Include me among those crazed Americans who can’t walk into Home Depot, Target or my local grocery store right now without wanting to grab a king-sized shopping cart and stuff it to the gunwales with 100-watt incandescent light bulbs.
Maybe it’s the sheer thrill of buying bulbs that in just a month, as of Jan. 1, 2012, will be banned for sale in America. What fun, in this incandescent twilight, to acquire legally what the federal government will soon treat as contraband. Or maybe it’s that gut sense that with the dollar teetering, those beloved old 100-watt bulbs will at least provide a decent store of value, even if all I do is use them to read by for the rest of my life.
First the 100-watt incandescents will vanish from the shelves. Then the 75-watt, the 60-watt and 40-watt.
Americans, being an enterprising band, may develop bootleg markets in incandescents. The federal government may not have control of America’s borders, but in Washington such stuff as border security can’t hold a candle to having control of America’s light bulbs. Presumably, federal authorities will now be spending US tax dollars (excuse me — “creating jobs”) to deploy light-bulb cops.
For decades, America has been the world’s beacon of freedom. Yet here we are, wards of the nanny state, with politicians dictating that even that prime symbol of American ingenuity, Thomas Edison’s incandescent light bulb, shall be regulated into oblivion. All this has been ably exposed as an act of crony capitalism, designed to enrich manufacturers who prefer to sell pricier light bulbs that a lot of Americans, if free to choose, prefer not to buy.
And the actual mechanics of this ban have been greatly blurred, Washington-style, by framing this fix not as an outright prohibition, but merely as a phase-out of light bulbs that do not meet “standards” set by Washington in the name of “energy efficiency.”
Think of the nanny-state implications.
If the federal government says it can choose my ideal energy-efficiency tradeoffs much better than I can for myself, then light bulbs are the least of it.
If our leaders in Washington are serious about saving us all from our self-imposed energy inefficiencies, they’re shirking their duties if they limit themselves to banning the light bulbs that most Americans prefer. They should be banning morning coffee and toast. Water and bread would be more energy-efficient.
There should be soup police — no, make that kitchen police — to ensure that no one spends too much energy heating up food that’s already been cooked. There should be federal laws to minimize energy-guzzling travel for such frivolous individual purposes as seeing friends or visiting family.
As for heat and hot water, the energy waste could be cut dramatically by the simple expedient of issuing draconian quotas, taking into account that the need for heating can be greatly reduced by wearing parkas, hats and gloves indoors at all times. Americans will hardly need to bathe all that often in any event, if they are forced to do most of their socializing by teleconference.
Of course, it would all make for a relatively spare existence. With the possible exception of Washington politicians and bureaucrats who would have to be exempted from this plan in order to more efficiently perform their duties, hundreds of millions of Americans would be facing a winter of near isolation sitting around unbathed in dim, frosty homes, swaddled around the clock in outdoor clothes, living on bread, water and cold soup. But think of the energy efficiencies!
So bring it on. There are much bigger things at stake here than Thomas Edison’s little old light bulbs.
Adapted from pjmedia, where Claudia Rosett blogs.
She is journalist in residence at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.