On that incandescent lamp ban...

On that incandescent lamp ban...  I keep getting surprised by running into people who believe that the ban on incandescent bulbs is the result of the green lobby.  It is no such thing.  The ban on incandescent bulbs would never have happened if it weren't for the lobbying (and associated millions of dollars in bribes “campaign donations”) in support of the ban done by the manufacturers of the incandescent bulbs.

Why?  Because before the incandescent bulbs were banned, the lamp manufacturing business was stagnant: their sales were limited to replacing those bulbs that burned out, plus a very modest growth each year.  It was a boring, highly-competitive, low-margin business.  By banning the incandescent bulbs, those manufacturers managed to get the government to force the replacement of every single incandescent bulb in the country with a more-expensive, government-subsidized, high-margin bulb (and in the case of CFL bulbs, far less reliable and therefore needing replacement more often).

It's smart business for those manufacturers to do this.  They're now seeing record profits, and are projecting even more.  They love disruptive new lamp technologies, as each time one comes along, they get to replace all those lamps again.  They'd love to see a mass migration to CFL (already in progress) followed by a mass migration to LED (easy to predict).  If you want proof that this is something those companies want, all you have to do is look at their lobbying expenditures.  They wanted that incandescent ban, and they wanted it bad.  The CEO of Philips (one of the world's largest manufacturers of incandescent bulbs) once said (on an earnings call) that the ban would “save the industry”.

Some greens are actually quite upset by the ban, especially the move toward CFL bulbs – mainly because of the mercury content and the environmental problems associated with their disposal.  Consumer groups are upset with the CFL bulbs because of their reliability problems (they're only reliable if you leave them on – cycling them on and off, as ordinary users would of course do, makes them fail much quicker than incandescent bulbs do).  Many consumers – most definitely including me – are unhappy with the terrible quality of the light emitted by both CFL and LED lamps (in both cases, their emission spectrum is very “peaky”, with between two and six peaks, unlike the smooth, continuous spectrum from incandescent bulbs).  For those consumers, the distortion of perceived colors is somewhere between annoying and painful – especially if you engage in any activity that requires high fidelity color.  That includes obvious things like photography or painting, but also perhaps less obvious things like reading the color codes on electronics parts, choosing yarns for knitting, etc.

Bring back the incandescents (or an equally high quality alternative)!  Down with spectrally impure lamps!!