Another skirmish in the light-bulb wars
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0308
The light-bulb wars continued early this week when House Republicans, according to an Associated Press article , “failed to stop the enactment of new energy-saving standards for light bulbs they portrayed as yet another example of big government interfering in people’s lives.”
The “legislation would have kept the marketplace clear for the cheap, energy-wasting bulbs that have changed little since Thomas Edison invented them in 1879,” the AP reported, adding that for “most Democrats, it’s an exasperating debate that, just like the old incandescent bulbs being crowded out of the market, produces more heat than light.”
In earlier skirmishing, a 7 June Wall Street Journal editorial had complained, “We’d like to believe that when the government decrees what kind of light bulbs you can screw into the lamp in your own bedroom, even liberals would be nervous about the nanny state.” The WSJ editors declared that the impending ban on incandescents “passed at the height of the global warming fad-scare when all proper thinkers were supposed to sacrifice to the anticarbon gods.”
Editorial-staff commentaries posted online over the weekend in both the Washington Post and the New York Times matched that sarcasm with tone and attitude — and wordplay — of their own.
Both pieces’ headlines played on the word dim, making it a charge against Republicans: in the Post, “The GOP’s dim idea on light bulb standards"; in the Times, “Dim and dimmer.” The Post editorial’s opening used illumination-related words: “The right wing of the political spectrum is incandescent on the subject of light bulbs.” The Times‘s editorial commentary, by editorial-page associate editor Robert B. Semple Jr began by declaring the Republican measure “utterly without merit.” It ended with this jab, which will surely draw charges of Orwellianism — whether merited or not — for making a “consumer choice” out of a consumption restriction: “What appears to have escaped these freedom-fighters is that the [impending new] law actually expanded consumer choice, which has largely been limited to a technology essentially unchanged since Thomas Edison.”
Momentarily setting aside the smirking cattiness that has characterized both sides, however, both the Post and the Times stopped to summarize their side’s case in more businesslike tones, just as the WSJ editorial had done back in June. Here’s how the Post put it:
Bulbs that meet the federal standards are more expensive than older ones. Nevertheless, Philips, the Dutch electronics giant, estimates that replacing a traditional 75-watt incandescent bulb with one of its latest light-emitting diode (LED) bulbs would save a household $160 in energy costs over its life. The company also reckons that replacing just the 90 million or so 75-watt incandescent bulbs sold in America annually with these advanced bulbs would reduce yearly energy use by 5,220 megawatts, saving $630 million and 3.26 million tons of carbon emissions — comparable to taking a million cars off the road. Not all Americans will choose to invest in one of Philips’s extremely efficient new bulbs, but, the Natural Resources Defense Council estimates, under the federal standards, the average family’s energy bill should drop by about 7 percent a year.
Republicans have a point that federal mandates aren’t always the most cost-effective ways to reduce energy use or carbon emissions. Yet they also vehemently oppose more attractive measures such as carbon taxes, which would enlist consumer demand to direct the development of more efficient products. Particularly with the most rational policies off the table, a government nudge to produce better light bulbs is an easy way to save energy.
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for ‘Science and the media.’ He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.
