Green Hell Blog

Compact fluorescent lightbulb (CFL) makers Philips Electronics, Osram Sylvania and General Electric are scrambling to defend the looming ban on incandescent light bulbs, according to Climatewire.

Philips has sent halogen bulbs to members of Congress and conservative columnists like George Will in an effort to show that CFLs are not the only option to incandescents. Sure, halogens and LEDs are options, but expensive and inferior ones. Try putting LED lights on your Christmas tree — they’re about as aesthetically pleasing as a migraine.

Sylvania is trying to convince people that the 2007 legislation — sponsored by let’s-hope-he’s-not-a-RINO Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich), the chairman-elect of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and signed by the accursed, lame-memoir-hawking George Bush — is not a ban at all. In January 2012, however, you won’t find any 100-watt incandescents on store shelves. In January 2014, 40-watt bulbs will be history. How is this not a ban?

Consumers, in fact, have more choices, says Sylvania. Perhaps, but they’re getting a lot worse.

Philips, Sylvania and GE all lobbied Congress into forcing us to buy more expensive and inferior lighting — all in the name of saving the planet from the dreaded global warming.

Moreover, CFLs are handblown by poor, low-wage Chinese bastards who reportedly are being poisoned by the mercury.

And no, Upton doesn’t get any points for any meaningless regret he expresses or futile effort he may make to repeal the ban. The Senate likely will not pass and/or Obama likely will veto any such bill. You can bet that the CFL makers will make sure of that.

In the next world, may the CEOs and lobbyists of Philips, Sylvania, and GE; Fred Upton and the members of the 110th Congress who voted for the ban; and the accursed George Bush be compelled to read W’s biography ad infinitum by humming and flickering CFL-light.

From Newsweek:

In the 1960s and 1970s, German companies and laboratories churned out futuristic technologies, from novel types of nuclear reactors to the world’s first magnetic-levitation train. In the early 1980s, Germany was one of the first countries to develop a national plan for genetics research, setting up labs in Munich, Cologne, and Heidelberg. Per capita, German scientists applied for more biotech patents than Americans did.

Yet only a few years later, German pharmaceutical companies like BASF and Bayer postponed production plans and moved much of their research abroad. Germany lost its spot at the cutting edge of biotech. One reason was the pull of a powerful new startup culture that had developed around American universities in the 1980s. But there was a more sinister reason as well: a powerful coalition of environmental activists, church leaders, politicians, and journalists mobilized fears against medical biotechnology as a dangerous meddling with nature, an attack on human dignity reminiscent of Nazi eugenics. With much of the public behind them, lawmakers tightened regulations, bureaucrats refused to grant permits, and even academic research facilities became targets of righteous protest. Today, most Germans once again accept medical biotech, but most of the industry’s leading companies are found in the U.S.

Now the greens want to regulate rocket launches lest they damage the ozone layer.

Here’s the first few paragraphs from the University of Colorado media release:

The global market for rocket launches may require more stringent regulation in order to prevent significant damage to Earth’s stratospheric ozone layer in the decades to come, according to a new study by researchers in California and Colorado.

Future ozone losses from unregulated rocket launches will eventually exceed ozone losses due to chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, which stimulated the 1987 Montreal Protocol banning ozone-depleting chemicals, said Martin Ross, chief study author from The Aerospace Corporation in Los Angeles. The study, which includes the University of Colorado at Boulder and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, provides a market analysis for estimating future ozone layer depletion based on the expected growth of the space industry and known impacts of rocket launches.

“As the rocket launch market grows, so will ozone-destroying rocket emissions,” said Professor Darin Toohey of CU-Boulder’s atmospheric and oceanic sciences department. “If left unregulated, rocket launches by the year 2050 could result in more ozone destruction than was ever realized by CFCs.”

My first reaction was, “Oh my, we’re going to be trapped forever on the same planet with the greens!”

But on second thought, since no one really understands the continual fluctuations in stratospheric ozone to start with, nor do they understand (simple chemistry aside) the impact of CFCs on the ozone layer, and since there’s no evidence that any harm was ever caused to anyone or to the environment by whatever spotty thinning may have occurred during the 1980s and 1990s, this new study seems to be nothing more than yet another green anti-technology moment.

Besides, private rocket launches can’t be evil — Google is for them.