Monday, July 11, 2011

Congress! Let there be Edison light! BULB Act Hits House Today

Contact Congress! Tell them you want your light bulbs back!
I bought a 60 watt CFL [compact fluorescent light] bulb last night at Giant for $6 and I bought four 60-watt incandescents for 37.5 cents a piece, four for a buck and a half. It takes a long time to make up efficiency when it's an 18 to 1 outlay up front.
~Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX), Sponsor of the Better Use of Light Bulbs Act

That's nothing. Wait till Barton has to drive to a toxic waste depot to dispose of his 60 watt curlyque because it contains toxic mercury.

Or he finds out that halogen bulbs burn so much hotter than Edison bulbs that they present a significant fire and burn risk.

Or he discovers that the cost of installing LED fixtures and bulbs is exorbitant, the resulting light is unpleasant (unless the LED bulb is coated with rare earth compounds from China), and a large number of the population would not outlive the payback period of many LED fixture installations.

I'm one of the millions of American hoarders of the good old-fashioned, time-tested for safety and comfort, tungsten-filament Edison light bulbs.

In 2007, in a fit of politically motivated, lobbyist-bootlicking greenmania, Congress decided to deprive us of our ability to purchase our favorite 60-watt light bulbs.

The legislators who passed the bill couldn't have cared less about the number of people and animals exposed to toxic mercury as a result of their decision, nor about the health of the unknown percentage of the population for whom use of fluorescents pose vision and other health risks, and they seemingly never gave a thought to the number of Americans whose light-bulb manufacturing jobs have been transferred to China.

Today, Rep. Joe Barton of Texas is trying to repeal the sections of the 2007 energy bill requiring light bulbs to be 30% more efficient by 2012, no matter how inefficient that efficiency is.

I sure hope he succeeds.


Linked by Pundette. Thanks!
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9 comments:

  1. @Woman - I want my lightbulb-hoarding shelf back, so I can hoard food there!

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  2. I was just looking for a picture of a light bulb, and clicked on your (un-credited) clip art. I think I am moderate, believe in fiscal sanity, but am socially what it seems you folks might call liberal...though I may not be as "out there" as many people might take that word to be. That being all said, I am pleasantly surprised at the "food for thought" in the article. I believe there are also more issues involved, but the information about mercury and so on are points many people don't hear. I mean "mercury" would usually set far-left people frothing at the mouth. The legislation sounds totally ridiculous. Thank you so much for the information. Note: Besides being not part of your usual target audience, I am also a photographer, so I am not totally unbiased--I love tungsten. Moderate-to-(l)eft people for light bulb sanity!!! "Bread upon the Water" indeed. Though I may not agree with some of the things I see around the light bulb post, I will note where it came from.

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  3. @Anonymous -- Thanks! Light bulb sanity is an equal opportunity goal. We might reasonably expect mercury contamination to be a hot-button "issue"; likewise child slavery mining for rare minerals used in pocket technologies and violent displacement and impoverishment of indigenous farmers to supply first world corporations with carbon credits (so called). Unfortunately, the "green" label offers many a worry-free pass for unconscionable behavior.

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  4. Hi, just wondering where you got the image of the light bulb from??

    ReplyDelete
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