• Tag Archives environment
  • The Incandescent Ban and the Lie of LED Efficiency

    It happened as I went to grab a new package of baby wipes from under the sink. I flipped on my bathroom light, and I noticed something strange—one of my three mirror light bulbs began flickering and ultimately settled at a barely luminous dim setting.

    My LED light went out.

    The problem is, I changed that light bulb around a month ago as memory serves. Aren’t LED lights supposed to outlast the heat death of the universe or some unbelievably long amount of time?

    Under this guise and the guise of energy efficiency, the Biden administration finally allowed a 2007 ban on incandescent light bulbs to go through at the end of July this year.

    The problem is that LED lights are not more efficient in a meaningful economic sense, and, as my story illustrates, they don’t necessarily last longer. To understand why, let’s explore some of the technical and economic details behind the mythical efficient LED.

    The ban on incandescent lights isn’t a ban on them specifically. Rather, the standard is that a light bulb must illuminate 45 lumens per watt. Most incandescent bulbs are incapable of doing this, so the regulation effectively bans them except in particular circumstances.

    It is by this scientific jargon of an arbitrary lumens per watt standard that the government claims LEDs are more efficient.

    The problem is that just because the LED bulbs (when they work) have a higher lumens per watt ratio, that doesn’t make them more efficient.

    Consider an example to see why. Imagine we have two ice cream trucks. One ice cream truck is just an empty van. The driver throws a bunch of tubs of ice cream in the van and sets out for the day. The second truck is a van equipped with freezers to preserve the ice cream. Tell me, reader, which truck uses more energy?

    Obviously the truck with freezers. So which truck has the best ratio of gallons of ice cream moved per unit of energy? Well that would be the truck without freezers. By our arbitrary technical measure, the freezerless ice cream truck is more efficient.

    The problem, as you know, is that frozen ice cream is better than room temperature ice cream soup. The issue with our efficiency measure is that it ignores the important fact that the two trucks are accomplishing different goals. One is delivering ice cream people want, the other is delivering inedible slop.

    You cannot compare the efficiency of two things which accomplish different outcomes for consumers. The same issue is true of light bulbs.

    Incandescent bulbs put out a consistent, pleasing light output. LED lights do not. The Department of Energy website tries to debunk this obvious truth with an appeal to technical jargon. In response to the criticism that LED lights are dim compared to incandescent, the website says,

    “LED bulbs produce more lumens per watt and last up to 25 times longer than incandescent bulbs. A 10W LED bulb emits as much light as a 60W incandescent bulb, making them both brighter and more energy efficient.”

    This is akin to claiming that melted ice cream is still ice cream.

    It is sometimes true that LED bulbs emit as many or more lumens than incandescent bulbs, but what people colloquially refer to as “brightness” is not the same as what scientists call “lumens.”

    When people talk about brightness, they aren’t just talking about lumens. They’re also talking about the extent to which different light sources make things like color easier to see. An essential component of whether something is easier to see is how warm or cool light is.

    This is where things get complicated. For incandescent bulbs, wattage is what mattered. More watts meant more visibility. For LEDs, things are different. Lumens measure the brightness but Kelvin (a temperature scale) determines how “warm” or “cool” the light appears. There is an in-depth piece by Tom Scocca in New York Magazine’s website The Strategist which describes this very well.

    The summary is that LED light bulbs, though usually bright in terms of “lumens,” often do not always illuminate colors well. Scocca points out:

    “If you want the objects that the light shines on to look the same, you’re getting into a different color question, specifically the color-rendering index. Your incandescent bulb — a glowing analog object, its light coming from a heated wire — had a CRI of 100 for a full unbroken spectrum. Your typical LED bulb, shining with cold digital electroluminescence, will not. Some colors will be missing or just different. If you’re lucky, the LED will have a CRI of 90 or higher. The box may not list any CRI at all.”

    He then highlights that so-called experts often downplay the importance of the CRI index, but provide no substitute measure for color-rendering.

    So lumens alone is not brightness—at least not the way you and I talk about brightness. But that isn’t the only problem.

    Remember my flickering bathroom light bulb? Turns out this isn’t a one-off complaint by yours truly. All over the internet I found people complaining about LED lights malfunctioning in much shorter time spans than it takes an incandescent to burn out.

    When searching, I found several answers for why. One common answer is that the driver in the power base (bottom opaque plastic part of each light bulb) often fails in the less expensive LED lights. Temperature issues were also listed as a possible cause as well as the building providing “too much” power.

    The bad driver in cheap LED bulbs could be explained away by saying you simply have to buy more expensive bulbs, but the up front cost of LEDs being higher was already an issue. Now we can’t even buy the best value version of the more expensive bulb?

    In Scocca’s piece, he highlights well how good lighting is more expensive with LEDs:

    “I checked my nearest dollar store and discovered that there were plenty of LED bulbs to be had there. Their color temperature was 6,400 Kelvin — the harshest, cheapest possible light, a light so blue that when I Googled it, what came up were grow bulbs. The efficient future of lighting now includes poor people; it just does it by making lighting one more form of privation.”

    Even worse, it’s not always obvious when the driver isn’t working or that the power base is too hot. Sometimes the bulb just gets subtly dimmer. The Department of Energy can kiss its “lumens” argument goodbye. It may be the case that LED bulbs can produce more lumens in theory, but if they dim frequently without warning in practice, who cares?

    LED lighting advocates will be quick to argue you can get the same results as incandescent light if you just approach it correctly. “Make sure your lumens are high enough. Don’t forget to memorize which degree Kelvin is best for each setting! But be careful not to buy one with a bad driver. You may need to rewire your house for best results, of course.” The list of excuses—and extra work for consumers—goes on.

    Unfortunately, not all of us have time to get a degree in electrical engineering to make sure our home doesn’t look like the inside of an alien spaceship.

    As I’ve demonstrated, technological efficiency is not the proper way to evaluate the efficiency of a product. So how should we evaluate it?

    Let’s return to our ice cream truck example. Which truck will consumers buy ice cream from? Obviously the one with freezers. It may cost a bit more than Uncle Sam’s ice cream soup, but people will pay the cost.

    When discussing efficiency as it applies to people’s choices, economic efficiency is king. The idea behind economic efficiency is there are lots of technologically feasible combinations of goods and services that can hypothetically be produced. The question is, which combination yields the most value? Economic efficiency is the criterion that separates the highest valued use of scarce resources from all other possible combinations.

    How is this point determined? By consumers! If consumers value frozen ice cream enough, they’ll be willing to pay more for an ice cream truck with a freezer. These higher prices enable the truck owner to buy the higher energy costs associated with running the freezers.

    The same is true with light bulbs.

    Who pays for an “inefficient” incandescent light bulb? The homeowner who installs the light bulb does in the form of higher energy bills! So how would we know if the better (or at least more consistent) lighting is worth the higher energy usage?

    Well, if the consumer chooses an incandescent bulb over an LED bulb, they are confirming they value the services of the incandescent bulb even after accounting for the cost of using more energy.

    The same principle operates with cars. Is the purchaser of an SUV tricked into buying a product which is not as efficient with fuel as a small sedan? Obviously not! The SUV owner prefers the additional space and larger size more than the cost of the extra gasoline. Since the SUV is assigned higher value than the extra gasoline that must be purchased to use it, the “inefficient” fuel economy is completely compatible with economic efficiency!

    If LED light bulbs are truly unquestionably superior, you would not need to pass a law stopping consumers from purchasing incandescent bulbs. Consumers would make the switch themselves to save money. Good ideas don’t require force, as they say.

    The fact that a law was needed to displace incandescent bulbs highlights a simple truth: on many margins LED lights are frankly worse for consumers. And all the bureaucratic gobbledygook in the world will not change that fundamental fact.


    Peter Jacobsen

    Peter Jacobsen is a Writing Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


  • Why EVs Are ‘Piling Up’ at Dealerships, Despite Massive Taxpayer Subsidies

    Ford Motor recently announced it is slashing prices on its F-150 Lightning, an electric vehicle the company rolled out in 2021.

    The Lightning now carries a suggested retail price of $49,995, about $10,000 lower than its previous recommended price tag ($59,974), a reduction the company says is possible because of lower “battery raw material costs and continued work on scaling production and cost.”

    It’s certainly possible that reduced overhead from battery minerals and production costs played a role in Ford’s decision to trim its price tag by nearly 20 percent, but that may be only half the story.

    Several reports show EVs are not exactly flying off dealership lots. In fact, there’s a glut of them.

    “After a prolonged period in which EVs quickly disappeared from dealerships, the electric vehicle industry now has the opposite problem: unsold models are piling up,” reported Money last week. “About 92,000 EVs currently sit on dealers’ lots; that’s a 342% increase from a year ago, when only about 21,000 did so, according to automotive research firm Cox Automotive.”

    Ford is not immune from the weakened demand for EVs. Sales of its flagship car, the Mustang Mach-E, have slumped, down 44 percent in May from the same month last year.

    The Lightning, which won the title of EV king of pickup trucks after Ford moved nearly 16,000 units in 2022, has fared better but is still struggling to keep pace with 2022. And now the company is facing some stiff new competition. (More on that in a minute.)

    This was not the scenario many people predicted.

    In April, the International Energy Agency released a report in which it predicted EV sales to increase 35 percent after a record-breaking year. But economists I spoke with said such predictions were overly optimistic considering current macroeconomic conditions.

    This invites important questions. Is the glut of EVs simply a product of tightened money supply?

    Apparently not. As Axios noted, the 92,000 EVs currently sitting on lots is comparatively high relative to gasoline-powered cars.

    “That’s a 92-day supply — roughly three months’ worth of EVs, and nearly twice the industry average,” wrote Joann Muller. “For comparison, dealers have a relatively low 54 days’ worth of gasoline-powered vehicles in inventory….”

    In other words, dealerships are sitting on a lot more EVs than gasoline-powered vehicles—despite efforts to entice consumers to buy EVs with taxpayer-funded credits up to $7,500.

    This is evidence that pretty much everyone—from central planners to auto manufacturers—misjudged the demand for EVs, which are not even as environmentally friendly as politicians would have you believe.

    Not only do EVs require an astonishing amount of mining—an estimated 500,000 pounds of rock and minerals must be upturned to make a single battery, physicists point out—but their carbon footprint isn’t much smaller than gas-powered cars.

    It turns out that EVs actually require a lot more CO2 to produce than gas-powered cars. EVs can make that up, but it takes a great deal of time because EVs also often run on electricity generated from fossil fuels. Just how long? In 2021, Volvo admitted that its C40 Recharge has to be driven 70,000 miles before its carbon impact is lower than its gas-powered version.

    All of this is to say that a bunch of unused EVs isn’t just a financial headache for auto dealers and motor companies; it’s also an environmental problem.

    That said, the weaker than expected demand for EVs doesn’t mean the future of electric vehicles is doomed. On the contrary, demand for EVs is likely to increase as battery technology and EV infrastructure improves. Ford’s Lightning, for example, only has half the range of its gas-powered F-150 because of its small battery—a clear concern when charging stations are not yet readily available in many places.

    For now, however, motor companies are competing with one another to attract customers in a smaller than anticipated EV market. Which brings me to Elon Musk.

    Tesla last week rolled out  its much-hyped Cybertruck, which is a direct challenge to the Lightning, and likely played a role in Ford’s price cut.

    Federal lawmakers may have created a glut of EVs with their meddling, and it’s likely to have an adverse impact on both the auto market and the environment. But one of the virtues of capitalism is that consumers will ultimately decide who wins in the EV market and who loses.

    Whether that turns out to be Musk’s Cybertruck or Ford’s Lightning remains to be seen. Either way, the competition is bringing down prices, which is a win for consumers looking to purchase an EV.

    But the glut of electrical vehicles on the market reveals the danger in letting lawmakers decide what consumers should be driving.

    This article originally appeared in The Epoch Times. 


    Jon Miltimore

    Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. (Follow him on Substack.)

    His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune.

    Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times. 

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


  • Sri Lanka’s Food Crisis Reveals the Dangers of Environmental Planning – Foundation for Economic Education

    On July 14, after months of economic and social unrest, Sri Lanka’s President Gotabaya Rajapaksa resigned in disgrace and fled to Singapore, leaving in his wake an economic crisis and a food shortage.

    How Rajapaksa’s fate was sealed is not complicated.

    You probably heard that Sri Lanka adopted an all-organic approach to agriculture, banning the import of regular fertilizer and fuel because activists assured the government that organic farming was the future. As a result, in merely one year Sri Lanka went from an exporter of rice to an importer. Sri Lanka was not a wealthy country to begin with, and the organic experiment—combined with Covid-19 and government lockdowns—plunged about half a million people into poverty and caused prices to surge. (Inflation is running well over 50 percent, the BBC notes.)

    It is a classic example where a supposedly “green” policy was implemented with a lot of fanfare, achieved very little, and created a lot of suffering.

    Moreover, such environmental overzealousness is not limited to countries like Sri Lanka. Rich countries have their share of poorly-thought-through “sustainable” initiatives that create a lot of misery and achieve little good. It’s just that rich countries have capital (or license to print dollars and euros) to hide the effects of bad policies.

    Consider the current issue of high energy prices. Sure, there are some unexpected factors, like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. However, expensive energy is largely a product of bad policies across the world.

    In the last decade, oil and gas production in the US increased significantly, in large part due to innovation, particularly hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”). This growth could have continued, lowering fuel prices at home and selling the excess oil and gas to Europe or other countries. However, green-minded policymakers have canceled or stalled a number of investment projects, such as the Keystone XL Pipeline, the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, and others.

    In addition, there are signs that the oil and gas industry is reluctant to invest a lot of money into new projects. It could be that the industry fears even more zealous policies against fossil fuels in the future. After all, would you want to invest in this sector when the government promises to eliminate fossil fuel use altogether?

    Most importantly, obstacles to oil and gas exploration in the US does little to reduce consumption of fossil fuels in the US or globally – oil and gas are merely acquired in other places, sometimes with much worse environmental records, e.g. Venezuela.

    Moving over to Europe, Germany is another country where unreasonable energy policies are wreaking havoc. Sure, the cuts in Russian supplied gas is the most visible issue, since Germany is very dependent on Russian gas. But this is in part due to German policies, which actively aimed to eliminate coal production and reduce coal consumption in favor of imported natural gas.

    At least changing from coal to natural has some sense in terms of climate change: in general coal has more CO2 emissions than natural gas. Although one could wonder whether relatively cleaner fuel is the right price for somewhat reduced CO2 emissions in exchange for dependence on natural gas supplied by Russia.

    However there is little practical justification for the German approach to nuclear power. German politicians chose to close working nuclear power plants (the last ones will shut down in 2022). Moreover, in truly zealous fashion, some politicians are against allowing German nuclear plants to come back online even as the country faces a true energy emergency. They prefer imposing energy rationing to industries or telling people to turn the thermostat a couple degrees down.

    Climate change politics could explain the resistance to coal, but not the opposition to nuclear. This latter is likely a combination of the legacy of the Green movement’s hostility to nuclear power, which goes back to the 1970s (long before climate change battles), and general distaste for development and industry.

    If you think the policies that impede development are only limited to fossil fuels and nuclear— just you wait. Resistance to renewable energy is beginning to rear its head too. Some of the opposition to renewable energy is legitimate, e.g. not all electricity produced on a windy day can be accommodated by an electric grid without major investment. Some rests on the “I-don’t-like-the-way-it-looks” sentiment, which some describe as “visual pollution.”

    All these cases are politician-produced disasters that impede man-made progress. Synthetic fertilizer made Sri-Lanka self-sufficient in food, but the government banned it. Indigenous energy sources could heat German homes, but politicians prohibited them. American oil and gas could make fuel affordable and power the free-world, but politicians on the fringe impede their development.

    The Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek once said “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”

    This is demonstrably true and a warning to overconfident politicians, aspiring social engineers, and green zealots. If they don’t trust logic and famous dead economists, they should at least learn from experience—blatant mistakes carried out right now for all the world to see.

    Banning synthetic fertilizer will result in less food. Impeding oil production will cause higher fuel prices. Shutting down power plants will cause blackouts. All of this is logical, obvious, and inevitable. It’s just that the effects of these policies take longer to manifest in rich countries. In poor countries, like Sri-Lanka, the effects of bad policies are tragically visible almost instantly.

    This Epoch Times article was republished with permission.


    Zilvinas Silenas

    Zilvinas Silenas became President of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) in May 2019. He served from 2011-2019 as the President of the Lithuanian Free Market Institute (LFMI), bringing the organization and its free-market policy reform message to the forefront of Lithuanian public discourse.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.