New US Government CFL Sales Campaign

 

Steve Milloy is good at finding and reporting on the many ways people are being misled, on this and many other science issues.

Here's his latest article at Canada Free Press:

Can you really buy a flat screen TV with the money you supposedly save with CFL light bulbs?

The Department of Energy is sponsoring Ad Council ads to promote CFL light bulbs. Coming on the heels of House Republican efforts to repeal the looming incandescent bulb ban, one of the ads features a couple throwing over a cliff stuff (like a flat screen TV) that they allegedly could have bought with the money saved by CFLs.

But as pointed out by Energy and Environment News, DOE says upgrading 15 traditional incandescent bulbs to efficient options could save households about $50 a year in energy costs.

I don’t know whether President Obama or Nobel Prize-winning Energy Secretary Steven Chu have been to a store recently but $50 won’t buy too many TVs — or much else of significance.

Moreover, the energy savings of CFLs have been significantly exaggerated as California utility PG&E recently learned.

Steve Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and GreenHellBlog.com, and is the author of Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them.



Comment

The Campaign in turn links to Energysavers.Gov at the Department of Energy (DOE):
Certainly it can obviously be good for both country and individual to save energy, as the Ceolas.net website with this blog makes a point of covering.
However, as the motto here says, light bulb regulation is not a good way to do it...
and the campaigns in that regard do not tell the whole truth - and that is as seen using the DOE's own data, and the information in the 2007 Energy Act itself




Frying a Chicken using Incandescents!

[So incandescents are really great when it's cold, as it often is when it's dark?! Regarding conflicting information, consider Departmental different statements that in winter "incandescent heat effect is negligible" while in summer "incandescent heat effect is considerable" (to affect air conditioning) http://ceolas.net/#li6x Ah yes...]

From the Referred Website...

[Note the caption, and website linked, that the bulbs meet the 2012-2014 standard... like...let's Keep Very Quiet about them not meeting the standard that follows!]

Nice of the US Government to finance sales campaigns that manufacturers should be taking care of themselves.... (Do Energizer battery sales people - given their famous commercials regarding "expensive to buy but cheap in the long run" - say "Please Energy Dept, can you Finance our Bunny as well, on behalf of US taxpayers"?! which might, say, reduce the number of dumped batteries, and if that logic is refuted, the same applies to any electrical product or car manufacturer etc, and energy saving is of course not the only positive quality a product can have anyway)

RE "upgrading 15 traditional incandescent bulbs to efficient options could save households about $50 a year in energy costs."

There's a lot of "could" and "about" and "typically" in Departmental statements (see above picture caption and its website), sometimes necessary, sometimes not, no doubt they have their legal people looking over what they say. On the language side, we not only have the beauty of calling fluorescent bulbs energy saving light bulbs - true or not, when did you last buy an incandescent bulb saying "Can you give me that Energy Wasting Light Bulb please?" - but also, as here, the use of efficiency as always meaning energy efficiency - a performant efficient fast car might not be energy efficient, a constructionally simple incandescent light bulb (which is much easier to make to give bright 100W+ equivalent light) might not be energy efficient, and so on.

Add to that in a wider sense that emission of the naturally occuring CO2 gas is called pollution (remembering that "too much" love and "too much" peace is bad for the planet too, by definition), necessitating clean energy that might have other environmental problems, or that global warming is handily renamed climate change, despite the heat effect still being considered the predominant problem, and so on, such terms being happily swallowed by the reporting media.

And those savings?

1. There are many reasons, too many to cite here, why the savings don't hold either for society or for consumers, also using DOE's own statistics. Summary http://ceolas.net/#li171x

2. They always take the most commonly used lights and multiply accordingly. American 45-bulb household has many other lights Less usage, less savings, apart from breakage, losses etc (http://ceolas.net/#li13x onwards)

3. Not only have to pay more for the light bulbs as an initial cost but also being being forced to pay for them, via taxpayer CFL programs

4. Little Money savings for consumers as a whole, regardless of energy savings: Because electricity companies are being subsidised (again by consumers as taxpayers) or allowed to directly raise Bill rates, to compensate for any reduced electricity use, as already seen both federally and in California, Ohio etc, and before them in the UK and other European countries (as referenced, http://ceolas.net/#californiacfl)

Saving money isn't the only reason to choose anything anyway, there are of course all the light quality and other issues too.