The simple answer to the question above is one. Ian Pearson, Minister for Climate Change and Environment at the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, said yesterday that the Government intended to ban incandescent light bulbs because they're not energy efficient.
The minister did acknowledge that the UK "cannot unilaterally ban or prevent the free trade in products such as incandescent light bulbs on the basis of their energy efficiency", but he went on to say that they could ban them with regulation which they were lobbying the European Commission to introduce.
There was also the implication of more bullying of businesses as he said the Government were "discussing with retailers and manufacturers how [to] remove inefficient lighting products from UK shelves."
They'll be banning matches and lighters next to stop us smoking.
5 comments:
I know you hate green taxes, but wouldn't sticking £1 per lightbulb tax do the same thing without the totalitarian overtones.
Better that we provide incentives to buy energy saving lightbulbs instead.
However, the purpose of government is to provide public goods that they market would not produce alone.
I think overall there is a case for better regulations on products; e.g. increasing standards of efficiency on new cars.
The only key is to make them cost neutral. SO that the car makers have sufficient lead time in this case to produce the car and consumers have an incentive to buy them (i.e. tax breaks).
The lightbulb idea is unfair in that is suggests a stick with no carrot. The overall principle is quite logical.
Given that the fancy bulbs are substantially more costly, I forsee a vast outbreak of bulb switching by people when they move house.
Er what about the small inconvenient fact that the extra cost of producing said light bulb, and the cost of the mining of the rare earth metals that they contain easily outweighs the energy saving over the life of the long life bulb? So they are in fact worse for the environment as a whole! Doesnt this concern anyone? Or are the facts not important?
Recycling paper and glass falls into the same category. Cost of collection and reprocessing outweighs gains from reusing the product. And people want more green taxes to force more people to do more damage. Total madness! And of course as things get worse - we need more taxes to fix it!
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