In response to the contention that incandescent light bulbs aren’t inefficient in the winter, when you’re heating your house anyway, commenter David over at Yglesias’s blog asks:
Have you done the cost benefit analysis on that? My hunch is that your heater is far more efficient at heating your place and that the ratio of electricity to heat that your bulb is producing is highly inefficient. Do you have studies that say differently?
It’s been a while since I took physics, but I’m pretty sure that the conservation of energy suggests this is a non-sensical question. If all the energy is being converted into either heat or light, and both heat and light are desired, then it’s incoherent to talk about the heat-producing efficiency of the bulb, since there’s nowhere else for the energy to go.
On the broader point, Matt gets it exactly right: it’s absurd for Congress to decide no one has a legitimate reason to use a less efficient light bulb. There are 300 million people in the country, surely at least a few of us have legitimate uses for incandescents. The right way to deal with the problem is to ensure that the electricity is being priced appropriately (perhaps increasing taxes on generators if there’s evidence that they’re imposing uncompensated environmental harms) and then let consumers decide for themselves how much energy they want to “waste.” Surely in a country where people are allowed to set their thermostats to 80 in the winter and 60 in the summer, they should have the option to spend their hard-earned money on slightly more-expensive but aesthetically more pleasing light if they want to.
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