Incandescent Light-Bulb Ban Takes Effect

In 2007, a Democratic Congress passed a bill to ban incandescent light bulbs, and George W. Bush signed it into law, but the implementation policy had been kicked down the road so many times that the news that the Biden administration actually plans to enforce the ban as of today may have snuck up on many people. 

As Noah Rothman wrote in a recent National Review cover story, the ban is but one example of “the war on things that work“:

The attack on effective appliances does occasionally encounter a hard target, with pro-ban activists and their critics fighting decades-long stalemated battles over contested terrain. In 2007, George W. Bush signed a law designed to gradually phase out inefficient incandescent light bulbs. Barack Obama accelerated the phase-out by tightening efficiency standards via regulatory mechanisms. In 2019, however, the Trump administration rolled those requirements back, giving incandescent bulbs a new lease on life. But in 2022, Joe Biden’s Department of Energy reimposed Obama-era lumens-per-watt standards designed to finally bury the filament bulb.

The effort to snuff out incandescent lights for good has continued despite the clear preferences of consumers, particularly low-income Americans. In 2018, University of Michigan researchers found that high-efficiency LED light bulbs “are more expensive and less available in high-poverty urban areas than in more affluent locations” and that the cost to upgrade “was twice as high in the highest-poverty areas.” Not only is the expense a burden; some LED adopters aren’t satisfied with the quality of light the new bulbs produce.

“Obviously enough, through millennia of human existence, the point of reference for artificial illumination was firelight or lamplight,” author and columnist Tom Scocca wrote for New York magazine. There is simply no replacement for “that ineffable and as yet irreplaceable glow” produced by incandescent bulbs. But beginning in August, with the exception of industrial applications like heat lamps, the government will formally retire Thomas Edison’s design. You will be able to purchase only LED lights — for your own good, of course

There is apparently an exception to the ban for “specialty bulbs,” but I didn’t want to leave anything to chance, so late last night, I bought what will hopefully be a lifetime supply of the best Christmas-tree lights known to man: