No – not the Canadian Football League. That still exists, believe it or not.
No – does a nyone out there remember the “compact fluorescent light”, or CFL?It seems like just yesterday when the green mafia wheedled the government into mandating the replacement of the incandescent bulb with the CFL – a miniature fluorescent tube that screws into a light socket and resembles the “poop“ emoji.
People resisted them. They were much more expensive than incandescent bulbs, the light (being a fluorescent tube), gave people, headaches, and they were hazardous to dispose of in landfills.
It wasn’t long after that the free market came up with the “LED bulb“ – an adaptation of “light emitting diode“ technology that had been around for decades. it used very little power, it created a much more pleasant brand of light, and it wasn’t toxic waste.
The federal mandate was apparently forgotten. As has been, near as I can tell, the compact fluorescent.
I’m reminded of that when I see how clumsy and ill thought out the governments, current mandate Ridge, the electric vehicle“ is, compared with a potentially much more palatable option, the hydrogen powered car.
Government may have learned something from the CFL fiasco, of course; and that “something“ is most likely not “listen to the free market“. As the Covid lockdowns show us, “strong arming the media and big tech into helping jam acquiescence down” also works.
The rapid refueling of a hydrogen car certainly beats the pants off state-of-the-art BEV charging, though I expect we’ll see rapid advances in battery technology that will change that equation.
This right here is a money quote – unicorn piss and dust that inhabits environ@zi space where brain should be. Not a word in the article, not a single fucking word, that largest R&D and capital expenditures by just about every refiner, pipeline operator and PetChem are spent on H2 production and infrastructure of every color, blue, green, fusia, etc… And yet, they gonna cling to their batteries until… well until they get their new marching orders.
Actually, the free market would dictate that I should get a dirt-cheap incandescent bulb for my closet, since it will last me a lifetime in that very limited use and can be easily disposed of should it ever die. The free market requires choice and gov’t mandates are by definition anti-choice.
voice-to-text without subsequent proofing is a slovenly way to write.
Incandescent bulbs are too cheap. Nobody important makes any real money selling them. They must be banned to force consumers to pony up so as to generate larger corporate profits which fund higher salaries and make possible larger campaign contributions.
Rent seeking is eternal.
Don’t forget the regulations that require any retailer that sells fluorescent bulbs is required to accept old bulbs for “recycling.” I can’t count the number of low wage, low skilled, returns counter cashiers have been exposed to mercury sans PPE from the bulbs that get brought back for disposal. Many are brought back broken. More break before they can be packed in cardboard boxes to be shipped away.
Big +1
This is a good, if trivial, example of how conservatism is really just synonymous with obstinance. Pointless obstinance.
Conservatives became obsessed with light bulbs because they saw it as government intrusion— and maybe it is in the most college-classroom-definition of freedom— but its also a good demonstration why that kind of shallow rejection of anything close to a government regulation is fairly stupid in a real, modern country. While CFLs were generally terrible, they only ended up lasting for maybe one or generations before far superior and cost-effective LEDs came to market.
Some of us who screwed in LEDs are still using the original ones we bought. They last forever and use a fraction of the electricity, while also giving off far less heat. Rather than celebrating a new, superior technology that’s ultimately more cost effective than what we had, we’re still getting whiny columns by people who are valuing a needless sentimentality just so they won’t have to run a 3 second search for a proper replacement.
Nostalgia and romanticism for an imagined past, is at the root of so much of our current social dysfunction.
There are times when I wonder why Mitch won’t ban Fluffy. Perhaps it’s because the Fluffster so often provides a real life example validating the point of Mitch’s post. Well done, Fluffy!
⬆️ Weird flex, but okay.
LEDs are more cost efficient — capitalist decision.
Emery,
Do you honestly not realize that is the point conservatives make? LEDs are superior to CFLs, and arguable incandescents. Banning incandescents was a needless step on the road towards incandescents.
I disagree with your “college classroom definition” malarkey. In the grand scheme of things it’s small, sure. But each small step is part of overall movement. Incrementalism is a dangerous thing. Hillary Care couldn’t get passed, but now rolling back ObamaCare is unthinkable, even within the Right.
If the free market would have gotten around to it eventually, then government should have mandated it long ago.
It would save everyone time and money if bureaucrats simply picked the winners. What could go wrong?
Even if the materialists are correct, perfect knowledge of the past is required if you want perfect knowledge of the future (& a computer that can do the calculation). The question is do we understand the climate to a sufficient granularity that we can use that data to predict the future climate to sufficient granularity. The IPCC says yes, they know to 95% certainty what global temperature corresponds to what atmospheric CO2.
Except efforts to correlate atmospheric CO2 to the amount of global warming have proven woefully deficient so far.
You don’t need to have a PhD in “climate science” to see that the IPCC and whole global warming scientific establishment works furiously, 24/7, to fit the data to the theory & not the reverse.
Mmp, I’m waiting for the climate change priesthood to explain the recent lack of global warming by adding epicycles to their theoretical projections. There is precedent.
A couple of years ago, traffic lights that had been converted to LEDs, were getting covered with snow and ice to the point they were obscured. The idiots found out that since LEDs don’t generate heat, they lights wouldn’t stay clear. From what I learned from a public works street supervisor, just one of the previous lights generated enough heat to prevent build up.
About 10 years ago, after the Bloomington School Board conned the minions into believing that they could buy a fleet of school buses and operate them cheaper than contracting it. The first winter exposed them when the biodiesel that they were running in the buses, gelled, preventing the buses from starting. Lots of late starts to classes. Dumb asses!
Bigman, you can actually see what they (people who call themselves “cimate scientists”) do in real time on twitter. If average temp in a region hasn’t changed or decrease, they find some temperature somewhere in that region that is higher than normal and plot it on a graph with a red, fiery background.
This year has been unusually cold in Australia/New Zealand, lots of record cold temps broken, and not one peep about it from the “climate scientists.”
It’s as bad as the old Soviet propaganda. Select a group of years where the current year has a modestly higher temp, make a graph with a red, lurid background, and put a claim above it with an exclamation point.
We left science behind a long time ago. At this point, the elites are so wedded to their Anthropogenic Global Warming fable if it started snowing year round in Minnesota they simply require that “best practices” now demanded that areas with temps in the thirties now be colored red on the nightly weather report.
I wasn’t an early adopter of CFLs, but I did learn that while the “bare bulb” equivalents for 40 & 60 W did give long life, few of the others did. So someone at the DOE did not insist on good analysis of the reliability of those bulbs. Agreed that LED are a big improvement, though I’m not sure how well they’ll work in the cold.
Regarding hydrogen fueled cars, they’ve got one of the same disadvantages as electrics; blowing up. Hydrogen is a smaller molecule with little of the viscousity of gasoline, and hence it tends to “sneak” past gaskets that work just fine for gasoline, and hence you can end up making your car shipping ship into a new Hindenburg or Challenger. This is especially problematic for fueling and operation in humid conditions, so I don’t believe I’ll be a first adopter, to put it mildly.
When the ban on incandescent light bulbs was proposed, I stocked up figuring to make a killing in black market light bulb sales. Then the ban was lifted and I took a bath on light bulbs, ended up throwing most of them away. Now lesko Brandon wants to ban them again and my stock is gone
Story of my life
I’m gonna keep paying 8X more than necessary for my home lighting needs just to own the libs. That’ll learn em!
rAT Emery gets his bulbs, and Busch Lite from looting ice houses on laKe HaCK in winter. He goes to work while his ER nurse/daughter keeps the fisherman, um, busy.
I know Fluffy won’t (or can’t) answer, but I’ll ask anyway.
I’d like to know why I can’t have a choice? If I want have cheap bulbs that cost more to run or expensive bulbs that cost less to run, why isn’t that solely my decision?
While CFLs were generally terrible, they only ended up lasting for maybe one or generations before far superior and cost-effective LEDs came to market.
Shorter Emery: The government inspired innovation through shoving an expensive and toxic solution down our throats.
Some of us who screwed in LEDs are still using the original ones we bought. They last forever and use a fraction of the electricity, while also giving off far less heat.
Not entirely true: I like LED bulbs for their lower power consumption, but they do not last forever. I have an older house with ungrounded wiring in almost all of the fixtures. Turns out LED bulbs are not as resilient to surges as incandescent bulbs are. When there’s a surge, and there’s no path to ground, where does the extra current go? Millions of homes were built before grounded wiring became part of the NEC code. So, when I am having to replace the more expensive LED bulbs at a rate close to the rate I was having to replace incandescent bulbs, the savings disappear.
So easy, update the wiring, right? Sure, tens of thousands of dollars to tear the walls down to their studs, run new 3-wire (copper ain’t cheap), and have an electrical inspector sign off on it. I can save money if I do the demo and wiring myself, provided the inspector doesn’t find some non-compliance with the complex NEC code, but I’m still out significant amounts of time and money. And I’ll just tell the wife and kids we’ll be staying with relatives or renting somewhere else while the wiring gets updated.
It’ll be a long while before I personally see those cost savings, Emery.
This is the problem with leftists/statists. Everything seems to be a one-size-fits-all solution.
If it’s OK for Emery to make fun of people who want to use lightbulbs that work at 20 below because they’ll waste a few bucks of electricity, what about liberals who own private jets and such? Just askin’.
I DEMAND to know, from the politicians/dictators who voted for this ban, EXACTLY how much global temperatures will be reduced 10, 20 and 100 years from now as a result? And if they can’t give an exact figure, or give one that is reasonably accurate by what we KNOW, (less than 1/10,000th of a degree) then they should rescind this supremely stupid edict.
J. I demand to know how many lives were saved when the reprobates filled in skate board parks, taped off toy shelves in stores and arrested people fishing on empty beaches.
Well stated, Ian, and quite true.
This is the problem with leftists/statists. Everything seems to be a one-size-fits-all solution.
No Ian, everything is free to libturds. Like electricity that magically comes out of the wall to charge their BEVs. And don’t you worry, they will make you update your wiring at YOUR expense, to save Gaia of course! Just you wait.
And yes, LEDs do not last forever, actually less than incandescents in my experience.
This is reality:
The UN’s IPCC is manned by politicians, not scientists.
The people on the IPCC have political, not scientific goals.
The IPCC itself refers to its projections as “probabilities.”
The IPCC’s last report, that classified outcomes as having “high confidence” values, have been wrong.
The Anthropogenic Global Warming scam is a political scam carried out by politicians for political reasons. It literally could not be more obvious. You have politicians who pay researchers to produce the “science” that they demand, and then the politicians leverage that “science” to inflict on on poor and working people the policies they desired before anyone ever thought of something like “anthropogenic global warming.”
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