A Nation of Dim Bulbs

Ban Everything Because lefties said so

Andrew Ferguson writes at The Weekly Standard about the new energy bill that takes away more of your freedom. In addition to the obvious decision to destroy what's left of Detroit by requiring them to manufacture only hemp-powered Yugos, there is that pesky ban on the light bulb that you may have grown accustom to having when the sun goes down.

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.

The whole point of course is that it is none of the government's business whether you have incandescent bulbs, an SUV or a large toilet.

IT IS NONE OF THEIR BUSINESS. This cannot be stressed enough.

There is nothing in the constitution that allows any of this. The reality is that politicians and activists are slowing taking away our freedom bit by bit and ignoring the fact that they have no constitutional authority to do so. They are simply doing it.

The best way to allocate resources is the market. And the left hates the market. That is what this is about, not energy independence. If they wanted us to be energy independent, they would be in favor of nuclear power generation. We have enough domestic uranium to last for thousands of years. And breeder technology would extend that so far as to be practically without limit. But they are against that too.

What this is really about is control. They want control over all of us pesky Americans who keep voting against them when they offer to run our lives for us because they can do such a better job at it than we can. And since we have, for the most part, kept them out of power and refused their kind offer to run things, they have gone around us in order to get their agenda in place whether we like it or not.

It is just a pity that so few Republicans today, including the President, seem to understand the agenda here.