers that their produce is better than the competitions. The regulations aren’t needed and no desired outcome, not even energy efficiency, is important enough to remove competition and choice in the market. Just a thought.
Thatcher
December 27, 2011 at 11:18 am
I am all for competition and choice in the market, but when the choices of one consumer bring with it negative effects on other consumers then a judgment call has to be made in order to correct or restrict that.
For example, I don’t think fast food is an apples to apples example. If one person chooses to ingest unhealthy food then the only person that affects is the one person. However, wasting energy when the majority of it is produced by coal is bringing a harmful reality to other people through no choice of their own. This would strike me as unconstitutional. The same goes for CAFE standards with cars. In these cases, efficiency is important because it lessens the degree of harm that people are inflicting not only on themselves, but others as well.
I see its effect on the environment the same way. Damaging the natural environment is only causing harm to the rest of society, albeit more slowly.
If it is the responsibility of companies to innovate and then educate consumers of that innovation, why is it not the responsibility of companies to educate consumers about the harmful nature of their products? How many coal companies are proactively educating people about the health risks associated with coal production and consumption? I’m going to guess few to none. If there is no one in the free marketplace to naturally fill that void, then that is where regulation is necessary.
March 26, 2012 at 8:48 pm
I have a few issues with CFL bulbs. The biggest one is the mercury they contain and the electronics required in the ballast. Those two things alone probably should have shot down any mandatory conversion, as these bulbs are hazardous waste once they wear out. Couple this with the fact that they take time to charge up to full brightness and that their lifespan is significantly reduced in applications where they are being turned on and off frequently (which is the majority of the applications in my house) and what we have is an expensive, difficult-to-dispose-of bulb that produces inferior light quality. Why not just canvas the nation getting people to use less artificial illumination?
It’s also fairly well-known that increases in efficiency don’t lead to decreases in overall consumption. Counter-intuitively, they actually increase overall consumption. It’s not as though the power company is shipping me free boxes of CFL bulbs so that they can reduce consumption enough to shut down a turbine or two. If electricity companies really wanted to campaign for energy consumption reductions, why not encourage people to stop using their clothes dryers or air conditioning, both of which eclipse home illumination in terms of energy usage in most places?
The CFL is mostly a turd in a pretty package. We all just need to turn off the lights.
March 26, 2012 at 10:19 pm
Jonathan,
Welcome. I’d say to start we have the same issues, but I’m not sure that they outweigh the usefulness of CFLs. CFLs aren’t that expensive and their savings pay for their premium over the life of the bulb. Sure, they can take a bit to reach full illumination, but sometimes that’s not that bad. I have them in my bathroom here and at night the slow fade up actually comes in handy. They do contain mercury, but as a piece of overall energy reduction, they could be saving more mercury than they contain. As for their disposal, well we have to get better at disposing of many things. Most things.
CFLs are constantly improving, but I don’t really consider them a solution. CFLs are just a step that allows us to progress into a new line of thinking that centers more around conservation. These bulbs will end up getting leapfrogged by LEDs which, despite their cost, last longer, use even less energy and allow for more control over the color of the light they emit. I think the important change is to stop reaching for low quality items that are cheap. Lightbulbs, like the rest of a home, can be seen as an asset–an investment. Spending $25 on a lightbulb may strike some people as crazy but only because we think of a lightbulb as a temporary, disposable item. On the contrary, the lightbulb can be no different than the fixture it’s screwed into–an investment and one that happens to pay for itself over time. The change in societal norms to cause people to question the lightbulbs they use is more important than the technological innovation itself, because changing societal norms is the only thing that will actually make a real difference. Technological fixes aren’t really an answer.
All that being said, I’m with you on what really needs to be done. We need spaces and buildings that make more use of natural light. We need homes that are not built bigger for their own sake. We need buildings that are not just more efficient systematically, but more efficient spatially. No need to remember to turn off the lights in your formal living room and dining room (outmoded archetypes that Americans have virtually no reason for) if the rooms no longer exist. Like you said, heating and cooling is 54% of our average household energy use to lighting’s 9%. If and when conservation and efficiency are serious goals we have no shortage of ways to achieve them.
March 27, 2012 at 9:19 am
I can’t say how much, but I know that some of the cost of CFL’s is offset by subsidies, as is so often the case with such things. If incandescent bulbs ever truly get beat with the ban stick, we’ll probably see the subsidies disappear and a return to more normal pricing will be the result.
As for the mercury, I know that there are some figures out there that point to mercury-containing power-plant emissions, showing that because CFL’s use less power, they therefore don’t emit as much at the plant, and based on these figures an incandescent actually is responsible for more mercury emissions overall. But power companies are not turning off any power plants (because of that pesky Jeavons Paradox), and for most of them, it’s either on full steam, or shut down. So the same amount of garbage is coming out of the stack no matter what we do with our bulbs, short of actually dropping the fire on a few coal plants. And now the mercury is coming into our homes, where people will usually just throw it away, just like they’ve been doing for decades with regular fluorescent tubes, or accidentally break them in the house. If the metal just needs to be used, then I’d rather it be at a point-source power plant than dispersed everywhere there’s a light-bulb socket. I definitely don’t want it where my clumsy self can cause a hazmat spill.
I can’t find an Internet example, but the Navy used incandescent light bulbs on their ships at some point, and they were designed with replaceable filaments. A box of filaments takes up far less valuable cargo space than a box of bulbs. The globe was unscrewed, the old filament removed and replaced, and a simple pump was employed to vacuum out the air once the globe was re-attached. It’s a bulb that, with an inexpensive pack of filaments, would last a lifetime if not broken. It’s also low-energy in it’s production, which is another of my sticking points with the CFL and LED bulbs, but I need to surrender my soapbox for now…
March 27, 2012 at 10:27 am
I can’t say I have heard about CFL subsidies, but if you find anything on it I’d definitely be interested in looking it over.
When it comes to the energy reduction to power plant usage, you’re definitely right. Even though a national move to curb 75% of our lighting energy load is nothing to scoff at and the net total could certainly offset some nasty power plants, at the end of the day this reduction is distributed throughout the country and the local concentrations of power reduction probably couldn’t make a difference enough to shut down plants (with the possible exception of our bigger cities like New York). But as I said, if lighting were a component of a broader series of curb energy consumption (say a push for geothermal heating and cooling and superior building envelopes) it could play a meaningful role.
No doubt, mercury is bad, but a lot of other things pour out of the stacks of coal plants that are also rather caustic to a large number of people. Sometimes living in New York has its perks. My building thankfully recycles about half of its waste and routinely collects CFLs for proper recycling. I would argue the urban model makes these practices much easier than the suburban counterpart.
March 27, 2012 at 2:49 pm
Paul Wheaton does a thorough write-up of CFL’s here: http://www.richsoil.com/CFL-fluorescent-light-bulbs.jsp#CFL-bulb-subsidy
There are links in there to some other sources, notably an article from 2009 in the New York Times describing some of the money that’s been spent to stimulate sales of these things. Those bulbs that the power company hands out for free aren’t conjured from nothing. In that article, you’ll note that the particular interest is in the sales of the bulbs, which was declining at that time. This is precisely what you’d expect if you were selling a bulb that lasts longer, but never mind that.
It’s at this point that I should mention that I don’t believe there is any way to make civilization-as-we-know-it into anything resembling sustainable, static, or self-stable. Indeed, I don’t believe such systems exist at all because they are impossible; everything must change and run its course eventually. It’s a position that often leaves me branded insane or insufferably self-righteous.
Now that my psychosis is right there in the open, I’ll say that broad-scale improvements to efficiency and “green-ness” as you suggest will come with problems of their own, to be solved at some later date. After all, the industrial revolution and every single technology decried as “brown” and detrimental today was at some point a shining light guiding the way for civilized humanity down a path to a better life. I see the sustainability and “green” craze as more of this kind of “solution”. We made the problem, we devised yet another answer for the problem, and the answer had problems all its own. I don’t see how our current round of answers can be any different.
You may now call me Negative Nathan. 😉
March 30, 2012 at 1:08 pm
Heh, well this might be our greatest point of diversion. I am not one to try and skirt around the problems that exist, but I think I remain nominally optimistic about the opportunities that stand before us. Though that offers no guarantees about whether or not we will take advantage of them, I have not counted us out just yet.
I agree that “civilization-as-we-know-it” is a ways away from a sustainable reality, but that would make sense to me given that the term takes on a connotation that is more temporary every day. The onset of the digital age has brought a significant transformation to how our civilization stores data, uses energy and disseminates information. Is civilization today the same as it was a decade ago? I’d argue there is a meaningful difference and perhaps not as meaningful as ten years from now may be from today. Civilization will change. The question is whether or not it will change in the ways it needs to in order to do more with less in an ecologically responsible way.
I see your last point in the same kind of light. Any new technology or practice brings with it a certain degree of unknown consequences, but I still think we are improving. I continue to believe (perhaps hopefully or just naively) that the rate of progress towards sustainability is slowed more by ignorance than apathy. As a result, I think we are in an exciting time given that information is more accessible than it ever has been before. Granted, this means that misinformation is just as accessible (which is a problem).
I suppose my question would be that it seems like you are painting a fairly bleak picture, so is there any real way to improve at this point in your mind or should we all just be preparing for the fall?
March 30, 2012 at 1:34 pm
It’s always typecast in a bleak role, but all appearances to the contrary, I see this as a great opportunity for a fresh start. Of course, I need to see it that way because I also see this as inevitable.
Improvement is a relative concept. I see a world without electricity and think that it’s an improvement over one with it, for example. Not everyone agrees. My improvements will look very different from yours, from theirs, and so on. Really, this is a huge part of the sustainability debate already; people are just discussing different views of what they consider beneficial and progressive.
Regardless of your perspective, it seems wise to prepare for civilization’s transformation, not necessarily its collapse. I’m of the opinion that collapse is imminent, but the difference between collapse and metamorphosis can probably be quite small.
One of the most handy tools to sharpen is our adaptability and readiness to change. We can start by not taking the Internet for granted. Imagine a world without it, because it may be uncomfortably close. Get used to the idea that the future options for personal transportation my look like a pair of sturdy, calloused feet. Envision every patch of soil sown with food instead of ornamentals, and every contemporary device sidelined by lack of access to resources repurposed in ways their designers never could have predicted.
You phrased the question as if improvement were at one end of the spectrum and the fall at the other. I believe that the way of improvement and the way of the fall are the same.