Your government has decided that, in 2012, you can no longer choose to purchase and use Thomas Edison's iconic invention, the 100-watt incandescent light bulb.
I am always amazed at the variety of choice that exists in my local supermarket. There are other supermarkets in the area, but the one I frequent most has lower prices on most items and almost anything you want to purchase allows one to select among several brands available.
We Americans may not think much about choice when it comes to what we buy because we have so many choices. It is the mark of a free marketplace where competition determines winners and losers. It says a lot about a society that puts a high premium on freedom.
Your government, however, has decided that, in 2012, you can no longer choose to purchase and use Thomas Edison's iconic invention, the 100-watt incandescent light bulb. By 2014, all such bulbs will be banned from sale. That's right, they will vanish from the shelves of supermarkets and other outlets.
As this is being written, your government is debating taking away your choice to purchase health insurance. Or not. If it gets its way, everyone, old and young, healthy or ill, everyone will have to buy health insurance — most likely the brand issued by the government because it will drive most present insurance companies out of business. That is so un-American as to defy belief.
In Europe, thanks to a European Union ban on incandescent light bulbs, consumers are cleaning out the shelves to stockpile a supply when they can no longer be sold. As Jason Lomberg, the Technical Editor of Electronic Component News, a trade publication, noted recently, "The ban has proved to be massively unpopular. All across Europe its media are reporting huge increases in the sales of incandescent sales. In Germany alone, sales for 100-watt bulbs rose by 80% to 150%.
Why were the EU and U.S. bans put in place? It is the view of environmentalists who insist that incandescent bulbs are less energy "efficient" than compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs) and that consumers must be denied the choice between them.
They are less "efficient," but it is equally true that CFL's unnatural, bluish light takes time to achieve full brightness, about three minutes on the average. At least a quarter of them fall short of meeting their rated service life, meaning you will have to buy more of them.
In addition to the fact that some "emit a headache-inducing buzzing sound" the worst thing about fluorescent light bulbs is that they contain mercury. As a recent issue of The DeWeese Report points out, they "contain poisonous liquid mercury over 300 times the EPA's standard accepted safety level."
"In addition, days after a bulb has been broken," noted Tom DeWeese, "vacuuming or simply crawling across the carpeted floor where the bulb was broken can cause mercury vapor levels to shoot back upwards of 100 times the accepted level of safety." Who crawls on the floor? Babies! Who's closer to the floor than you? Pets!
The Maine Department of Environmental Protection reported that a woman was quoted $2,000 for cleanup of a broken compact fluorescent bulb in her house.
The politicians in the U.S. Congress, pandering as always to the crazed environmentalists, enacted the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 that put the ban in place to begin in 2012.
The Obama administration has declared war on the building of new coal-fired energy plants despite the fact that they currently provide just over half of all the electricity we use daily, and a new nuclear plant hasn't been built in decades. Obama won't allow any offshore exploration and extraction of oil or natural gas either. So, while allegedly providing for "energy independence," the government is thwarting any new provision of electricity.
But you will be forced to buy fluorescent light bulbs to ensure "energy efficiency" while one of the greatest inventions, the incandescent light bulb, is banned from use. The result will turn all U.S. landfills into toxic dumps.
Where the government finds the justification for destroying your right of choice continues to elude my grasp.
What it portends are supermarkets with far fewer products and food choices than currently exist because some environmentalist or vegetarian has decided that coercive laws are the best way to take away the freedom of choice that is quintessentially American.
This ban must be repealed along with so-called healthcare "reform" and the hideous "cap-and-trade" law, renamed the "American Clean Energy and Security Act," that will raise the cost of electricity in the name of saving the Earth from a "global warming" that is NOT happening.
As Pogo said, "We have met the enemy and he is us."
Even more alarming is the incandescent ban in Russia. Unlike similar legislation in the EU and US, the Russian ban covers the manufacture and *sale* of incandescent bulbs.
In Soviet Russia…bulb lights you.
Check this website out: http://www.costofenergy.org/
Besides the nifty calculator that tells you how much extra Cap&Spend is going to cost you personally by state, the site provides a form protest letter automatically addressed to your Senator.
Of course choice has been outlawed.
Just wait until universal health care passes. All these current programs are just smoke & mirrors to hide the progressives’ true agenda, and that is a ‘single-payer’ system. The ‘public’ option is being sold to the American Public as a’ right’. It’s not a ‘citizen’s’ right! It will become a right of the state.
Once government has a vested interest in paying for your health care, the list of ‘choices’ they will make for you to ensure your health would make you sick!
They will decide if you are to be born. If so, where you will live, how you will live, what you will do for a living, how you will be paid, what you can eat and in what amount, what you may ‘consume’ in other services, what treatment you may receive, what drugs you may receive, and how much they will expend on your continued survival. They will regulate your energy consumption, your water consumption, your carbon footprint, your allowable square footage, income, expendature, and your ‘end-of-life’ issues. All decided upon by how ‘uesful’ you may be to the state.
Health care will change drastically, the relationship between the citizen and the state. You want to be a ‘ward-of-the-state’; well just wait until they pass health care reform.
There is more to it than the light bulb. The American people (the thinking) are awake to everything that has fallen on us over the last 40 years. These elections, I hope will give birth to a new way of governing this nation. It may need to cycle all the way to 2016,but I PRAY we turn this around. As for the upcoming elections and the elections in 2010, I feel we will continue to be absent a leader in the whitehouse. He will spend his time either playen golf,in other countries,or campaigning for more thieving career politicians. Thus leaving us in a whirlwind of uncertainty, while they grab power. Get off the soap-box and lead us! Dem’s don’t understand it..Repub’s don’t get it..Media ignores it…It’s real,
From The Election to Teaparty. Townhall to the March on D.C. “We The American People” are about Fed-Up.
So I start my own personal revolution here and now.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHbC7KliwQA
My time and effort in producing and now passing to all Patriots a video showing “The People In Action”
spread this.
A couple of random thoughts on this.
1) This was passed by congress late last year and signed into law by President Bush on December 19, 2007. Why are we just now hearing about it?
2) I was cooking something in the oven and the incandesacent bulb in the oven got me thinking: what will you put in there when incandescent bulbe are no longer available? CFLs have plastic in their base and small electronic cicruits in them. They will not be able to withstand the heat. The opposite seems to be true about the lights outside on my garage and the pole light at the end of my sidewalk. Will CFLs be able to even come on during cold winter days & nights? I know that they make special ballasts for regular flourescent lights for cold weather, so they will have to come up with something similar for CFLs.
As always, these dunderheads make policy without considering the practical problems that will be created. They ONLY care about appeasing some envirmonetalist wackos – who also don’t consider the practical problems – so that they will get their votes and appear to care about us.