Re: New USA Company Making "Banned" Lightbulbs After Getting Waiver from DOE
You misinterpreted the last paragraph of my previous post, and you may wish to pause and notice how/why you read it the way you did. I did not say that people are ignorant lemmings.
You didn't say it, but based on 49+ years of living I'd say it's a pretty reasonable assumption
with the current state of education that the majority of people are incapable of any kind of rational thought on any number of complex subjects. In other words, when certain things become too complex for the average poorly educated person to deal with, it's necessary to have people with more knowledge making at least some of the choices. It's also sometimes necessary to disincentivize really poor choices which might happen to also be really profitable for companies (i.e. I might have taxed incandescents just enough to achieve cost parity with CFLs, as opposed to banning them outright). The fact that this is sometimes done poorly doesn't negate the validity of this line of thinking. At the very least,
I feel people should be fully informed of the consequences of the poorer choice, as we already currently do with the numerous warnings on packs of cigarettes. You could do something similar on packages of alkalines informing people of LSD NiMH. You could have TCO analysis of CFL or LED bulbs on packs of incandescents, etc. I don't object to people coming to a decision when they're fully informed. I do object to people making bad choices solely because information on better choices isn't readily available, or the negatives of the poorer choice are papered over with clever advertising. In a perfect world where everyone received a great education, you would probably be right-people would be capable of making informed choices. Sad to say, large numbers of people can't even compose a coherent sentence.
I do not believe people are fundamentally ignorant, or lemmings. However, that is frequently the assumption and justification when standards or regulations are imposed. Let's go back to the light bulb. For thousands of years, everyone was running around using candles, oil lamps, or torches despite their obvious fire hazards. Along comes Edison and develops a light bulb and electrical delivery systems (I won't get into who actually invented it).
To follow your logic, the only way Edison could have succeeded was if governments phased out, then banned all fire based sources of illumination--following their typical assumption that people are too ignorant to start using light bulbs when candles and oil lamps are so familiar, cheap, and in front of them at the country store. Edison's brilliance was not from "inventing" the light bulb, but presenting & packaging it as something people would want instead of what they already had. He created the market and a demand that had bulbs fly out the factories as fast as they could be made.
Ford did it with the assembly line and Model T's--horses did not have to be banned. LED's have done that with hand held lights--small flashlight incan bulbs did not need to be banned. Apple has done it with many of their products--Sony's Walkman, IBM/Microsoft's PC, other cellphones did not need to be banned. Sanyo has done it with eneloops--alkalines don't need to be banned. Successful companies do not view consumers as ignorant lemmings. Rather, they find ways to educate and entice them into using their new products.
The key thing here is in every single case the new item was better than what it replaced by any reasonable measure. Same thing happened in the railroading world when diesel locomotives replaced steam, and later when diesels were largely replaced by electrics, except on lightly used lines where the investment in stringing up wire wasn't justified. In some cases the adoption of the better alternative was sped up with government help. If the government hadn't built smooth roads (which incidentally were first built for bicycles), then the auto may not have been as successful (I could argue that the commercial success of autos has been largely bad overall for society but let's save that for another time). In the case of incandescents, by imposing a time limit on their use, the government effectively sped up the adoption of LEDs. Without a "guaranteed" market by 2020, do you think private enterprise would have invested the money needed to advance LED efficiency, and even color quality, as fast as it did? I know we're jaded by this stuff, but really it's amazing when you think about how white LEDs have increased in efficiency tenfold over the last decade. I'm sure this might have happened eventually without government legislation, but I'll bet it would have taken 25 years instead of 10. The fact that LED has largely supplemented incandescent in our flashlight world is mostly of spinoff of larger government policy towards solid state general lighting.
I bold-faced the part about Sanyo and Eneloops because this illustrates one of my points perfectly. Here we have a product which many in the know, including me, and it seems you, agree makes alkalines obsolete, yet I'm still seeing shelves full of alkalines in stores, along with Energizer bunny commercials. My speculation as to why is outside of rarified circles like CPF,
people just don't know about Eneloops. Add in the fact that if I see rechargeables in a store at all, they're generally in a hidden corner, and they're never the LSD type. I can understand why all this is done from a profit motive perspective. I can't understand why it's not required to at least put information on LSD NiMH right on packs of alkaline batteries. In world full of informed people, none of this would be needed. Alkalines would have died out already. Sadly, this isn't the world we live in.
Your sentence is in conflict with itself, and at the heart of my points. I don't know if you can see it. I suspect the logic of your justifications (efficiency, finite resources, profit limitations) is obscuring your ability to understand fundamental human nature--specifically the desire for freedom. Given the rate of population growth, there will never be adequate resources going forward--no matter how much more conservation is employed.
No, I agree as things stand, we're going to run into a resource problem sooner or later. I'm hoping that conservation measures simply buy us enough time to come up with some sort of technological solution (and flashflood also seems to agree that technology could save us in the end). At the heart of everything is energy. You can recycle resources given enough energy. You can artificially grow all the food you need in 100 story vertical farms given enough energy. You can even mine asteroids given enough energy. If you had to ask me, I'd say it's critical for mankind's survival that we develop commercially viable fusion sometime in the next 50 years. I'm just toying with some ideas to keep us from going to war over resources before then.
I recognize this is all a very complex, multifaceted series of issues, and that some degree of government intervention at various levels is required and useful for a civil society. To flush it all out properly, you would need to write many books on all the nuances. I'm really only addressing the fundamental issue of individual freedom, free choice, and enrolling people in new products and behaviors as the preferred approach when reasonable...rather than the more common use of force, mandates, threats, penalties, bans, more laws, etc.
Thank you for at least acknowledging that some level of government intervention is needed and useful. We can argue all day about how much but that's not the point. The point is a world where companies are free to do as they wish, and individuals are totally unconstrained in their choices, isn't a world either of us would want to live in.
Really, in the end, I'm more for the use of education to influence choices than force. Force should only be used as a last resort, and then only when the end goal is important enough to the smooth functioning of society to justify it. As for how this applies to the topic at hand, I feel accelerating the adoption of solid-state lighting is a worthy goal for many reasons but the legislation could have been a little better. What the government got wrong here was its utter failure to educate the larger populace on the rational behind the ban. All people are seeing is they can't buy their light bulbs any more. If maybe they knew about the fragile state of the grid, pollution from power plants (not just the CO2 GW proponents harp on), plus the consequences of failing to reduce power usage, then many people might voluntary switch to alternatives. Also, it really helps when stores display their bulbs lit up.
Oh, and both Lux and flashflood-great posts!
