A Nation of Dim Bulbs

On December 19, President Bush signed an energy bill that will, among many, many other things, force you to buy a new kind of light bulb. He did this because environmental enthusiasts don't like the light bulbs you're using now. He and they reason, therefore, that you shouldn't be allowed to have them. So now you can't.

Ordinary consumers may be surprised, once they understand what's happened. They probably haven't known that the traditional incandescent light bulb, that happy little globe shining so innocently from the lamp in the corner, has been a scourge of environmentalists for many years.
With their stern and unrelenting moralism, the warriors of Greenpeace have even branded lightbulb manufacturers "climate criminals" for making incandescents, which are, they say, a "silent killer." In Europe and in a few individual states in the U.S., professional environmentalists have managed to persuade their colleagues in government to ban the bulbs altogether, on the grounds that incandescents use energy inefficiently.

Ninety percent of the energy a traditional light bulb uses, for example, is thrown off as heat rather than light. This waste contributes to the overproduction of energy from coal-fired power plants, which contributes to the emission of carbon dioxide, which contributes to global warming. Professional environmentalists prefer a different kind of bulb, the compact fluorescent light (CFL), which is much more expensive to make and to buy but also much more efficient in its use of energy.

American environmental groups have long called for an outright national ban on the old-fashioned bulbs. But then they came to the realization, as a spokesman for the Natural Resources Defense Council told the New York Times this spring, that such a ban might "anger consumers." "We've given up a sound bite, 'ban the incandescent,'" the spokesman said.

Instead the groups joined with the Bush administration this year in advocating a steady increase in federally mandated efficiency standards for light bulbs. The effect of the tightened standards is to make it illegal to manufacture or sell the inefficient incandescent bulb by 2014. So it's not a ban, see. It's just higher standards. Which have the same effect as a ban--a slow-motion ban that's not really a ban. Not surprisingly, in long, self-congratulatory remarks at the bill signing last week, Bush neglected to mention that he and Congress have just done away with the incandescent light bulb. Maybe most of us won't notice until he's back in Crawford.

Some people really like the new bulbs, of course. Not all of them are professional environmentalists, though all of them are cheapskates. CFLs produce the same amount of light (lumens) as an incandescent bulb while using only about a quarter of the watts. With proper care and moderate use, they can last as much as six times longer than a typical incandescent. Even if you consider their higher purchase price--six or seven times the price of a traditional bulb--CFLs can lower your monthly lighting bill by as much as 20 percent. And because they're deemed environmentally sensitive, switching them on can give you the same hard-to-define feeling of exaltation you get shopping for organic vegetables at Whole Foods. Then you can donate the money you've saved on your electric bill to the Natural Resources Defense Council or the George W. Bush Presidential Library.

Other people, however, perhaps a very large number, will prefer the old, pre-Bush bulbs. Their reasons have less to do with the wonderfulness of the incandescent and their disdain for environmentalists than with the inconveniences of the CFL. The new bulbs are particularly vulnerable to extremes of temperature, for example; you won't want to use them in your garage in winter. CFLs are also 25 percent longer in size than the average incandescent. This makes them unsuitable for all kinds of lighting fixtures--particularly chandeliers and other ceiling lights--which will have to be either discarded or reconfigured, at considerable expense, after the Bush ban goes into effect. You can't use most CFLs with dimmer switches, either; ditto timers. Newer models that can be dimmed and are adaptable to timers will require you to buy new CFL-compatible dimmers and timers.

The quality of the light given off by CFLs is quite different from what we're used to from incandescents. The old bulb concentrates its light through a small surface area. CFLs don't shine in beams; they glow all the way around, diffusing their illumination. They're terrible reading lights. Many people find fluorescent light itself to be harsh and unpleasant. Moreover--in a variation of the old joke about the restaurant that serves awful food and, even worse, serves it in such small portions--a CFL bulb can take two to three minutes to reach its full illumination after being turned on. And once it's fully aglow, according to Department of Energy guidelines, you need to leave it on for at least 15 minutes. In a typically chipper, pro-ban article last week, U.S. News and World Report explained why: "Turning a CFL on and off frequently shortens its life."

Odd, isn't it--an energy-saving device that you're not supposed to turn off? Such complications undermine the extravagant claims made for the CFLs' energy savings. Let's say you're a CFL aficionado and you want to fetch your car keys from your darkened bedroom: You switch on the light, wait a couple minutes, finally find the wallet as the room slowly brightens, and then leave the light on, because you don't want to shorten the life of your expensive CFL. Will you remember to go back and turn it off 15 minutes later? Or will you get in your Prius, drive to Whole Foods, and leave the light burning for several more hours while you absent-mindedly fondle the organics? If you're not a CFL aficionado, by contrast, you turn on the incandescent light, get your car keys, and then switch it off. Who's wasting more energy? I'm sure some green-eye-shade in the depths of the Department of Energy could calculate an answer, and maybe already has. But we're unlikely to hear about it.

Sam Kazman, of the antiregulation Competitive Enterprise Institute, likes to cite the now legendary Great Light Bulb Exchange sponsored by a local power company in the tiny town of Traer, Iowa. Half the town's residents turned in their incandescents for free CFLs--and electricity consumption rose by 8 percent. The cost of burning electricity went down, and demand increased. Funny how that happens.

There are other complications that might give environmentalists pause, if they were the kind of people who paused. When a CFL bulb finally dies--after years and years and years!--it cannot be dropped in the trash like an incandescent; it must be recycled by specially equipped recycling facilities. CFLs contain mercury. If one breaks in your home, Kazman says, EPA guidelines suggest you open windows and leave the room for at least a quarter of an hour before trying to clean up the mess. And for God's sakes don't use a vacuum, which could disperse the poison into the air. Even when they're intact, U.S. News happily tells us, "the bulbs must be handled with caution. Using a drop cloth might be a good new routine to develop when screwing in a light bulb."

The mind reels at the joke-like possibilities: How many Bush administration officials does it take to screw in a CFL? As many as it takes to screw American consumers! But the Bushies aren't the half of it. In creating the ban, Bush and his environmentalist allies were joined by Philips Lighting, which is--you should probably sit down--the world's foremost manufacturer of CFLs. The phased-in ban will position Philips to crowd from the market any troublesome competitors. It's a perfect confluence of interests: the Big Environmental Lobby, Big Business, and Big Government Conservatives.

But back to the screwees--those American consumers, also known, not so long ago, as the citizens of the United States, a free people, rulers of the world's proudest self-governing nation. Will there be protests of some kind, expressions of disgust at least? And what if there aren't? What if, as the ban slowly tightens, we hear nothing, not a howl, not a peep, just a long mellow moo? Then maybe it really will be time to turn out the lights.

Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.