Let There Be More Efficient Light
By ROGER A. PIELKE Jr.
NYT
Boulder, Colo.
LAST week Michele Bachmann, a Republican representative from Minnesota, introduced a bill to roll back efficiency standards for light bulbs, which include a phasing out of incandescent bulbs in favor of more energy-efficient bulbs. The “government has no business telling an individual what kind of light bulb to buy,” she declared.
Opponents of the new standards, to be in place by 2014, draw on the odd-couple coalition of Tea Party Republicans and organized labor. They have positioned themselves as defenders of American tradition in the face of big government: another Republican representative, Joe Barton of Texas, waxed lyrically with two colleagues about “the incandescent bulb that has been turning back the night ever since Thomas Edison ended the era of a world lit only by fire in 1879.”
But this opposition ignores another, more important bit of American history: the critical role that government-mandated standards have played in scientific and industrial innovation.
Republicans are right, of course, to praise inventors like Edison for their pioneering advancements at the close of the 19th century. But inventions alone weren’t enough to guarantee progress.
(More here.)
NYT
Boulder, Colo.
LAST week Michele Bachmann, a Republican representative from Minnesota, introduced a bill to roll back efficiency standards for light bulbs, which include a phasing out of incandescent bulbs in favor of more energy-efficient bulbs. The “government has no business telling an individual what kind of light bulb to buy,” she declared.
Opponents of the new standards, to be in place by 2014, draw on the odd-couple coalition of Tea Party Republicans and organized labor. They have positioned themselves as defenders of American tradition in the face of big government: another Republican representative, Joe Barton of Texas, waxed lyrically with two colleagues about “the incandescent bulb that has been turning back the night ever since Thomas Edison ended the era of a world lit only by fire in 1879.”
But this opposition ignores another, more important bit of American history: the critical role that government-mandated standards have played in scientific and industrial innovation.
Republicans are right, of course, to praise inventors like Edison for their pioneering advancements at the close of the 19th century. But inventions alone weren’t enough to guarantee progress.
(More here.)
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