I meant that if the gvt wants to implement gas standards, fucking *implement *them.
The point is to reduce carbon footprint/oil dependency/gas expenditure, yes ? Selling one Prius for each Hummer doesn’t accomplish that - how do you know the Prius buyer won’t drive it once a month while Hummer guy “rolls coal” all day erry day ?
It’s a compromise that accomplishes precious little… but still infringes on individual liberties enough to be a cause for grousing on the “regulations are bad ! Big gummint in yo house !” side of the spectrum. Seems silly.
We are getting more into GD than GQ, but basically one of the fundamental problems with the idea that an absolutely free market is OK is that it commonly causes the Tragedy of the Commons. I won’t bother typing out an explanation since a couple of seconds of googling will enlighten you on the subject. But in very simple terms, the TotC situation crops up in life all the damn time, and it results in a situation where it can be in any given individual’s best immediate personal interest to do something that can result in the overall situation becoming worse for everyone.
Nah. I mean, if I was dictator of the universe, I wouldn’t have implemented fuel efficiency standards like this. But the standards have pushed fleet efficiency upwards steadily since they were first implemented in 1975. It’s a compromise, but in the absence of an alternative, the CAFE standards have still managed to produce results.
Mr. Ford my next door neighbor is certainly free to sell hid gas guzzling SUV and is under no duty to sell a Prius along side it.
The Ford Corporation has different requirements.
If a car manufacturer wants to make it’s fleet completely fuel-inefficient, they can do so (to a certain extent), but they’ll have to pay a fine. Conversely, if a car manufacturer wants to make its fleet super-efficient, they get a credit. This is a standard way to use regulation on the market to incentivize behavior. Not my preferred way, but it’s pretty standard market economics.
This. This exactly. And, probably better written than I was going to if the points didn’t get made by the bottom of the thread.
The “free market” has many examples of costs that get shifted from the people profiting off of something to the rest of us. Sometimes they’re shifted by government action, perhaps influenced by corporate investment in politics. And sometimes they’re just driven by the underlying science, such as when the oxygen we all share gets converted to the carbon dioxide changing the environment we also all share.
First off, this comment is inappropriate here. Second, it is objectively false. Think which party is gung ho over drug laws, prostitution, same sex marriage, etc. And I just read that it is mostly one party that is trying to make it illegal (or subject to financial penalties) to have rooftop solar panels hooked to the power grid. See article in this month’s Scientific American.
Now I have several reasons why I want to be able to buy incandescents. I have old eyes and need every lumen I can get. LEDs about 60W equivalent light are still fearfully expensive. I bought a 100W equivalent LED bulb for $32 only to discover that it cannot be used in enclosed fixture. My house is full of enclosed fixtures and I really don’t want to replace them all. Another point: All winter those incandescent bulbs are providing hear as well as light. When I go to take a shower before going to bed, the first thing I do is turn on the 4 x 60W incandescents in the bathroom and then go putter for a couple minutes, while the lights heat the bathroom.
For what it is worth. I just bought half a dozen Cree LED bulbs at Home Depot for $4.95 each. (60 watt equivalent, soft white (2700K).)
CFLs are flimsy, don’t meet their longevity goals by a mile, and are slow to reach full brightness, especially outdoors in the winter. My new LEDs seem to answer all of these shortcomings, and the price has come down to the point where they are practical.
Something else to think about: the amount of money you’ll save using “high-efficiency” light bulbs is dependent on your latitude and method of heating your home.
If you live in Canada, and have electric heat, then you won’t save much money by switching to “high-efficiency” light bulbs. May as well use incandescent…
I pinged him for this in post #8 . He said in post #10 that he was kidding.
The rest of what you’ve said I agree with. My objection is that I run dimmers on almost 100% of my lights. And rarely use full blast. None of the later technologies dim for shit, either in brightness range or in color behavior.
After they fix that shortcoming I’m all for cost savings for me and energy efficiency for the planet. But first it has to achieve all my main mission objectives as illumination before I can start worrying about second order objectives.
The question nis not about whether they are good or not, but about it being a criminal act to manufacture, sell or use them. If they are actually more economical and perform better, the marketplace will reflect what people use.
People who can afford uneconomical and inefficient products have, broadly, a right to indulge, and buy what suits their personal taste and pay the going price. The question is Why do light bulbs fall into a special category of consumer products that require legislative acts to not just discourage their use, but to criminalize it.
There is an old saying in the law biz that the government is entitled to cue society’s ills at the time and in the sequence it chooses. The legal principle being that nobody has a cause of action against the government for failing to choose to solve some societal problem, even if that problem did directly injure the interests of some specific would-be plaintiff in some specific identifiable instance.
So … For whatever combination of high-minded social motives and low political calculation, inefficient light bulbs were selected for legislative action. The rest is simply the playing-out of the political / influence-buying process. All of which is within the government’s prerogative.
Light bulbs aren’t “special”. They were merely number 1,345,654 in the list of things the government chose to regulate. Almost 10 years later we’re now up to item number 1,346,234 or thereabouts. A similar claim could be made about each of those. Or a countervailing claim made about the millions of “broken” things not yet “fixed” in our society.
The government can (and will) ban things that are economically-priced - or have superior performance - solely based on environmental concerns. Examples:
The ban on full-flush toilets.
The ban on lead-based solder in Europe.
The ban on R-22 refrigerant.
Regulations on low power-factor electrical loads (for industry).
Ban on leaded gasoline.
Our elected representation passed a law to make it the case. The special category is electric devices. There is a lot of regulation in that areach because people wasting energy drives up the cost for everyone. The costs of energy production is not linear. The more capacity a plant needs to use the more expensive it becomes.
This is a rather silly argument. Electric heat is more expensive than natural gas by a significant margin for nearly all Canadians outside of Quebec. Moreover, most Canadians do not heat their houses in summer, and indeed many have air conditioning. And finally, most light fixtures are poorly situated in rooms to effectively provide heat, which should be introduced to rooms at floor level along outside walls. The vast majority of Canadians will realize a significant majority of the cost savings that the lower electrical usage of LED bulbs offer.
I have no idea what you think you’re saying, so I’ll just say this:
Incandescent bulbs can be made more efficient. The package I have in my hand, the third one I’m not typing with, is “43w = 60w, soft white, dimmable, pleasant light.” That’s a 28% energy saving, exactly in line with the law. It’s available here and now, at every retailer, and being made by American factories.
They are not banned. Not. They are good, old-fashioned technology pepped up with some improvements. Again, stop listening to those people who are telling you otherwise. And I mean stop listening to them on every single subject. They are deliberately lying to you for ideological purposes. And you are falling for it. You don’t have to. Cut them out of your life.
CRI is getting better, but I’ve tried a bunch and I still can’t find an LED that can dim from 0-100% over the full range of a dimmer. Most of them, including the Cree only use a fraction of the range, go out at 5-10%, and tend to flicker when dim. And they still throw light in vastly different directions compared to incandescents. All of them, including the Cree, have a heatsink that blocks a lot of light that would be emitted down from the globe and outward from the base. Cree TWs with the 90 CRI do render colors acceptable to me, but they have an even bigger heatsink, and the overall cast of the light look pinkish to me. Philips have a more incandescent light cast but lower overall CRI>