The Age of Efficient Enlightenment

In a recent New York Times post, Roger A Pilke Jr. discusses the controversy over Congressional efficiency standards on lighting such as the mandate to use compact fluorescents instead of the historic A-type incandescent.  There have been bills introduced lately that work to remove some of these standards on the basis of the government having too much power and controlling trade.  Pilke responds to this by outlying the history of governments around the world standardizing technology and inventions and how it has helped their economy by allowing the consumers to know what they are buying and keeping ahead of foreign markets.  This breeds innovation as people choose to partake of the technological revolution standards allow.  He goes on to say that we should follow Japan’s example to keep up with world markets of recognizing technological leaders and following their standards of efficiency.  However, he concludes that markets should be kept open with the smaller industries that may not be able to follow these standardizations because of job loss increases and only require standardization of the large market holders.

While I agree with Mr. Pilke that Congress does have the right to standardize and restrict American incandescent use, I feel his argument is slightly arbitrary though an interesting history lesson.  America has defined measurement descriptions such as ohms and volts that in turn were used to standardize different industries such as electricity.  There are many examples of other standards that have improved the lives of Americans such as fire exit standards for buildings or factory working conditions standards. These standardizations increased the economic conditions of the United States as we could be better innovators, but there are also a lot of things the United States has done in the past to increase economic conditions that are not good and shouldn’t be continued simply because we did it in the past.  Slavery for sure created a stronger economic base for farmers, but in no way should we ever employ slavery on the sole reason of we did it in the past.  A sound argument needs to have more base than this.  Pilke left out the main and most crucial arguments for these Congressional regulations: the environment, mass energy use incandescent bulbs take, landfill use for shorter lasting bulbs, etc. It is an extremely easy switch as they use the same technology, doesn’t cost more than a dollar more per bulb but lasts at least twice as long, and compact fluorescents even are created in colors that mimic incandescent shades of soft yellow light.  All of these are perfectly valid arguments for reasons why the government should instill regulations on people.  Pilke, while having a good opinion, went about his argument in a way that avoided the true issue and reason Congress is conducting itself in this way, and almost discredited the basis of his argument simply because he didn’t have a strong enough reason to support it.  His conclusion that small markets shouldn’t be held accountable and should continue to be able to function without the restrictions only furthers the doubt that he is aware of the true reasons there is such a push to remove incandescent bulbs from the American household.