A whole bunch of right-wing pundits and members of Congress have been lying about new government standards for light bulbs for quite a while now. These, they claim, set forth in the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, will take away the Founders' guarantee that Americans will forever have the freedom to light their houses with incandescent bulbs.
House Republicans, including Rep. Michele Bachmann, who introduced her own light-bulb freedom act, made a big deal all year of squelching the standards. Last week, they got their wish with a rider attached to the omnibus spending bill. Consequently, until Sept. 30, the end of the 2012 fiscal year, the new standards that were supposed to take effect in January can't be enforced.
You know who isn't happy about it? The light-bulb industry:
Big companies like General Electric, Philips and Osram Sylvania spent big bucks preparing for the standards, and the industry is fuming over the GOP bid to undercut them.
After spending four years and millions of dollars prepping for the new rules, businesses say pulling the plug now could cost them. The National Electrical Manufacturers Association has waged a lobbying campaign for more than a year to persuade the GOP to abandon the effort.
Manufacturers are worried that the rider will undermine companies’ investments and “allow potential bad actors to sell inefficient light bulbs in the United States without any fear of federal enforcement,” said Kyle Pitsor, the trade group’s vice president of government relations.
But the Republican complaint focuses not so much on how the standards affect industry, they supposedly are all about freedom of choice for consumers. These are the successors to the politicians who said automobile air bags and seat belts shouldn't be mandatory. But, in those cases, the industry agreed with them.
Of course the light-bulb standards aren't about imposed safety but rather imposed efficiency. Such standards have been gradually required on electric appliances from refrigerators to air conditioners since the 1990s. Too gradually, some critics say. Generating electricity takes energy, and a hefty portion of that energy in the United States comes from burning coal, which puts prodigious amounts of carbon dioxide into our already-overburdened atmosphere, among other problems, and is increasingly costly.
The cheapest unit of electricity, both financially and environmentally, is the one you don't have to generate in the first place. At its core, that's what efficiency is all about. Not only do Energy Star-qualified bulbs save far more money than they cost over their lifetime, but if every household in America exchanged just one of the old 100-watt energy hogs for a more efficient bulb, it would keep as much CO2 out of the atmosphere as taking 800,000 cars off the road.
But when you're a politician who thinks pumping gigatons of CO2 into the air has no pernicious effects, imposing standards becomes all about some violation of the 1st and 10th Amendments, or something like that. Time to stash some old-fashioned 100-watt bulbs in the basement along with the ammo and water. Or stick a rider on some unrelated bill because you can. Dunces.
As Joseph Higbee, a spokesman for the National Electrical Manufacturers Association, told the New York Times in May:
"Unfortunately people do not yet understand this lighting transition, and mistakenly think they won't be able to buy incandescent light bulbs. This misinformation has been promoted by a number of media outlets. Incandescent light bulbs are not being banned, and the new federal energy-efficiency standards for light bulbs do not mandate the use of CFLs. My hope is that the media can help the American people understand the energy-efficient lighting options available, as opposed to furthering misconceptions."
Once again, for the record, the 2007 act does not outlaw incandescent light bulbs. It requires that bulbs use 30 percent less electricity to provide the same amount of illumination. And while compact fluorescent bulbs have long been able to do that, the new standards have spurred innovation in incandescent bulbs. Halogen incandescents already meet the standards. The idea that nobody can own incandescents is utterly bogus. Just another jackass attack on the alleged "radical environmentalism" that is supposedly No. 3 or 5 on the Democratic agenda.