Our Long National Light Bulb Nightmare Has Been Averted — For Now
This human species banded together in the United States of America and did something that the Cuban people cannot do and the human beings in the European Union are too dulled to do: we made clear our grievances to our elected members of Congress. We used our powers of speech, of logical argument, and, yes, of deep outrage that one Steven Chu, Ph. D., an unelected member of President Barack Obama’s cabinet, dared to tell the American people what we should do inside our homes and with our hard-earned money.
Last July, as the House of Representatives sought to accomplish what it finally, and victoriously, did accomplish yesterday, the president sent his Nobel Prize-winning physicist secretary of Energy (like his Nobel Prize earned him the right to boss us around) to lecture the American people on what we should and should not do. That was a huge error in judgment. Huge.
Here is what the condescending cabinet member said to us — us, the pathetic, scientifically uneducated, financially ignorant, unwashed, energy-profligate, unable-to-balance-our-own-checkbooks fools he takes us to be — on light bulbs:
“Right now many families around the country are struggling to pay their energy bills, and leaders in the House want to roll back these standards that will save families money.…
“You’ll still be able to buy halogen incandescent bulbs. They’ll look and feel the same, but the only difference is that they’ll save consumers money.”
Of tea partiers’s philosophical argument that the law would deprive consumers of the choice of lighting products, Chu said, these standards are not taking choices away, they are “putting money back in the pockets of American families.”
Well, the Republican Congress fought back.
It showed Secretary Chu, President Obama, and every environmentalist who seeks to control what kind of light bulb you and I can use exactly what a Congress responsive to a free people can do. We are not Cuba and we are not the European Union.
As Dylan Thomas wrote exactly 60 years ago: “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” We did, and a Republican Congress listened and acted. Thank you, Congress. Thank you, Founding Fathers, for a system that, even in the Age of Obama, Pelosi, and Reid, still works.
“filled with toxic mercury” you say.
Must be filled with something awful. The light from these bulbs is like a cold, grey death glow.
Chilling to the bone and casts everyone into hard lines and angles. Most unpleasent to the eye. Utterly depressing and gloomy.
At least the old bulbs have a cheery glow to them. Nice warmth and feeling.
While we are at it we can repeal the enviro’s dictates on toilets that don’t flush well, washers that don’t wash well, CAFE standards that force literal automotive deathtraps upon many, defective asthma inhalers that will soon be foisted upon us, pesticides that don’t kill the malaria carrying mosquity like good old banned DDT. We are AMERICANS and are capable of choosing what is or is not good for the envioronment or anything else for that matter. We are not Europeans that need to be told by the Leftist Elite what toilet paper to use.
AMEN!
Never thought I’d be cheering over being allowed to keep my choice of light bulbs, but there you go.
So glad we got a reprieve: trying to write or draw anything by that disturbing gray-white light is hell.
OK, it’s a victory. But a very, very small one. It is Maskirova and propaganda so that the Institutional Republicans can point to that and say that they are really doing something. There are no manufacturers of incandescent light bulbs left in this country. The last one closed a few months ago. And the reprieve allowing sales will only be for 9 months. The Institutionals stood and drew the line on this, now, and gave up on everything else. Kind of like Boehner and McConnell and the rest of the Institutionals after the 2010 election on:
1) the continuing resolution, where they caved saying that they would really fight for the late 2010-11 budget,
2) the late 2010-11 budget, where they caved saying that they would really, really fight for the Debt Ceiling.
3) the Debt ceiling where they not only caved but gave the Democrats the means to slash Defense, and promised that they would really, really, REALLY fight for the 2011-12 budget.
4) there is no 2011-12 budget, and they are a) deliberately not hammering the Democrats for blocking it [if you can't win, at least use your loss as a weapon and shape the next battlefield], b) playing this omnibus and continuing resolution game still and getting critical body parts handed to them in separate containers constantly, and c) abetting the Democrats by allowing things like SOPA to be inserted and passed with their approval.
They will not stand and fight on the important matters.
This is about the most innocuous victory that they could have.
I got my first funds solicitation for 2012 from the RNC yesterday, the regular one that claims to be a survey on the platform [which they micturate on as soon as it is passed]. Postage paid envelope. It will be returned with a nastygram wrapped around as much heavy waste paper as I can fit in so it costs them as much money as possible.
No money to the Institutionals, because they will just waste it or use it against us. All contributions need to go directly to Patriot candidates. And we have to realize that most of the Republicans are perfectly happy to go along with the Democrats on almost all things; while trying to create an illusion of resisting them.
Subotai Bahadur
I completely agree. Do NOT support the establishment. Support conservatives who will actually fight the Left and roll back the socialist state rather than just slow its growth.
Make sure to include a sheet or two of TP in that envelope.
Time to kick in on the letter-writing to inform the institutionals that they have failed to do their one Constitutional job AGAIN! They need to resign in shame.
Add to that the fact that our standard of living and the amount of people we can support on this planet will be reduced by these fools. If they get their way like they have in the UK and base power generation is not renewed it is going to get very interesting, in dear Old Blighty our coal and nuclear powered generators are coming to the end of their working life and they are not being replaced, due to the actions of the Green Lobby. When the lights go and people cannot light or heat their homes or in the case of the mind number population watch television due to the actions of Greenpeace blocking efficient power generation, they might hang a few from the nearest lamp post. (A quaint old European tradition). One can only hope.
How true.
A momentary reprieve does not mean that the system is working.
If the system were working, we would not be having this conversation, because such an extreme usurpation of powers would not have been attempted in the first place.
Just out of curiosity: Do you blog anywhere, or just comment?
From 9/11 until about 3 years ago, I ran an email newsletter on military and political affairs. I comment a lot around PJM and elsewhere, and I post at Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler every so often. Fair warning, the ambiance at the Rott is not nearly as refined as here.
Subotai Bahadur
I suggest you check out 1389 Blog. It’s a team blog about the worldwide counterjihad. We run plenty of stuff on the political scene in the US, Canada, and Australia as it relates to the counterjihad, as well as the economy, energy policy, defense, Constitutional issues, and so forth. It’s a hard news blog with hardly any fluff except for a “Caturday” article on those weeks when I happen to get around to it.
With regard to decorum, we push the envelope much further than PJM with regard to policy and opinion, but we mostly avoid being crude or vulgar about it. I can deliver invective as well as anybody (and then some), but I deliver it with ice water in my veins. If you’re interested in joining the 1389 Blog team, please contact us [here].
The environmentalists are wreaking havoc on the middle-class through their non-stop assault on US energy.
They are shutting down coal mines and coal plants throwing thousands of blue-collar Americans out of work and, as Obama said, causing electricity prices to necessarily skyrocket.
They are now going after fracking, the process that has drastically increased our domestic supplies of natural gas, touched off an energy boom, and created hundreds of thousands if jobs.
They desperately want to kill the XL pipeline which would create tens of thousands of jobs, generate billions in revenue, improve our energy security, and reduce the price of fuel. I live in AR and 60 people in Little Rock lost their jobs at a pipe manufacturer due to the XL delay. How many more will be lost?
By driving up the price of fuel and coal they cause the price of EVERYTHING else to rise because energy is the most basic ingredient in manufacturing, transportation, retail, etc.
They are putting fishermen in New England out of work.
They are preventing drilling in the Gulf, in Alaska, the OCS, and trying to shut down drilling in West Texas to save a lizard. How many jobs will be lost?
They have destroyed tens of thousands of farm jobs in CA to save a bait fish.
There was a time when we needed an environmental movement, much like we once needed unions. Now however, they’re regularly destroying industries, jobs, and lives.
And ironically the Democrat party, who has allied themselves with the eco-Marxists, claim to represent the poor and middle-class.
Their environmental policies expose that lie.
Our enemies are all the environmental organizations in the US and globally.
The old bulbs are filled with toxic vacuum.
And hence the environmentalists’ rage, as nature abhors a vacuum.
Yes, and weren’t they warning people in Europe not to use them in reading areas since they had cases of them exploding! The greens are the same ones who put the LED lights in stop lights to save the environment, it only took til the first snow storm to find that the snow never melted off the lights!
God Bless Thomas Edison!
A bit hyperbolic: “filled with toxic mercury”; more like, “contains toxic mercury in miniscule but possibly dangerous amount”. Nevertheless, I am tired of the Nanny State telling us what we can buy, what we can say, what we can eat. What a crazy country we are becoming.
Hyperbolic would be “filled 100% with toxic mercury” or “overflowing with toxic mercury.” It is, however, perfectly accurate to say these compact fluorescent bulbs are “filled with toxic mercury” because they are.
Mercury is present at levels the EPA deems toxic.
Didn’t the same Professional Do-Gooders even get the old medical thermometers banned because they had mercury in them? Ask any of them what the “Safe” exposure limit to mercury is -without mentioning light bulbs- and watch ‘em go ballistic
jeez, you make it sound like a victory for the ages.
It’s simply something that should not have been done to begin with and from what I hear they only defunded enforcement of the law. Does that mean manufacturers will retool and start producing these bulbs.
Probably not, since the next vote could reinstate the ban.
Who knows? That’s the problem.
The fact that none of us got 100% of what we wanted, the total repeal of this terrible law, shouldn’t blind us to the fact that a reprieve from a death sentence is still better than an execution. A lot can happen in nine months. The president can grow ever weaker, the Republicans can grow ever stronger, even Democrats can hear from their constituents how mad they are over this law.
Having no enforcement of this dreadful law for the next nine months may not be your idea of heaven, but it’s progress, and in a democracy, with a majority Democrat Senate and a Democrat in the White House, let’s cheer this victory even as we know that it isn’t all we wanted on a silver platter.
In divided government, it doesn’t happen that way. This is way better than it was going to be.
yeah, I guess I’ll accept what we can get.
But it’s a damn shame that being able to purchase and use a 100 watt incandescent lightbulb is a victory.
So what am I supposed to do with all these 100 watt lightbulbs I’ve hoarded? I think the Republicans and Democrats invested in GE and Sylvania.
You will always need them. They’re great presents and they’ll be reassuring to own when something gums up the works and they’ll no longer be available at some point in the future. You’ll never regret your hoard of 100-watt incandescent light bulbs. I know I never will.
Check the side of a light bulb package. It takes two 60 Watt bulbs to equal the light output of one hundred Watt bulb. So a 100 Watt bulb is 20% more efficient than 2 60s.
The real enemy of efficiency is multi-socket fixtures. 100 watt incandescent is more than twice as efficient as 25 watt bulbs. Not to give the government ideas but making multi-socket fixtures not accept incandescent bulbs would probably save more than outlawing higher efficiency incandescent bulbs.
Incandescent _______ Lumens ______ lm/watt
25 watt 210 8
40 watt 460 12
60 watt 890 15
100 watt 1,750 17
Forget efficiency here– I have outdoor light fixtures on the front of my house. They were initially spec’d to use 100w clear bulbs, and when THOSE are in place, they cast a really nice, safe amount of light. I don’t feel I need to worry about my elderly mother tripping as she comes up to my front door in the evening. I have also used lower-wattage, and 100w white bulbs. NONE OF THEM cast the same amount of light or provide the same clarity of viewing. So again, forget efficiency– how about safety?
And the latest chunk of the “Green” edifice snaps off and falls to the ground.
On my facebook wall tonight some of my loudest, most reliable liberal friends were candidly expressing their relief/happiness at this development.
All in all, it’s been a rough couple of years for the greens:
* Climategates I and II
* Massive media blow-its like the 1010 “No Pressure” short and the “Green Police” Superbowl ad
* The theater-of-the-absurd that just concluded in Durban
And now the national sigh of relief, even from loyal but increasingly embarassed liberals, at being able to keep buying our favorite light bulbs.
Think I’ll have a drink and enjoy the show!
Greenies are the watermelon lobby. Green looking on the outside but red through and through. The problem with tracking is that it produces cheap, clean energy and if we are going back to the Garden of Eden we can’t have any of that, thank you. The problem with the old bulbs was that people preferred them, and we can’t have any of that either, thank you. Why if we let people decide what kind of bulb they use in their house, where will things end? Next they’ll even want to decide what kind of car we will drive, and we certainly can’t have any of that starting, now can we?
In Re: that “Republican” opinion poll that just came in the mail. I sent it back with a nasty gram stating what I’d like the RINOs to do. I also wrapped it around a piece of 10ga mild steel plate I’d accumulated in the dim past for a long forgotten project. The plate fit nicely in the envelope and weighs nearly a pound. I have ten or twelve more waiting in line for an air journey to the far side of the country at great expense. Sheet lead is a good ballast material for nasty grams, too.
Cranky ol’
Gerry N.
Not mentioned is the fact that GE would have enjoyed a light bulb monopoly if the CFL became the law of the land. Have you checked the prices of a CFL – 3 way bulb or a dimmable bulb? Thank you Congress for getting the Light Bulb Police off our backs.
This is both good and very bad. It’s a prime example of the range-of-the-moment anti-thinking that is pervasive in the culture. Yesterday, your bulb was evil, your interests were in the rulers hands, your industries were misguided; so said Dems & Repubs. Today, we’ll let you have a choice (after having already disrupted things). Tomorrow…? The unpredictability of our rulers is a wrecking ball to industry, planning and the soul. I don’t know what’s to come in the next weeks and months from them; only that it will be wild and disruptive – until they change their minds for another week.
You sir have hit the nail on the head. This utter capreciousness of government action is at the heart of our economic woes. Why risk your capital to build a company when in two years the government might come along and declare your enterprise illegal?
Every week, I encounter another successful business owner asking himself this same question. Every one has shaken his head at me and said, “It’s just not worth the risk.” And that should be a wake-up call. Entrepreneurs are inherently risk-takers, yet when they – the economic engine of this country – are deciding that the government has made entrepreneurship too risky, we are in very deep trouble.
I know they swear you can’t get migraines from the compact bulbs but they’re wrong. My husband and I get terrible migraines from them. Army housing installed them in our house and I made them take them right back out after spending an evening blinded from a migraine. I’m all for better sources of energy but I doubt the green movement will be the ones to find it. It will undoubtedly come from the free market.
Yeah, my mom gets migraines from those lights, too. She and my dad tried them because the power company sent them out, and one gave her a headache and one busted less than two weeks after installation.
The thing these people don’t understand is that it’s not enough to tell us something is more “virtuous” environmentally and expect us to use it. It needs to be as good or better in terms of FUNCTION than what we already have. Make something like that, or shut up, because you’re not offering anything but a decrease in our quality of life for the sake of an ambiguous and uncertain future benefit. That’s never, ever gonna work.
While the lightbulbs are getting the attention, with which I totally agree, I’ll bet there is “payback galore” stuffed into that spending bill. Obama and the Dems got this spending spree started, and you can be guaranteed the Republicans are now getting their “piece of the action”.
Next we need to get the corrupt government out of our bathroom by allowing toilets that work with just one flush to be sold.
“This ban, part of a 2007 omnibus national energy and security bill — which, as everyone duly notes, was signed into law by former President George W. Bush — was about more than light bulbs. Far more.”
Additional proof, if any be needed at this late date, that GW belongs to the ruling class. His “compassionate conservatism” was a kind of socialism-lite. Still, I’d trade Obama.0 for him any day.
It is still illegal to manufacture or sell 100-watt incandescent bulbs.
They simply haven’t funded the enforcement of that law . . . for a year.
Who is now going to go into (or back into) the business of manufacturing and selling something that is illegal to manufacture and sell? Just because they’ve been told the government won’t enforce these laws . . . for a year?
The demand of the marketplace will cause retailers to re-order 100-watt incandescents and manufacturers will manufacture to meet the demand. This is the beauty of capitalism. Supplies will be manufactured to meet the demand. Every one wins, except the environmento-fascisti, who have lost their enforcement funding, poor babies.
Indian Tribes: the reservation is sovereign land, right? They have unemployment out the wazoo, right? It doesn’t take a genius to work on an assembly line, right? Indians suffer from high rates of FAS, right? At least Michael Dorris asserts this. I don’t know if it’s true. I have my doubts, since every Indian I’ve ever met is into healthy food and working out.
Wouldn’t it be a great idea if a sovereign Indian nation opened up a lightbulb factory?
ari, that would be beautiful if they could do that. Since a lot of the greenies are PC, they could shut them up by bringing up their minority status every time they open their pieholes to complain.
I kinda wish I lived back in a border state, though. I’d organize a shopping trip to Mexico or Canada for the bulbs on a big luxury bus to piss ‘em off. (Or see if I could open a “medicinal light bulb dispensary” for people with migraines.)
See, that’s the part that scares me- the “medicinal” part. You’d have to have double-blind, live studies, first off. Those are crazy expensive. And everything that the subjects suffer would get attributed to the lightbulb. Have you ever read a package insert? Each of those symptoms happened to a real person who reported them to the clinician. That was my job for a few years- technician at a drug-testing facility. It was awesome- every person that “kept Austin Weird” had to finance that lifestyle- I got to work to really professional guitar serenades, drawing blood, collecting urine sample cups, watching people eat. So, if someone walks outside while testing and gets hit by a car- that’s a death attributable to lightbulbs, and you’re right back where you started: incandescent lightbulbs = death! And, as a side effect- lightbulbs would quadruple or quintuple in cost.
And, second- you know those planes that fly over and survey thermal patterns on houses? Trying to find drug operations? Well, an incandescent lightbulb heats up. If we are at all near O’care- migraine and seizure care is expensive. The drugs are expensive, the testing is expensive. You would be draining off the public purse. Would you want to get outed as a health-care criminal? It’s already difficult for sickle-cell anemia patients to get treatment as they pass adolescence. We know that African mothers hide their use of formula to hide their HIV status. When anyone’s health is in the public forum, affecting other people and government receipts- it’s dangerous. It always is dangerous.
And, well, insurance and so on. Prove you are a migraineur rather than an epileptic. I’ve had to prove it, to retain my driver’s license. An anonymous tip- that I was an epileptic. I didn’t even own a car- I had to go to a DMV that was four hours away by bus, lose a day of work, and go prove a negative. “When did you stop beating your wife?” The best guess was that a clinical tester had gotten fired from her position, and decided to mess with all her colleagues in various malignant fashions. Other people had to show they weren’t drinking on the way to work, or were legal citizens of the United States, if they were some flavor of brown, that they weren’t speeding when they were in a parking lot with baffling systems, there were custody and paternity complaints..It really was ingenious, the ways she pulled the levers of Mess With You bureaucracy.
Lightbulbs need to remain in the invisible to regulation quarter. They aren’t there anymore, b/c of some hysterical Californian legislator, but they ought to be. right there with candles, and whale oil lamps, and propane lights, and city main gas lights. None of which have been banned from the open market.
I wish we’d get a real, upfront Gnostic church going again. All works of the body and matter would be evil, prima facie. We’d know where these ideas were coming from, and sigh with boredom. As it is, it’s disorganized, and one has to pay attention to the unruly hysteria associated with it. I mean, the Druids at least have figured out the First Amendment applies to them, too, and have registered as a church. When one of them gets excited about trees- you know what they’re thinking.
Can you imagine a weekend of fireworks, gambling, lightbulbs, and, oh, horseback riding with the wild Indian rodeo show? That’d be a vacation to save up for, yearly. Throw in off-market arthritis meds, and herbal cancer treatments ( agarita)and you’d have a fine old time. It might even look like America, back when.
And if you were just mis-typing in the dark b/c your cfl just exploded in its socket, and you’re Lili von Schtupp of the comments: I’d go for that bus ride b/c you sound like more fun than a barrel of monkeys. I’ve always wanted to meet you.:-)
NOT averted. Merely the enforcement is not being funded.
Can be inserted into any 5 ream bill that comes down the road that no congress critter ever bothers to read.
And since they are still illegal{spit} what manufacturer in their right mind is going to be making them? With the exception of china…
Duped and screwed again and some seem to think this is some kind of victory. We are so very screwed…
The law no longer has any teeth. The EPA has zero funds to enforce the ban. Selling 100-watt incandescent bulbs will be like driving at 75 mph in a 65-mph limit zone where no police or highway patrol ever go. The law has not been repealed but there will be no one to enforce it. The free market will determine sales, as it should. Buyers will determine what can and will be sold, not an unenforceable and likely un-
Constitutional law.
The Dems caved on this because they want to win next November. Fat chance. But I think you’ll see that retailers will continue selling the 100-watt incandescents because they can.
Um, yeah, the ban was lifted. Hurrah! After the last factory in the US that actually produces incandescent bulbs closed.
Factories can re-open; new factories can open; bulbs, like everything else we buy, can be imported. Global markets respond to local needs. The US market just re-opened to 100-watt incandescent bulbs. Ask and ye shall receive.
If there are enough chimps in a dark room with enough typewriters available for them to be playing with, eventually they will compose the Great American Novel; or in this case perhaps the great light bulb solution. This is possibly how our elected officials function. So don’t let’s us hold our breath on this.
If it is true that the last incandescent light bulb factory has shut down, then we are really staring into a dim future.
As for me, I now am shifting to a daylight life. I wake up with the sun, go to sleep when it sets. I do my reading by daylight. The new light(?!)bulbs are not only worthless as light sources, but will actually cost more in a BIG way. That is, if you continue to turn them on and off as you do the incan bulbs. And BTW–who gave the Congress the right to force us to use these crap bulbs?
TIME FOR A GIANT WARNING LABEL FOR ALL CFL’S
“TOXIC MERCURY”