In a positively illuminating Wall Street Journal column today, lighting expert Howard M. Brandston asks the government to take their hands off our lighting, or at the very least, to go first in uglifying the country’s lumen-verse.
Brandston’s expertise in lighting can’t be ignored: he’s been a lighting designer for 50 years, has lit up over 2,500 projects, and he even re-lit the Statue of Liberty (not to be confused with David Copperfield, who made it disappear).
As Brandston explains, the shift to compact fluorescent lights (CFL’s) is likely to render lighting less attractive, and may not offer environmental or energy-conservation benefits.
CFLs, he observes, are
not an equivalent technology to incandescents in all applications. For example, if you have dimmers used for home theater or general ambience, you must buy a compatible dimmable CFL, which costs more, and even then it may not work as desired on your dimmers. How environmental will it be for frustrated homeowners to remove and dispose of thousands of dimmers? What’s more, CFLs work best in light fixtures designed for CFLs, and may not fit, provide desired service life, or distribute light in the same pleasing pattern as incandescents. How environmental will it be for homeowners to tear out and install new light fixtures?
Invoking what some have argued in healthcare, Brandston offers a modest proposal of the “After you, my dear Alphonse” variety: Congress should, according to Brandston,
Satisfy the proposed power limits in all public buildings, from museums, houses of worship and hospitals to the White House and the homes of all elected officials. Of course, this will include replacing all incandescents with CFLs. At the end of 18 months, we would check to be certain that the former lighting had not been reinstalled, and survey all users to determine satisfaction with the resulting lighting.
Based on the data collected, the Energy Independence and Security Act and energy legislation still in Congress would be amended to conform to the results of the test. Or better yet, scrapped in favor of a thoughtful process that could yield a set of recommendations that better serve our nation’s needs by maximizing both human satisfaction and energy efficiency.
I like that idea, but then, I’ve wanted to see Al Gore go first on trimming his lifestyle back to the mud-hut level he advocates for the rest of us, and I’m fairly sure that we’ll never see that, nor will we see Congress going for fluorescent lighting that will make them look like corpses on C-SPAN. (And, having been in some congressional hearing rooms recently, I can assure you that they are chock-full of high-intensity incandescent lighting, which is only intensified by high-intensity lighting brought along by camera crews. One doesn’t sweat when testifying before Congress out of fear, as much as being suited up under lighting strong enough to keep the food warm at IHOP.)
But the most important nugget of information in Brandston’s column is this:
The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 will effectively phase out incandescent light bulbs by 2012–2014 in favor of compact fluorescent lamps, or CFLs. Other countries around the world have passed similar legislation to ban most incandescents.
To me, that says it’s time to stock up on incandescent bulbs in 2011, if not in 2010.
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