Posted on 03/21/2014 10:35:17 AM PDT by cotton1706
Among the many dumb and harmful things Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) has voted for over the decades -- and there are some doozies, for example, adding trillions to the national debt, creating the unneeded and unaffordable Medicare Part D prescription drug entitlement (2003, Roll Call Vote 457), and, even more outrageously, funding Obamacare (2013, RCV 206) -- one of the dumbest has to be the light-bulb ban (2007, RCV 430).
The bill Senator McConnell voted for contained a federally mandated phase-out out of the traditional incandescent light bulb in favor of those annoying folded-tube fluorescents. Compact fluorescents, as they're called, cost a lot more than regular bulbs, give off a pallid light, and contain hazardous mercury. Under the ban, the Energy Department is authorized to phase out incandescents, and it is doing so.
This dumb idea was tucked into a massive "omnibus" energy bill passed by the Democrats in 2007. Among other things, that bill created massive new subsidies for green energy development, severely tightened fuel mileage requirements for passenger vehicles, and created a whole new renewable fuels standard -- all of which have increased the cost of our cars and our fuel.
McConnell voted for it.
Thanks, Mitch!
Wanting to reduce wasteful energy use is a fine goal. But there is a right way to do it, and a wrong way. The right way is to let markets work. The wrong way is to have the government interfere with people's private choices.
When people have to pay the real cost of their electricity or gasoline use, or what have you, you can bet they will use only as much as makes sense to them financially and no more. When the government interferes, the result is inevitably waste and misallocation of resources.
(Excerpt) Read more at freedomworks.org ...
Sometimes the result is the very opposite of what the central planners had in mind.
That may be true here. The light-bulb ban probably drives up energy use by people who think they can leave energy-frugal compact fluorescents burning all the time at little cost to themselves. Certainly the ban reduces our comfort and convenience. More importantly, it reduces our freedom.
By the way. Why can't these busybodies mind their own bee's wax? Who gives a hoot about what kind of light-bulb other people use, or what kind of toilet they flush? Jeepers.
The light-bulb ban is one of the dumber ideas to come out of Washington in a long time. In voting for it, Mitch McConnell revealed himself to be -- you'll pardon the expression -- a dim bulb.
The only thing I can figure is that the incandescent bulb creates heat. That infuriated the Global Warming Nazis and they manipulated the politicians to ban the incandescent. I hate the CFL bulbs......they give me a headache. We have been buying the LED bulbs, one at a time as they are really expensive. But they are supposed to last for decades.
Not a dime’s worth of difference.
Those CFL bulbs WILL NOT cross my threshold. I bought a case of 60 and 75 watters on ebay. I should be good for about ten years.
In the case of McConnell it simply means he got a campaign contribution (er, Bribe) from a CFL manufacturer.
That’s all. He’s a really easy guy to understand.
Please KY, dump this TURD.
Can you find any 100 watt bulbs in stores?
Just wait until the enviroNazi’s start demanding Billions to clean up all the Mercury in our landfills, due to these bulbs.
We pretty much use 75-watt everywhere so haven’t noticed.
McConnell had 85 other dim bulbs with him on that vote.
The vote was 86 to 8 with 6 not voting.
Those voting against or not voting were:
NAYs -—8
Barrasso (R-WY)
Coburn (R-OK)
DeMint (R-SC)
Enzi (R-WY)
Hatch (R-UT)
Inhofe (R-OK)
Kyl (R-AZ)
Stabenow (D-MI)
Not Voting - 6
Biden (D-DE)
Clinton (D-NY)
Dodd (D-CT)
Hagel (R-NE)
McCain (R-AZ)
Obama (D-IL)
The 100 and 75 watt bulbs are almost impossible to find these days. You are probably not seeing anything over 60 watts in the stores.
The ban kicks in over time with the 100 watt bulbs outlawed one year, and 75 watt bulbs the next, etc.
My anger over this has dissipated somewhat as I already have a lifetime supply of incandescent bulbs.
Now, about those gas cans...
Stupid Republicans, RINO’s, are just as bad as democrats.
I find CFLs actually allow me to fine tune my lighting needs.
6500K in the kitchen and bathroom, 4100K and 3500K in my living space and 5000K and 3500K in the bedroom.
I hate the yellow old light bulb and never want to go back to it. I like a relaxing yellow hint color bulb in living spaces, a bright white light for reading and full daylight light to allow me to get tasks done faster.
And for open fixtures, CFLs now come in the more familiar A shape and globe shape, I find I can live with them and their energy savings as well in producing the kind of light I want in a particular room.
Halogen bulbs which are considered to be energy efficient generate more heat per watt than incandescent’s.
There are some loopholes to the ban. You can still buy “rough service” incandescent bulbs as well as silicone coated bulbs. The coated bulbs were designed for use around food.
These are two good led bulbs to look at:
http://reviews.cnet.com/smart-home/philips-slimstyle-led-bulb/4505-9788_7-35833478.html
This sounds like a lie on the face of it. Perhaps the higher peak temperature of the capsule is in view. But the capsule is smaller than a "normal" bulb's shell.
I applied for a government grant to study the effects of the incandescent light bulbs over the next 40 years on blindness. I figure since I was 63 at the time, I’ll be dead before the results are in, have spent all the money and the government will spend more millions to back up my data (which will come from the internet). So far, I haven’t heard a word. What makes me unable to get a grant?
As an early adopter of the compact fluorescent bulbs, I chose them because their overall cost (first cost plus cost of operation over the lifetime of the device) is much lower, and in this I have not been disappointed. I only have incandescent bulbs now for a very special purposes, as a light in the oven, or refrigerator, or one or two old portable lights. Incandescent bulbs have the advantage of being INSTANTEOUSLY at full brightness when switched on, a troublesome short-coming of fluorescent lighting, both the older kind, which needed a starter that had to charge up, before light flickered into being, and with a residual hum in operation, and in the newer compact bulbs, which are about as bright as a wet match when first powered up, not coming to full intensity for several minutes. Once lit, their power drain is much less than incandescent bulbs, and total lifetimes vastly exceed the older technology.
But this ban on incandescent lighting distorts the market and freezes in place innovations in design. Halogen lighting would never have been developed without the intermediary step of the tungsten filament bulb. Halogen lighting has the further design flaw of converting the energy not only into visible light, but generating much greater heat intensity per watt of energy used. But halogen light has not been called out for this difference, as first of all, they have a much longer lifetime than the older tungsten-filament design, and sometimes, the heat generation is a positive attribute in some applications.
In the normal course of things, tungsten-filament bulbs would have died away, like the old vacuum tubes that used to dominate electronic devices, because there were newer and more efficient means to gain the same objective with transistors. LED bulbs are the equivalent of transistors in the level of technology, and it is only because of resistance to innovation that they are not already as cheap and plentiful as transistors and computer chips.
You can still find 75 watts?
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