Enlightening news and welcome news: "Congressional negotiators struck a deal Thursday that overturns the new rules that were to have banned sales of traditional incandescent light bulbs beginning next year.
That agreement is tucked inside the massive 1,200-page spending bill that funds the government through the rest of this fiscal year, and which both houses of Congress will vote on Friday. Mr. Obama is expected to sign the bill, which heads off a looming government shutdown.
Congressional Republicans dropped almost all of the policy restrictions they tried to attach to the bill, but won inclusion of the light bulb provision, which prevents the Obama administration from carrying through a 2007 law that would have set energy efficiency standards that effectively made the traditional light bulb obsolete.
Stopping the bulb ban was a chief GOP priority coming into this year, with all of the candidates seeking to become chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee saying they would push through a repeal. That bill cleared the House but Democrats blocked its consideration in the Senate.
House Republicans then insisted on adding a provision into the year-end spending bill, and it was one of the last major sticking-points in the negotiations.
The spending bill doesn’t actually amend the 2007 law, but does prohibit the administration from spending any money to carry out the light bulb standards — which amounts to at least a temporary reprieve."
Hurrah! (But how absurd it has come to this - the federal government interfering with the marketplace and the choices of consumers to this extreme extent.)
4 comments:
Some time ago I bought a case of the evil 100 watt incandescent bulbs. Not to make a political statement. Rather, because my wife is a professional artist and needs bright light to work by. Mr. Edison's old, familiar bulbs do the job nicely.
Cheaper, too!
It is more than that Izzy -- Alternating current flips sides 60 times per *second* (think of the batteries in your flashlight spinning around really really fast....). As the incandescent filiment is HEATED, it cools of a little bit but not much and you have a constant light. Everything else is literally going on and off 120 times a second -- even the LEDs -- and everything else is electron discharge (think lightning) -- and it is really freaky to use a chain saw out under a high pressure sodium streetlight -- you can see the blade as you cut.
You can tell the blade is still moving because the gasoline engine isn't lined up with the 60 cycles, but an electric motor inherently *is* -- and the strobe light effect occurs -- the blade appears to be standing still (just like the timing mark on a car) -- in a noisy shop you don't know it is your saw that is running -- people have put their hands into moving blades before. Quite a few people -- enough for them to put that INCANDESCENT light on the saw itself. That isn't so you can see what you are cutting, it is so you can see the BLADE!
And then you have the people who have the various flavors of ADHD -- which is actually a deficit of processing ability because the individual perceives *all* stimuli in the environment including the flickering lights, which can be very very distracting.
We have known this for 40 years -- even before we knew what ADHD was, let alone that there are four different kinds of it, or that girls have it too.
Back when we were just talking "hyperactive boys" and modernization had upgraded the classrooms to the 8 foot long fat-tube fluorescents with the metal fins (we all remember them), they converted some of the classrooms back to incandescents and found a marked behavior and performance improvement in the boys. (If they had known to look, they likely would have found the girls a bit less daydreamy as well...)
The 8 foot ones were worse because they were twice as long, and the thin tube/electronic ballast lights of today aren't anywhere near as bad -- but this is still real. And if we can ban peanuts for one kid, what ought we do for the 8% or so who have some aspect of ADHD?
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