Global Warming on Free Republic
Posted on 09/10/2010 5:59:41 PM PDT by Kaslin
Eco-Extremism: A light bulb factory closes in Virginia as mandated fluorescents are made in China. It's now a crime to make or ship for sale 75-watt incandescent bulbs in the European Union. Welcome to green hell.
Thomas Alva Edison was a genius credited with the invention of many things — the phonograph, the motion picture, the incandescent light bulb, global warming. That last credit was given by those who rank light bulbs right up there with the internal combustion engine as ravagers of the planet.
The General Electric light bulb factory in Winchester, Va., closed this month, a victim, along with its 200 employees, of a 2007 energy conservation measure passed by Congress that set standards essentially banning ordinary incandescents by 2014.
Just as they are by fuel-economy standards, consumers are denied choice and the freedom to evaluate any possible benefits on their own by the nanny state. Washington's force and coercion are necessary because it seems the great unwashed can't seem to see the benefits or ignore the risks of compact fluorescents, or CFLs.
In Europe, light bulbs are already a controlled substance. The 100-watt bulb was banned last year and the 75-watt became illegal as of Sept. 1.
Not surprisingly, incandescent light bulbs there quickly became a hot item, flying off the shelves while they were still available. Der Spiegel reported that German customers leave hardware stores with carts piled high with enough incandescent bulbs to last 20 years. Garages and attics throughout the Old World are full of them.
(Excerpt) Read more at investors.com ...
What’s going to happen to oven bulbs, for example? It’s vital for people hatching chicks to have heat bulbs, not to mention those folks who install light bulbs in barns or kennels to keep animals warm in winter. What will people keep in chandeliers?
Idiots. They will never invent a bulb that saves more power than “off”.
No!
It is up to US, to send enviro-nazis back to the stoneage.
These clowns want us to believe that people are the scourge of the earth and that fewer people and less industry are the only way to “save the planet”. As though “go forth and multiply” were some demonic sanction.
There is a difference between being responsible and being anti-civilzation!
Global Warming on Free Republic
LEDs by far have been the most safe and the most efficient type of lighting. From the field of environmental engineering, semiconductors which compose the LEDs are far more safe than mercury is. LED lights are more difficult to break, and take 1/10 the electrical output of an incandescent, to shine even brighter! Semiconductors are also not volatile like Mercury is. LED bulbs are also durable in comparison to fluorescent or incandescent. My family replaced our Christmas lights with the LED equivalents as they died out, it made our Christmas displays cost less in the power bills
The real dogma and falsehood is that industry saved the planet and allowed for almost all of the great population boom in the 20th century. Industrial farming allows us to grow more food than our population even needs, at 10 to 50 times the efficiency per person working in farming. Industrialized nations can feed their populace far better than those without industrial development.
The real issue, above Global Warming, IMO, is getting more nuclear energy into the power grid. It’s the most efficient type of large-scale power plant we have available to use, or have had for decades. The newer models are even safer and more efficient for operation than ever before.
The problem is that environmentalists similar to those in the extreme global warming camp are the ones who can’t accept that nuclear energy holds a great deal of solutions to their woes, again, religious dogma, seems the big problem with world issues actually getting solved. Nuclear energy has a whole lot of potential for the future of humanity, but some are stuck up in some anti-human progress belief.
We can only hope that our nation notices the consequences suffered by the EU due to this decision.
Recall the consequences of the morning sickness drug, Thalidomide. I’m sure there were many who lamented how the U.S. was not as “Progressive” as the Europeans.
Only with "gay marriage."
Build a better mousetrap these days, and it will be a SWAT team that beats a path to your door.
“Same here. I have a small stash. I’m planning on buying a few more boxes tomorrow.”
May be a good investment. I mean gold is maxed out, stocks iffy, and forget bonds or savings interest. But a few thousand incandescent bulbs? Can you imagine what those babies will be worth once inflation sets in and they become black-market objects?
Not saying you could put your kids through school with them, but . . .
How Innovation Killed the Lights
By Peter Whoriskey
Washington Post
09/10/2010 WINCHESTER, Va. — The last major GE factory making ordinary incandescent light bulbs in the United States is closing this month, marking a small, sad exit for a product and company that can trace their roots to Thomas Alva Edison’s innovations in the 1870s.
The remaining 200 workers at the Winchester plant will lose their jobs.
“Now what’re we going to do?” said Toby Savolainen, 49, who like many others worked for decades at the factory, making bulbs now deemed wasteful.
During the recession, political and business leaders held out the promise that American advances, particularly in green technology, might stem the decades-long decline in U.S. manufacturing jobs. But as the lighting industry shows, even when the government pushes companies toward environmental innovations and Americans come up with them, the manufacture of the next-generation technology can still end up overseas.
What made the GE plant vulnerable was, in part, a 2007 energy conservation measure passed by Congress that set standards essentially banning ordinary incandescents by 2014. The law will force millions of American households to switch to more efficient bulbs.
The resulting savings in energy and greenhouse-gas emissions are expected to be immense. But the move also had unintended consequences.
Rather than setting off a boom in the U.S. manufacture of replacement lights, the leading replacement lights are compact fluorescents, or CFLs, which are made almost entirely overseas, mostly in China.
Consisting of glass tubes twisted into a spiral, they require more hand labor, which is cheaper there. So though they were first developed by American engineers in the 1970s, none of the major brands make CFLs in the United States.
“Everybody’s jumping on the green bandwagon,” said Pat Doyle, 54, who has worked at the plant for 26 years. But “we’ve been sold out. First sold out by the government. Then sold out by GE.”
Doyle was speaking after a shift last month surrounded by several co-workers around a picnic table near the punch clock. Many of the workers have been at the plant for decades, and most appeared to be in their 40s and 50s. Several worried aloud about finding another job.
“When you’re 50 years old, no one wants you,” Savolainen said. It was meant half in jest, but some of the men nod grimly.
If there is a green bandwagon, as Doyle says, much of the Obama administration is on board. As a means of creating U.S. jobs, the administration has been promoting the nation’s “green economy” — solar power, electric cars, wind turbines — with the idea that U.S. innovations in those fields may translate into U.S. factories. President Barack Obama said last month that he expects the government’s commitment to clean energy to lead to more than 800,000 jobs by 2012, one step in a larger journey planned to restore U.S. manufacturing.
Manufacturing shrinks
But officials are working against a daunting trend. Under the pressures of globalization, the number of manufacturing jobs in the United States has been shrinking for decades, from 19.5 million in 1979 to 11.6 million this year, a decline of 40 percent.
At textile mills in North Carolina, at auto parts plants in Ohio, at other assorted manufacturing plants around the country, the closures have pushed workers out, often leaving them to face an onslaught of personal defeats: lower wages, community college retraining and unemployment checks.
In Obama’s vision, the nation’s mastery of new technology will create American manufacturing jobs.
“See, when folks lift up the hoods on the cars of the future, I want them to see engines stamped ‘Made in America,’ “ Obama said in an August speech at a Wisconsin plant. “When new batteries to store solar power come off the line, I want to see printed on the side, ‘Made in America.’ When new technologies are developed and new industries are formed, I want them made right here in America. That’s what we’re fighting for.”
But a closer look at the lighting industry reveals that isn’t going to be easy.
At one time, the United States was ahead of the game in CFLs.
Following the 1973 energy crisis, a GE engineer named Ed Hammer and others at the company’s famed Nela Park research laboratories were tinkering with different methods of saving electricity with fluorescent lights.
Innovation at GE
In a standard incandescent bulb, in which the filament is electrified until it glows, only about 10 percent of the electricity is transformed into light; the rest generates heat as a side effect. A typical fluorescent uses about 75 percent less electricity than an incandescent to produce the same amount of light.
The trouble facing Hammer was that fluorescents are most efficient in long tubes. But long, linear tubes don’t fit into the same lamp fixtures that the standard incandescent bulbs do.
Working with a team of talented glass blowers, though, Hammer twisted the tubes into a spiral. The new lamps had length, but were also more compact.
“I knew it was a good lamp design,” he recalled recently. In retrospect, in fact, it was a key innovation. The Smithsonian houses Hammer’s original spiral CFL prototype.
At the time, however, the design had one big problem. Bending all that glass into the required shape was slow and required lots of manual labor.
“I used to say you would need 40,000 glass blowers to make the parts,” Hammer said. “Without automation, it was economically unfeasible. It was a lamp before its time.”
The company decided to make investments in other types of lighting then being developed.
Years passed. The next major innovator to try his hand at CFLs was Ellis Yan, a Chinese immigrant to the United States, who had started his own lighting business in China and then in the early ‘90s turned his attention to the possibilities of CFLs.
To make CFLs, he had workers in China sit beside furnaces and bend the glass by hand. Even with the low-wages there, the first attempts were very expensive, clunky and flickered when turned on, he said. But he persisted.
“Everybody in the industry stayed back and was watching me,” he recalled. “No one else wanted to make the big investment for the next generation of technology.”
Prospering in China
The business prospered and Yan’s factories in China employed as many as 14,000 — not so far off from the 40,000 glass blowers that Hammer had once imagined would be necessary. With new automation techniques, Yan is seeking to cut the number of his employees in China, where wages are rising, to 5,000 by year’s end.
Today, about a quarter of the lights sold in the United States are CFLs, according to NEMA, an industry association. Of those, Yan says, he manufactures more than half.
Someday soon, Yan says, he hopes to build a U.S. factory, though he so far has been unable to secure $12.5 million in government funding for the project.
Manufacturing in the United States would add 10 percent or more to the cost of building a standard CFL, he said, but retailers have indicated that there is a demand for products manufactured domestically.
“Retailers tell me people ask for ‘Made in the USA,’ “ Yan said. “I tell them the product will cost 45 to 50 cents more. They say people will pay for it.”
Sales of the CFLs began slowly, but they spiked in 2006 and 2007, when federal and state government efforts promoted their use.
The Energy Department teamed with Walt Disney Co. to develop a public service announcement based on the Disney Pixar film “Ratatouille” to encourage the adoption of technologies such as CFLs. It was shown on CNN, HGTV and the Food Network.
Lawmakers in California and Nevada drafted legislation calling for higher efficiency standards for light bulbs. And in December 2007, Congress passed its new energy standards.
GE balked at the standards at first, knowing that they could impact their U.S. manufacturing. But the company also saw that with restrictions gaining momentum in more states and other countries, some kind of legislation was unavoidable. They decided to support the bill as long as it didn’t amount to a ban on traditional incandescents, but instead simply set energy standards.
“We obviously pointed out to legislators that the impact of an outright ban would be the elimination of some manufacturing operations,” said Earl Jones, senior counsel in government relations and regulatory compliance at the company. “But it was inevitable that some kind of legislation would be coming to the U.S.”
As expected, the new standards hurt the business in traditional incandescents.
The company developed a plan to see what it would take to retrofit a plant that makes traditional incandescents into one that makes CFLs. Even with a $40 million investment and automation, the disparity in wages and other factors made it uneconomical. The new plant’s CFLs would have cost about 50 percent more than those from China, GE officials said.
The company also makes halogen light bulbs, which are an innovative type of incandescent, and Sylvania is transforming its incandescent light bulb factory in St. Marys, Pa., to halogen as well.
But the era of traditional incandescents built in the United States was coming to an end.
WINCHESTER, Va. — The last major GE factory making ordinary incandescent light bulbs in the United States is closing this month, marking a small, sad exit for a product and company that can trace their roots to Thomas Alva Edison’s innovations in the 1870s.
The remaining 200 workers at the Winchester plant will lose their jobs.
“Now what’re we going to do?” said Toby Savolainen, 49, who like many others worked for decades at the factory, making bulbs now deemed wasteful.
During the recession, political and business leaders held out the promise that American advances, particularly in green technology, might stem the decades-long decline in U.S. manufacturing jobs. But as the lighting industry shows, even when the government pushes companies toward environmental innovations and Americans come up with them, the manufacture of the next-generation technology can still end up overseas.
What made the GE plant vulnerable was, in part, a 2007 energy conservation measure passed by Congress that set standards essentially banning ordinary incandescents by 2014. The law will force millions of American households to switch to more efficient bulbs.
The resulting savings in energy and greenhouse-gas emissions are expected to be immense. But the move also had unintended consequences.
Rather than setting off a boom in the U.S. manufacture of replacement lights, the leading replacement lights are compact fluorescents, or CFLs, which
That's actually their goal.
I like LEDs too. They are fantastic in flashlights. However, they are not good for all applications. I recall reading this past winter about some morons who decided it would be a good idea to use them in stoplights in places up north. Apparently, in winter conditions the things would freeze over making them essentially not funcion because they couldn't be seen. You see, LEDs are so efficient, they give off very little heat. Simple, old-fashioned light bulbs provided their own built-in heating source to keep them from freezing over. They ended up having to add small heaters to the stoplights to keep them working in snow. Not only was that stupidly expensive, it completely nullified the "energy savings" they'd been hoping to get by going with LEDs. Not only that, now the entire system is more complex because it needs a separate heating element, thus making it ultimately less dependable and prone to failure.
Yet another unintended consequence of the eco-nazis.
Good point: living in the SE United States its easy to forget the cold part of LEDs. It usually doesn’t get close to as cold as you are talking there.
back to the stoneage...
Indeed, the human spirit is generally gone to the pits when it has come to optimism.
Nuclear Energy and other improved technologies are the key to the future. Better technologies = more eco-friendly!
back to the stoneage...
Indeed, the human spirit is generally gone to the pits when it has come to optimism.
Nuclear Energy and other improved technologies are the key to the future. Better technologies = more eco-friendly!
Yep.
http://www.longislandpress.com/2010/09/16/teslas-last-stand-on-long-island/
Tesla’s Last Stand on Long Island
The visionary scientist’s Shoreham lab is for sale–and his priceless legacy soon could be lost
By Spencer Rumsey on September 16th, 2010
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