Age of enlightenment
Home » Magazine » Good, issue 3 » Good bits » Age of enlightenmentDave Hansford wondershow many light bulbs it will take to change a Government
Gaia and brimstone
What is it with people and compact fluorescent light bulbs? In her Dominion Post column, Rosemary McLeod complained that she was being asked to choose between “a party that wants to make me have ugly light bulbs, and a party that once again has welfare mothers in its sights”.
Just days after McLeod’s column, a Dominion Post editorial cited people’s “disillusionment with a government too eager to tell them how to bring up their kids, what sort of light bulbs they’re allowed to have ...”
Under Labour, we’ve seen the introduction of anti-smacking laws, the legalisation of prostitution and civil unions, but this time it seems they’ve gone a filament too far. It seems eco-bulbs have somehow become the most irksome instrument of the nanny state.
Government wants to cut home lighting energy consumption by 20 percent by 2015 and to do that, they say, the incandescent bulb has to go. But the idea has been met with indignation. Soon after it was mooted, the New Zealand Herald ran a poll that asked readers, “Are you annoyed at the old style, cheap light bulb is [sic] being phased out?”
The responses ran to 22 web pages, and were more incandescent than the bulbs themselves. “How can we describe what we have as a ‘democratic government’,” demanded one Takapuna reader, “when, just to maintain power, the Labour Party has to go along with the lunatic ideas of a tiny minority of the population? How much longer are we going to put up with state interference in our lives?”
Eco-bulbs, it seems, have their problems. First, it was their mercury content (in truth, there is a hundred times more mercury in that thermometer you happily put in your mouth ... or wherever). Then it was claimed you couldn’t use them with dimmers, instantly putting them offside with romantics and photophobes (actually, CFLs are available that work just fine in dimmers). Lately, they’ve been accused of triggering migraines and spontaneously bursting into flames (beware the $2 versions).
The furore over CFLs is puzzling. The Labour Government has conspicuously not banned plastic supermarket bags ... yet thousands of Kiwi shoppers bear their cotton grocery bags as a badge of eco-honour
But there’s no denying their efficiency; they use 80 percent less energy than incandescent bulbs and last up to seven years longer. They pay for themselves in a few months, after which they’re saving us $500 million by 2020, according to Greens co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimons.
But Kiwis, it seems, have failed to appreciate the logic already grasped by the Irish, the Canadians, the Cubans, the Venezuelans, the Brazilians the Californians and yes, even the Australians, all of whom have either banned the bulb already, or put it on notice.
The furore over CFLs is puzzling. The Labour Government has conspicuously not banned plastic supermarket bags (although Australia, Bangladesh, Ireland, Italy, South Africa and Taiwan have), yet thousands of Kiwi shoppers bear their cotton grocery bags as a badge of eco-honour.
Clearly, we understand that plastic bags are an environmental blight—but incandescent bulbs are equally wasteful. Ninety-five percent of their energy input is radiated as heat rather than light, guaranteeing galloping power consumption, and all the hefty bills and power crises that come with it. They last, on average, for just 1,000 hours, by which time they’ve helped us burn around 2.65 million tonnes of greenhouse gases a year.
An incandescent bulb run for three hours a day, according to EECA, and will cost you $21.90 a year to run. A CFL will cost you $4.40.
Yet the same Kiwis who clamour for tax cuts are decrying the adoption of CFLs. “Left wing socialists and your friends in the watermelon party—stay out of my life! Let me be the judge of what lights I use in my house,” fumes Sam of the Waikato.
Maybe Sam’s forgotten that stringent building and electrical safety codes dictated the specification of the hot water cylinder, electric blanket, roofing material, insulation and virtually every other item in his house. However, he continues, “Call an election now HC [Helen Clark] and let’s all see what the country thinks of you and your interfering cohorts.”
Finally, we get to the crux of the matter. It’s no coincidence that the most outspoken critics of CFLs just happen to have a strong preference for a National Government; the Dominion Post has been a fervent John Key cheerleader since his rise to party leadership. These free-right faux-naifs would have us believe that the introduction of CFLs represents an attack on our personal freedom, another smothering jurisdiction from the uber-state.
Sadly, some people seem to have fallen for it. Retailers report house-lot sales of incandescent bulbs as outraged consumers stockpile them, an act of defiance about as effective as stocking up on floppy disks or cassette tapes.
Energy Minister David Parker said he was surprised by the backlash, and well he might. A Greenpeace survey in August this year found that 87.4 percent of Kiwis were “willing to act personally or accept costs to reduce the effects of climate change”. If New Zealanders aren’t prepared to change a light bulb to save the planet, it doesn’t look good for an Emissions Trading Scheme.
