While that effort will not succeed as written, what is the path from here to there vis-à-vis bulbs?
The simple first idea would be to make the fluorescents cheaper than the others, taxing the old and subsidizing the new.
The subsidizing is done now on a sporatic basis by the power company. They have one size bulb on super sale every month, maybe 60% off.
I’m not sure if that creates a problem.
They’ll have to address the problems that many people have with them first, such as the color and the delay it typically takes to bring them to full brightness–a problem compounded by cold–and the problem of not being able to dim them unless they are specially designed to be dimmable. They’re good, but they have a ways to go before they can effectively compete with incandescents.
Aren’t LCD bulbs the new thing anyway? Even better than fluorescent?
Yes, but they are further away from a competitive price point.
Government tax on Incandescent and tax incentives to reduce the price of better compact Fluorescents and LED would be the method I would pursue. On the other hand, I will never be an elected official and I can make pronouncements that might not be politically feasible.
Jim
I guess you haven’t looked at them closely. They come in all colors, and most now are instant on. I don’t know how many dimmers there are out there, but it hardly matters. Most people have those only in the dining room. That leaves a lot of savings in the rest of the house.
I have all fluorescents except the dining room and that’s not a dimmer problem but that my chandelier takes tiny bulbs. If I used the room more hours per day I would just get a different lamp. Plenty of choices there too these days.
You mean LED. They suffer from the same color problems as CFLs, since white LEDs produce their light by exciting a mixture of phosphors, just like fluorescent lamps do. They are slightly less efficient than CFLs, at the moment, but are improving all the time, and they don’t suffer from the drawback of the slow risetime to full brightness that CFLs do; they are essentially instant-on. For the moment, they are much more expensive per lumen than CFLs are, but this is expected to decrease dramatically over the next few years. Their main benefit is the vastly increased lifespan over any other light source on the market. A typical LED has an expected MTBF of around 100,000 hours, which blows away everything else.
Fluorescents have come in a range of colors for years. That’s not the problem. The problem is that none of those colors are natural to our eyes, because the spectrum of a fluorescent bulb is composed of discrete lines corresponding to the emission spectrum of the various phosphors. Our eyes evolved to cope with a continuous spectrum, such as is emitted by the sun and incandescent light sources. Some people are bothered by this more than others.
Even the “instant on” bulbs don’t reach maximum brightness for at least several seconds. Even longer, if used in a cold environment. They are getting better in this regard, but they still have a way to go. Again, some people are more bothered by this than others. YMMV.
Oh, geez, do we really have to legislate this? Do we really have to use the power of the law to tell people what kind of light bulbs they can and can’t buy?
If the fluorescents are better, won’t they naturally win out eventually?
Sure, but we could speed it along to save a very large amount of energy and therefore partially fight global warming. IIRC, lighting is about 20% of the USA’s electrical consumption. It might be higher. The CF bulbs use roughly 1/4 to 1/5 the energy.
Jim
Residential lighting accounts for only a tiny fraction of environmental carbon emissions in the US. Legislative dollars are better spent reducing emissions elsewhere. Writing laws such as proposed in the OP in order to fight global warming is like trying to heat up the North Atlantic by pissing in it.
Big Fluorescent is watching YOU.
How depressing. Reminds me of the beginning of Joe vs. the Volcano.
LED cluster lamps are also more durable than either fluorescent or incandescent bulbs. They are, in fact, essentially physically indestructable short of crushing the diode element or breaking a contact. You can burn out the diode by trying to run electricity the wrong way through it, but I assume the integral power regulator in the bulb would prevent this.
The white LEDs do produce a very “blue white” light that can be fatiguing, but there are soft light versions that appear to absorb or filter our excessive quantities of unwelcome wavelengths. You can also get them in other colors (including color changing bulbs) for accent or ease of vision.
Stranger
What is a tiny fraction?
We need a lot of small fractions to add up to a solution.
If this simple act could eliminate even 1% of the emissions, it would be a good, mostly painless start.
Jim
In Australia one of the power companies was (maybe still is) giving away free four or five flouro bulbs or a low flow shower head to anyone interested. As I recall they didn’t even care if you were a subscriber to another power supplier.
I’m one of those people who is very bothered by fluorescents. I prefer warm, yellow light, and I think I’d rather go back to candles if I couldn’t have it. I don’t know if there are CF bulbs that give more natural light - if there are, I’d definitely use them - but if all of them look like the kind of fluorescent lights in stores and places like that, I wouldn’t want to.
Well, the reason why dudes buy incandescents is 'cause they are cheaper.Let us slap a modest tax on them, thereby encouraging dudes to buy other tyoes, but still giving everyone their free choice.
The tax will go towards alternative energy credits or something.
I’m usually pretty edgy under fluorescents in stores, and I have to say that the CFLs I purchased from Costco are great. They come on right away, and they give the same color cast light as my incandescents. Right now I have three fluorescents and one incandescent in my dining room (I’m installing the CFLs as the incandescents burn out), and there’s no variation on either side of the room of brightness or of color cast or “vibe”.
Those LED bulbs are intriguing, but at $20 or more a bulb, there’s just no way I can afford that.
Like so many habits, the best thing we can do to encourage change is to increase education, availability and affordability. Wal-Mart is going to start pushing CFL’s in their stores soon, I hear. That should help. Basically we’ve got to convince people that fluorescents ain’t what they used to be, and they can save you money pretty quickly.
I wouldn’t go that far. They are certainly better than they used to be, but I can still tell CFLs from incandescents immediately. Maybe my eyes are just attuned top the differences.
Maybe. If you’re ever in Chicago, drop me a line and come by my dining room. 
I have a lot of light bulbs in hard-to-reach fixtures, some of which are in places that need illumination most of the time (i.e., dark places in the lower level). The frequently used lights burn out quite often and are a pain to change; the fluorescents last much longer.
However, they don’t fit into the fixtures. I can get them into the socket but can’t put the cover back on. If they fit, I would replace all of them, because they would be worth it. That would be a good start. Make those suckers the same size as regular light bulbs, or even slightly smaller. Because they almost fit.
Another would be not to call them “instant on!” when they are not. It’s a slight delay, but it’s a delay you don’t get with incandescents, and it would be better IMO if the package either didn’t mention it or called it a slight delay.