Banning Incandescents and Keeping 'Green' Light Warm
| By Graham - Apr 19th, 2007 at 11:53 am EDT |
| Also listed in: Campus Progress Blog |
I have to credit this post to Treehugger, which yesterday reported that Ontario has banned incandescent light bulbs, which are not energy efficient. Which led them to post about an elegant way to keep those now-illegal Edison-style bulbs out of landfills and also to solve the problem that most fluorescent lights can't be dimmed. Oil conversions!
I for one have been completely baffled as to what interior designers are going to do as incandescents become illegal or discouraged. What will light paintings in galleries? How will dark clubs stay dingy?
!
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If something is too polluting or draws too much energy and you want people to stop using it, there's a far easier solution that's friendlier to individual liberty: Tax the hell out of it.
That's the government's proper role - providing incentives and disincentives for behavior.
Banning the bulbs entirely strikes me as completely unnecessary.
Since people have to pay for the energy they use, won't they already have a natural incentive to buy more energy-efficent lighting?
Inefficient behavior can be ingrained or conditioned into consumers, you know that. If temporal concerns didn't matter, waiting for the market to resolve issues would probably be sensible. But most global warming science seems to indicate that time is a factor, and that we are approaching an event horizon. Steps to expedite the transition to more energy efficient consumer goods make sense in such a context.
Wouldn't it make sense, then, to generally disincentivize energy usage by taxing it at a higher rate, giving people a greater financial incentive to make these sorts of upgrades?
I entirely agree. But I'm not seeing how this particular step was the appropriate one to take to bring about that result.
As I said below, political considerations make increased taxation less likely to pass. If reduction of overall power use is the ultimate goal, then of course higher tax rates would get you there (just like Europeans burn less gas per capita). But a tax increase that would likely mean more expensive energy bills in a pretty cold part of the continent is just not all that likely to happen. Bulb regulation is a bit less of a concern to the average voter than tax rates, and will achieve at least some progress towards the goal of reduced energy consumption.
Politics are a bitch.