Many moons ago, during the era of Republican Representative and bugshitcrazytarian Michele Bachmann, conservatives believed that the Obama administration’s effort to increase energy efficiency of light bulbs was an assault on our Basic Freedoms. Faced with the threat of light bulb vigilantes, the Trump administration has decided to protect Our Sacred Way of Life (boldface mine):
A second wave of lightbulb changes was set to happen. But now the Trump administration wants to undo an Obama-era regulation designed to make a wide array of specialty lightbulbs more energy efficient.
At issue here are bulbs such as decorative globes used in bathrooms, reflectors in recessed lighting, candle-shaped lights and three-way lightbulbs. The Natural Resources Defense Council says that, collectively, these account for about 2.7 billion light sockets, nearly half the conventional sockets in use in the U.S.
…”Now we’re going to have to generate about 25 large coal-burning power plants’ worth of extra electricity if this rollback goes through,” says Noah Horowitz, a senior scientist at NRDC. He calls it a bad idea and says it’s illegal.
NEMA disagrees and also objects to the term “rollback.” Backsliding on energy efficiency requirements is not allowed under federal law.
Everything this administration does is something it will take years to recover from, if we can at all. Everything.
Mike,
I am no fan of these people but the efficiency is not the only difference between the lightbulbs. The incandescent ones do not trigger migraine or epileptic seizures, LEDs and fluorescent lights do (in people with glare and pattern glare triggered migraine and epilepsy) they also can trigger headaches in some people.
I am in a different country, so effected by different laws, but the here change in lighting meant that I was no able to visit many people’s houses after dark. If incandescent bulbs were no longer available (which I understand is now the case in the EU) I would not be able to light my own flat.
I am all in favour of using safe forms of energy production, ending coal mining and oil extraction, and if there was an energy efficient source of lighting that did not harm anyone I would of course be happy to see it used.
But the expense of this change has not been felt evenly. And I do not remotely believe that best, fairest, solution to global warming can only come at the expense of excluding people like me from the built environment. Not in a world that still burns carbon to produce luxury goods anyway.