Dim thinking behind the new lightbulb laws

From Times.

The hoarders were out last week. We learnt that the Germans have been stockpiling old-fashioned lightbulbs to beat this week's European Union ban on making and importing pearl and frosted traditional bulbs, yet you might have expected this ever-so-green, tree-loving nation to be marching out to buy the energy-saving ones.

I talked about it to James Shortridge, who runs the Ryness chain of lighting stores. Apparently we Brits aren't so different. He has noticed hoarding lately. One customer came in and bought 650 bulbs last week. Others who have rushed to buy any pearl or frosted bulbs, or 100 watt clear bulbs — the kinds affected by this week's ban — have included the custodians of the Palace of Westminster. Now you might think that they ought to have been buying compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs), since MPs had waved through the European legislation that is inflicting them on the rest of us.

This technological shift, imposed for the best possible reasons — it is claimed that it will reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 15m tons a year — is being defended in all the wrong ways.

Take this argument put forward last week by Christian Schraft, head of the consumer division at Osram, the bulb manufacturer. He laid into people who said CFLs were ugly, expensive and produced a harsh light. They were out of touch, he said. "In fact, with today's technology, nobody is able to tell the difference between the light of incandescent and energy-efficient bulbs."

We should be kind to Schraft because he is clearly colour-blind. I have been following the improvements in CFLs for some years now. I have been surreptitiously installing them and my wife, just as surreptitiously, removes the worst examples and re-installs the incandescents. And while I might go as far as to say the CFLs now give out light of a colour that I don't mind, it is clearly of a different quality to that given out by the traditional bulbs developed by Joseph Swan and perfected by Thomas Edison over a century ago. While I might think that this difference is not very great, my wife, who has a degree in fine art and an eye for colour, thinks it is marked indeed. As I was Googling last week I found many German artists and designers who agreed with her.

Creative and educated people who know about colour, such as the conservators of the National Trust, also know that the quality of light from a CFL is something else — something that doesn't go particularly well with fabrics, crisp modern design or twinkly historic interiors. The trust has even developed its own halogen bulb to avoid it.

It would be perfectly reasonable for the government to say that modern energy-saving lightbulbs save you quite a lot of money and, while they are not perfect, they are a painless, utilitarian sacrifice we all need to make in the war against climate change. But why bleat, as the environment department does, that in tests "the majority of people cannot tell the difference between the light of a new CFL and an incandescent bulb"? The fact is that many people can. So it is faintly Orwellian to belittle their concerns — also bad precedent as there will be more climate change-inspired regulatory changes to come in the home, for which acceptance needs to be built.

Lots more dubious CFL propaganda exists, for instance the claim that there are now CFLs that work with dimmer switches. Well, they do, but the dimmers have a habit of breaking them.

Surely energy saving is the virtue we want to promote, not the compact fluorescent lightbulb? Suspicious-minded people, like Shortridge and me, wonder whether there is an ulterior motive for inflicting compact fluorescent technology upon us. (It is being inflicted all right: the energy companies have been subsidising this flood of cheap CFLs to meet their energy saving obligations.) Could the idea be to recoup the cost of developing CFLs before the manufacturers start producing their LED (light emitting diode) substitutes — which give a 95% energy saving on traditional bulbs?

Smart retailers, like Shortridge, are imploring the manufacturers to bring forward their better LEDs now. There is a 3-watt LED which gives better light and uses fewer watts than the equivalent CFL, but it isn't on the market yet. Leaping straight to LEDs would mean further energy savings and, of course, no mercury — the toxic metal essential to the functioning of the CFL. No more using rubber gloves to scoop the mercury and broken shards of glass into a sealed container and taking it to be decontaminated at the tip.

Well intentioned changes have a habit of acting as a cover for other agendas. The wackiest of these is that we are soon going to have to measure our lightbulbs in lumens, which nobody understands, instead of in watts. EU empire builders have ordained that, because the wattage of traditional lightbulbs and energy-saving ones is so different, it would be more logical to label bulbs with the light they give, not the power they use.

The bureaucratic empire builders have cheerfully forgotten that if you do that alone, people will have no idea how much energy they are using and will therefore be inclined to waste more of it. As ever: two steps forward, one back.