IncanDissent

IncanDissent
Posted by Karen De Coster on June 7, 2011 05:19 PM

Here's more civil disobedience on the light bulb front, and this time from the Wall Street Journal. A quote:

Fluorescent lights also carry their own environmental risks because they contain small amounts of mercury and other toxic materials. The EPA website contains three pages of consumer directions about what to do if you break a CFL bulb in your home: "Open a window and leave the room for 15 minutes or more. Shut off the central heating and air conditioning system. Carefully scoop up glass fragments and powder using stiff paper or cardboard and place them in a glass jar with a metal lid."

Congressman Ted Poe of Texas has poked fun at these EPA guidelines by holding up a fluorescent bulb on the House floor asking: "If I dropped this, would we all have to evacuate the Capitol?" If fluorescent bulbs weren't all the rage among greens, the Consumer Product Safety Commission might ban them as a home health hazard. The question an (allegedly) free society should ask is if CFL bulbs are so clearly superior, why does the government have to force people to buy them?

And folks -- please don't write me and tell me that incandescent bulbs haven't been banned. The law, indeed, is "technology neutral" in that it sets particular standards for bulbs that cannot be met with traditional incandescent technology. However, is it so difficult to see that when government sets impossible standards to meet that will result in the phase-out (manufacturing and importing) of current products in favor of newer products that benefit certain manufacturers, industries, and special interests, this is a totalitarian, lifestyle decree in the same vein as a full-force, explicit ban on the product? Why is implicitly peddled "soft fascism" somehow kindler and gentler than explicit, acknowledged totalitarian decrees? You can put all of the Chanel No. 5 that you want on a pile of cowplop, but beneath the perfumed surface lies the very same pile of putrid dung.