A Tale of Light Bulb Technology, Jobs and Energy Policy

+ Reply to Thread

Results 1 to 4 of 4

This is a screwy story about a light bulb—no kidding.
One Republican looking to lead the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee in the next Congress wants to take on a law that some say costs American jobs and limits consumer light bulb choice.
But the lighting industry – and the American consumer – seems to have already moved on.

“We’ve introduced (legislation) which repeals the ban on the incandescent bulb that has been turning back the night ever since Thomas Edison ended the era of a world lit only by fire in 1879,”Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) wrote in a post on the conservative blog RedState.com.
Barton, currently the panel's ranking GOP member, was referring to a rule in the 2007 Energy Independence and Security act that could make current incandescent bulb technology obsolete in California by January 2011 and a year later in the rest of the country.

But calling it a “ban” on incandescents is misleading, say lighting industry pros.
Like fuel efficiency standards for cars, the rule sets levels for energy use in the most common light bulbs, requiring a 30 percent increase in efficiency in the most widely used incandescent bulbs.
“A lot of people like to use ‘ban’ but that’s false,” says Justin Neumann, manager of government relations at the National Electrical Manufacturers Association, NEMA, a lighting industry trade group.

“It raises the efficiency of light bulbs, so if someone develops an [efficient] incandescent technology, it can be sold,” he says.
CEO Mike Connors of Bulbs.com, an 11-year-old lighting products website with around 80,000 commercial, industrial and government clients, points out it also doesn’t affect all incandescent bulbs.

“There will be several bulb types that have no energy efficient equivalent so those will still be available,” he says, including the three-way bulbs that many consumers use.
"Barton's office wouldn't comment on the story, referring CNBC.com to the Republican staff on the Energy and Commerce Committee.

But the target of Barton’s ire, based on a recent speech to the conservative Heritage Foundation, is the the widely available replacement for the incandescent bulb—the compact fluorescent light, CFL, bulb, which he referred to as the “little, squiggly, pig-tailed ones” .

He blames cheap, foreign-made CFLs for the September closure of a GE incandescent bulb factory in Winchester, Va., which left 200 out of work.

“Turns out the CFL…can’t be produced cheaply enough in America so we’ve turned to China, where virtually every CFL is produced,” Barton wrote in RedState.com. “The unanticipated consequence of the ’07 act – Washington-mandated layoffs in the middle of a desperate recession—is one of many examples of what happens when politicians and activists think they know better than consumers and workers."
Labor costs are a big part of plant closures like the one in.......

I use 10 year light bulbs, so I haven't had to change one for several years. They're available from the Vermont Country Store catalogue.