The 1,219-page, trillion-dollar omnibus spending bill that will fund the government through fiscal year 2012 appears to be the usual mix of compromise and compromised. But out of the mire of horse-trading and half-measures there is at least one bright light: bright light itself.
As we understand it, the omnibus contains a rider defunding Department of Energy efficiency standards that would have effectively killed the incandescent light bulb on January 1. The reprieve is temporary — instead of repealing the relevant regulations, it merely stalls their implementation through next September. But riders are sticky things, often renewed automatically, and this rider marks an important win for House Republicans, consumer choice, and Edison’s fine old filaments.
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Breaking liberals’ usual rule about government not intruding in the bedroom, Stephen Chu’s DOE would have insinuated itself into your bedroom and into every other room of your domicile, casting the pale pall and dreary buzzing of compact fluorescence over every home in America.
And why? For our own good, Chu says, to “tak[e] away a choice that continues to let people waste their own money.” What a splendid mission statement for the DOE, and a pithy summation of the case for abolishing it. Call us old-fashioned, but we think that if government interventions into a market are ever justified, they are justified on the grounds of giving consumers more choice. Regulation undertaken in the name of Green piety inevitably offers less. One need look no further than the contemporaneous, and so far successful, move by the FDA to ban arguably the most effective asthma inhalers because they contain CFCs. In Bureaucraworld, Freon in the atmosphere trumps oxygen in the lungs.
In a way, the damage done by the promise of the incandescent ban is irreversible: GE closed its last U.S. factory making incandescent lights in 2010, as GE chair and Obama crony Jeffrey Immelt counted on a rush of new business for his more expensive fluorescent bulbs. And Democrats will no doubt claim a “compromise” in the rider, as they have apparently managed to insert language forcing the recipients of DOE grants in excess of $1 million to meet the mothballed standards in any event. But DOE grants are not exactly held in the highest esteem these days, and should themselves be continued targets for conservative cuts. The branches have been pruned; next up, the roots.
The obvious joke here is, “How many bureaucrats does it take to screw up the light bulb?” Thanks to this small victory, we’ll have to wait at least until September to hear the punch line.
You must mean, "How many bureaucrats does it take to screw the American people?" Stephen Chu is the genius who wants us to paint our roofs and our roads WHITE to fend off that nasty sunlight! Me? I'm just waiting for the first big snowfall; my roof will be white soon enough. There is no more fitting symbol for environmental insanity than the hideous compact fluorescent bulb. Since its invention, the Edison light bulb has symbolized bright ideas and warm homecomings in our culture. And they want to replace that heritage with a nasty, flickering, buzzing, pallid, toxic, ugly piece of overkill! Just as the light bulb symbolizes hope, the squiggly fluorescents symbolize government defiance. If the factories have closed, then reopen them! If they've retooled, then retool them again! Or they might as well hoist a giant CFL to replace Lady Liberty's torch. If that spectre doesn't make you furious enough to write your congressman, nothing will.
Some environmentalists have been trying to get the government to ban nonstick cookware, alleging that the fumes given off by the coating while cooking are hazardous.
If you think the consumer revolt against the incandescent ban was something, wait till all the cooks and housewives in America are told they have to give up nonstick cookware.
I wouldn't count this as a "small victory". By postponing the requirement through Sept. 2012, the politicians hope to reduce the outrage prior to the Nov., 2012 elections. A better idea: a 5-year tax holiday for any company that establishes an incandescent manufacturing plant in the U.S. - so we can produce both bulbs and jobs at home.
Ned, I wouldn't quit stockpiling the contraband bulbs just yet if I were you. As detailed in the oddly optimistic review of the trillion dollar spending bill, nothing of real substance or permanence was achieved by the ever feckless republican leadership on your behalf.
But don’t lose hope. I’m sure that Presidents Romney or Huntsman will light the way for principled, structural rollbacks of leftist policies and programs.
While they might not be able to unscrew the entrenched light bulb ban at that point, Obama care will be in real danger.
You took (appropriate) shots at the DOE of energy and Secretary Stephen Chu, including repeating his brain dead nanny-state quote. You also took a shot at GE Chair Jeffrey Immelt and by doing so tied in Obama.
All well and good. But didn’t you forget someone?
How about Michigan Representative Fred Upton? You know the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The same Fred Upton that you gave valuable Home page space to below on his hypocritical rant about government regulations. May I remind you that representative Upton said in 2007 that the light-bulb mandate was a "common-sense, bipartisan approach ... to save energy as well as help foster the creation of new domestic manufacturing jobs."
Or how about the fact that President George Bush, not Barack Obama is the one that signed the Light Bulb ban in the first place. You didn’t mention him.
It seems that NRO’s editorial board is standing athwart history and saying “Stop Democrats, but you progressive Republicans go right ahead.”
So now domestic manufacturers have ramped down or retooled their factories in anticipation the ban and the bill is just a defunding not a repel, leading to more uncertainty. Yep, that’s what we need in the business community, more uncertainty. So where will the incandescent light bulbs that you will still find on your store shelves come from? If you guess foreign manufactures you might be right.
Good job Representative Upton, good job George Bush, good job NRO Editorial board.
You are of course correct that Republicans have done a great job of following the Democrats down the wrong road in many ways. In many ways they are just Democrat Lite.
However it is the Democrats who are usually the leaders in this type of nonsense. The Republicans need to take the lead on taking the conservative road.
No matter. Dem or Rep, the people who want to micromanage our lives for no justifiable reason must be opposed at every instance. This light bulb issue may be too little too late but it is better than nothing. And we need to continue, otherwise the whole country will turn into San Francisco where they have banned or proposed bans on everything from pet stores to circumcision.
I am not against some regulation, but it must be necessary and the minimum possible to achieve the desired result or more accurately prevent the damage that must be avoided. Speed limits are a good example of a necessary regulation. The 55 MPH speed limit was an example of an unreasonable regulation.
By the way, I predominately use CFL light bulbs these days for a variety of reasons. But that is my choice for most applications. There is no need to ban incandescents and it is not the governments business to poke their nose into something that miniscule. Just produce something better and let the market make the decision, unless we are talking about something that is a real threat to the public.
We put some of those lights in our kitchen. You turn them on and it takes them several minutes to reach full brilliance. Alaskan winter mornings are cold and dark. The first thing I need in the morning is coffee. The last thing I need is mood lighting.
Congress continues to be worse than useless. Are Lowe's, Home Depot, and Walmart going to order more light bulbs, literally sent on the slow boat from China, only to quit selling them again in October 2012? It may be legal to sell 100 watt light bulbs through most of 2012, but I don't expect to see them stocked on the shelves where I shop.
Uh oh, the GOP put in a rider that might allow for the continued sale of light bulbs. Just when you thought they didn't have it in them. Watch out towering welfare state you're next! The conservatives are back!
So Team R has put down its foot and courageously defunded the bill that made how you light your home the responsibility of government. Probably in the criminal sense.
Spectacular.
This, of course, while the country wallows in fifty different ways of coming in dead last and drowns under a quarter quadrillion dollars of red ink courtesy of the Welfare State.
But hey, light bulbs could be back. Depends, of course. But victory!
Pithy summations like this one are why I read NR. That and the fact the commentariat typically blow such lame editors out of the water.
Looks like National Review's Editors still have a soft spot for George W. Bush, whose domestic policy was far worse than Bill Clinton's or Jimmy Carter's, and less conservative.
Deroy Murdock called him a Republican socialist once. That mighty be just a taaaaad too much, but really, only a tad.
I found it funny how at a recent debate, Paul Wolfowitz prefaced his question by saying: "George Bush, who was a conservative Republican..."
If you need to tell us that he was a conservative, it means he wasn't.
Perhaps just a small pebble, but I’ll take it.
The 'pebble' in my shoe had become more then an irritant, it was beginning to fester and a long indolent but ultimately fatal infection was about to set in.
So perhaps this little pebble now has been kicked out of my shoe into a snow pile which the optimist in me thinks will begin an expanding cascade until an avalanche of reforms returns us to our past glory.
Being seen as on the wrong side of sensible energy conservation and environmental protections costs us conservatives much support and many potential votes. Emphasis on sensible. "Green" (without the too-typical lefty hysteria and anti-capitalism) should be a natural issue for conservatives. We should own it. Environmentalists should be our natural allies in spirit (minus the anti-business, anti-corporation, anti-consumer attitudes that often are involved). In short, Conservatives should want to conserve. To the extent that we are perceived as the enemy to all things environmental, we needlessly alienate and antagonize a certain swath of high minded voters. We make ourselves objects of scorn, turning those voters off to other conservative messages and far more important conservative priorities, ones that they might well be very receptive to. We should not needlessly alienate potential voters for frivolous reasons. Winning voters is what allows us to effect more important changes and conserve more important values. Opposing every initiative of environmentalism is not the hill we want to die on. We cannot afford to keep turning off idealistic young people, who are fans of technology and alternative energy this way. All that said, an incandescent phase out ('ban' is not quite accurate) does make sense for the nation in some respects. We should acknowledge that. Like increasing CAFE standards for automobiles, an increase in lighting efficiency standards does serve to drive improvements in technologies and to drive even newer technologies into the market, eventually reducing electricity waste on a national scale. Which is a worthwhile result. Nasty, mercury containing CFLs and expensive, disappointing LEDs are not the only game in town. Other technologies such as OLED and full spectrum ESL ( vu1.com) are coming to the fore as superior successors of the incandescent bulbs..
Gotta love the argument: Greenies should be our allies, "minus the..." this and that. Yeah. And Communists should be our allies, minus of course) the compulsion, the force, the "government knows best" thing. Oh, and Nazis, too, if we could only get 'em to drop the brutality and the "We hate everyone" schtick.
This comment sounds to me like what I've heard often before: All we conservatives have to do to make other folks like us, is...stop being so darn *conservative*. RPM, nobody cares what kind of lightbulbs you choose - but the key word is "choose". Individual liberty is pretty much always the conservative thing...and the *right* thing.
This is good news but I don't trust the arrogant politicians enough to stop hoarding. Had I hoarded toilets when I was younger, I wouldn't have plungers in every bathroom.
In the early 1980's there was a drought in CA that led to the federal regulation on "low flow" toilets and shower heads across the nation. We're getting back our light bulbs. Please, PLEASE, can I get a toilet that doesn't require multiple flushes and plunging every other week? Also, I'd really like to get the shampoo outta my hair every now and again. .... Don't expect it to happen. I will continue to stock up on regular bulbs for as long as I can. I'll will them to my grandchildren.
In the early 1980's there was a drought in CA that led to the federal regulation on "low flow" toilets and shower heads across the nation. We're getting back our light bulbs. Please, PLEASE, can I get a toilet that doesn't require multiple flushes and plunging every other week? Also, I'd really like to get the shampoo outta my hair every now and again. .... Don't expect it to happen. I will continue to stock up on regular bulbs for as long as I can. I'll will them to my grandchildren.
