{"id":9761,"date":"2011-06-11T11:28:16","date_gmt":"2011-06-11T15:28:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=9761"},"modified":"2011-06-11T11:28:16","modified_gmt":"2011-06-11T15:28:16","slug":"they-buried-the-ban-in-the-300-plus-pages-of-the-2007-energy-bill-and-very-few-talked-about-it-in-public","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/06\/11\/they-buried-the-ban-in-the-300-plus-pages-of-the-2007-energy-bill-and-very-few-talked-about-it-in-public\/","title":{"rendered":"They “buried the ban in the 300-plus pages of the 2007 energy bill, and very few talked about it in public”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Virginia Postrel<\/a> talks about the looming ban-that-isn’t-a-ban on incandescent lightbulbs:<\/p>\n

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One serious technophile, University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds, spent much of 2007 flogging compact fluorescents on his popular Instapundit blog, eventually persuading more than 1,900 readers to swap 19,871 incandescent bulbs for CFLs. To this day, the Instapundit group is by far the largest participant at OneBillionBulbs.com, a bulb-switching campaign organized by the consulting firm Symmetric Technologies. But Reynolds himself has changed his mind.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m deeply, deeply disappointed with CFL bulbs,\u201d he wrote last month on his blog. \u201cI replaced pretty much every regular bulb in the house with CFLs, but they\u2019ve been failing at about the same rate as ordinary long-life bulbs, despite the promises of multiyear service. And I can\u2019t tell any difference in my electric bill. Plus, the Insta-Wife hates the light.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That was our experience with the early CFL bulbs, too: they didn’t come close to achieving the longevity we were supposedly paying all the extra money for. And, as I’ve posted before, they’re not as easy to clean up after breakage as the older bulbs<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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So the activists offended by the public\u2019s presumed wastefulness took a more direct approach. They joined forces with the big bulb producers, who had an interest in replacing low-margin commodities with high-margin specialty wares, and, with help from Congress and President George W. Bush, banned the bulbs people prefer.<\/p>\n

It was an inside job. Neither ordinary consumers nor even organized interior designers had a say. Lawmakers buried the ban in the 300-plus pages of the 2007 energy bill, and very few talked about it in public. It was crony capitalism with a touch of green. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Crony capitalism is what the general public is coming to think is the only kind of capitalism, because they have seen so much of it during the last few presidencies. Your business can be plagued with petty regulators enforcing nitpicking rules, while Congress showers money and special privileges on big businesses and banks.<\/p>\n

But, as she points out, it’s not technically<\/em> a true ban:<\/p>\n

\n

Now, I realize that by complaining about the bulb ban — indeed, by calling it a ban — I am declaring myself an unsophisticated rube, the sort of person who supposedly takes marching orders from Rush Limbaugh. In a New York Times<\/em> article last month, Penelope Green set people like me straight. The law, she patiently explained, \u201csimply requires that companies make some of their incandescent bulbs work a bit better, meeting a series of rolling deadlines between 2012 and 2014.\u201d<\/p>\n

True, the law doesn\u2019t affect all bulbs — just the vast majority. (It exempts certain special types, like the one in your refrigerator.) The domed halogen bulbs meet the new standards yet are technically incandescents; judging from my personal experiments, they produce light similar to that of old- fashioned bulbs. They do, however, cost twice as much as traditional bulbs and, if the packages are to be believed, don\u2019t last as long. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I keep hoping that LED lights will be able to produce the kind of long-life that we used to be able to depend upon from incandescents, as CFLs and halogen bulbs have not come close to living up to the promises. However, LEDs have not yet managed that trick in commercial applications.<\/p>\n

So, aside from allowing lobbyists to flex their muscles, what is the ban attempting to achieve? That’s not quite clear-cut:<\/p>\n

\n

Though anti-populist in the extreme, the bulb ban in fact evinces none of the polished wonkery you\u2019d expect from sophisticated technocrats. For starters, it\u2019s not clear what the point is. Why should the government try to make consumers use less electricity? There\u2019s no foreign policy reason. Electricity comes mostly from coal, natural gas and nuclear plants, all domestic sources. So presumably the reason has something to do with air pollution or carbon-dioxide emissions.<\/p>\n

But banning light bulbs is one of the least efficient ways imaginable to attack those problems. A lamp using power from a clean source is treated the same as a lamp using power from a dirty source. A ban gives electricity producers no incentive to reduce emissions. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Virginia Postrel talks about the looming ban-that-isn’t-a-ban on incandescent lightbulbs: One serious technophile, University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds, spent much of 2007 flogging compact fluorescents on his popular Instapundit blog, eventually persuading more than 1,900 readers to swap 19,871 incandescent bulbs for CFLs. To this day, the Instapundit group is by far the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,84,9,15],"tags":[727,497,661],"class_list":["post-9761","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-government","category-law","category-technology","tag-cronycapitalism","tag-electricity","tag-regulation"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-2xr","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9761","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9761"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9761\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9764,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9761\/revisions\/9764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}