there is currently research and development done on LED based bulbs, which are much more efficient than CFL and are completely non toxic. However cost of production and lifespan still need work. Research is continuing quickly, and eventually I Expect all bulbs to be LED. Until then, however, incandescents remain a safer, more environmentally sound solution than CFLs.

From a price standpoint, you can take a brand new incandescent, throw it in the trash, and get a brand new CFL, and you will STILL save a lot of money. Because as environmentally harmful and unsafe as CFLs are, they do take significantly less power to use.

I think they have the longevity licked on the LEDs, but price will only come down once they go into mass marketing.

CFLs, because of the mercury issue, are a bad mandate.  I think we will look back on them as another clossal blunder (like the Edsel).

LEDs longevity is directly tied to their illumination power. If you push enough voltage through them to create acceptable levels of illumination, then you greatly reduce longevity. And even if longevity is greater than that of a CFL, it still needs to increase further in order for total cost of ownership to be reduced. Double the lifespan, and you half the cost per year. since LEDs cost about 4x a CFL, their longevity needs to be at least 4x to be comparable.

the brightest LEDs today mimic 60 watt incandescent and require an actual heatsink and fan to prevent overheating; which further degrades reliability and longevity (moving parts).

It always amazes me where discussions go on blogs!

I will take your word for it as I am no expert.  But then the problem seems to be less one of longevity and more of illumination.  Still a problem (and of course the price is as well).  But considering where LEDs have come from in the last 20 years, I see them as becoming viable in the near future (I never said they were now).  If they can lick the issues you describe, then we basically have a source of light that is not lethal and will consume less energy.

And you know why I believe this?  because the driving force behind them is not some government bureaucracy, but consumers - via the computer industry (which the government has stayed out of so far).  it is not some Green Mandate or Obamination.  It is simple economics without government interferance.

In this specific case government intervention is very dubious. But there are other scenarios where I really like  that the government is playing watchdog. Most of these scenarios invovle negative externalities that are created in alot of industries like carcinogenic fumes, toxic waste, air and water pollution, workplace safety etc.

One example for that is here. I'll just excerpt it from an essay by Mark Sagoff, At the Shrine of Our lady of Fàtima, or Why political questions are not all economic, Arizona Law Review, Vol 23, 1283-1298.

There was a SCOTUS decision in 1981 about a Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Textile Mfgrs. v. Donovan, 101 S.Ct. 2478 (1981)). The American Textile Manufacturers Institute lawyers were heard in the Supreme Court in Jan 1981 and argued against a proposed OSHA regulation which would have severely reduced the acceptable levels of cotton  dust in textile plants. The lawyers for industry argued that the benefits of the regulation would not equal the costs. The lawyers for the government said that the law required tough standards. OSHA asked the Court not to decide in order to give the agency time to complete the cost benefit analsis required by the textile industry. The Supreme Court handed down its verdict on June 17, 1981 and found that the actions of regulatory agencies which conorm to the OSHA law need not be supported by cost benefit analsis and that Congress in writing a statute, rather than the agencies applying it, has the primary responsibility for balancing benefits and costs.

I don't think that all questions regarding  environmental measures have to be decided by economic reasoning. But each decision has to be evaluated individually, I find the whole topic of environmental policy way too broad to generalize.

It would be interesting to read how the decision for banning incandescent lightbults by 2014 was phrased. I mean, they had to pass it through the proper political channels, right?

As it is, this would be an argument for government intervention in economic markets in certain areas that concern public safety and overall costs for society.

Large L.E.D. technology has come a long way. Military vehicles are now being built with L.E.D. headlights and they work quite well (no heat sinks or fans). Big rigs and trailers now come with L.E.D. marker and tail lights. I've noticed that the price of these tail lights has dropped a great deal over the past few years as they have become the standard.

The key with L.E.D. lights is not in making a single diode to burn as bright as you need, but in clustering them to produce the needed light. The big down-side to them at the moment is the spectrum of light they produce isn't quite as good as what we currently use for indoor lighting. I can't imagine trying to read by that slightly blue/white light they produce. I keep a couple of flashlights in the truck, one L.E.D. and one with a Xenon  bulb. The spectrum difference of the two lights is quite obvious side by side.

Once they can produce a true white light I think they will be the way to go.

I agree.  Us "cowboy Americans" are not anarchists, just libertarians.  Government being a watch dog is one thing.  However, they are not being a watchdog when they are mandating toxic light bulbs because they save a few pfennigs in energy.  That was my point.  Here we have a safe alternative that has come down drastically in price in the last 20 years (and gone up drastically in quality) that the government has literally ignored (thankfully) versus one where we now have a toxic waste being introduced by law into every nook and cranny of living space.

A good ruling - on a bad law.  I agree with  SCOTUS on that, but the fault there is with the congress.  Before mandating taxes, a CBA should be run.  Anything in life is harmful if people are exposed to too much of it.  However there comes a point of diminishing returns.  We can save a million lives by reducing mercury to a certain small ppm, with minimal cost.  But to reduce it to zero would require more money than the GDP of the USA.

If you think about it, all should be, and almost all are.  Lead Poisoning - the cost of the health care far outweighs the cost of limiting exposure - so it is a cost benefit analysis.  Cost is not only found in manufacturing, but in all aspects of the handling and exposure of a substance.

No, that is the flaw in the ointment.  Congress needs no proper anything.  As we see with AGW, even bad science can create a stampede mentality that results in bad legislation.

I disagree.  Oversight, yes. Intervention, no.  By using an economic model (and law suits are part of the costs), the market can basically regulate itself, with the government just ensuring a fair and level playing field.  That is the role of government, not micromanaging industry.

Thanks for the further explanation!  As I stated previously, I am no lighting expert, but I am in computers and follow them rigorously (out of the MS support area now you will be glad to hear. ).  I have seen what LEDs have become, from the first eye straniners to today.  And that is just the beginning.  We have OLED on the horizon (ridiculously expensive, but they do address some of the illumination issues).

And it is consumers driving it, not Al Gore.

Isn't there a danger that workers/environment are only treated as means for the production of overall utility and not as ends in themselves if only the costs are regarded? I find that ethically dubious.

There is another example from the essay regarding a decision from 1977 by the Sec. of Labor to reduce the permissible ambient exposure level for benzene from 10 ppm to 1ppm. The American Petroleum Institute challened that new standard in court. They argued that the benefits to workers of the 1 ppm did not equal the costs to the industry. The standard did not appear to be a rational response to a market failure because it did not strike a balance between the interests of the workers in safety and the interest of industry and consumers in keeping prices down. The maxim of efficiency would require a standard which required safety until it cost more to prevent a risk that it cost workers to accept it.

I find the whole concept of evaluation things like health and happiness or the monetary value of nature difficult. I know  environmental ethic principles like physiocentrist approaches in which every living thing is an end in itself and has thus value, but it is downright difficult to apply those principles in practise for decisions like where to build a new industrial park or suburb or to reduce CO2 emissions. Overall, I sorely miss the ethical dimension in the whole global warming debate. Right now it seems to be all about posturing and accusing each other, and that turns it into a shallow debate. Not that I think you're article is shallow! But the media certainly presents it as such.

I really like this conclusion:

That is an exellent post!  In an ideal world, the existance of work would be for the sole purpose of the betterment of the worker.  But we are not in a perfect world.  So the sole purpose of workers is to produce more than they consume.  In effect, it is strictly a cost issue.  if I hire someone, I want to make money on that person's labor.  Now they can work for themselves, but they work for me because I bring in the contracts that gets them the work.  This is on a small scale, but it applies to a larger scale as well (except in Government - that is another story).

Look at it this way.  If I hire someone at $100/hour and then charge their services out at $100/hr, (and let's assume for the sake of this simplistic example that there is no overhead) I make nothing from their labors, but they are making a lot from mine (the goodwill my company has and that customers use to hire my company).  So I can do 1 or 2 things.  I can pay them less than what I charge for them, or I can make them pay me for the goodwill.  Say $20/hr.

The net effect is the same.  They "net" $80/hr.

In effect yes.  And while, with no government oversight, that would eventually be litigated in the courts (perhaps a long time), the government short cutted the process.  Which is their reponsibility (ensure the public safety being one of the mandates of a minimal government - think of it as the tribe around a campfire mentality).  Now the point of contention is how far the government can go or not go.  Clearly in some cases it goes too far and instead of oversight, becomes a dictatorial tyrant where it stiffles private enterprise (see the old USSR).  This can be seen in today's world by the American EPA and the CO2 ruling.  The ruling, if allowed to stand, will do nothing for the worker, but will drive many businesses out of business or increase costs dramatically (most likely both).  That is government being meddlesome, not government in oversight,

The fly in the ointment between you and me (or between a socialist and a capitalist in the purest sense of the definitions) is where the line should be.  Where does it stop being oversight, and start being control?  As a senator said "I can't define what pornography is, but I can tell you when I see it."

Actually I do not believe you do.  You just do not realize you are assigning costs to some things.  Even your quote does assign costs in a subjective way.  "The Public" is society.  Some places love opera so much the people vote to pay for it through taxes.  They do not write the check themselves, but they still pay for it since the taxes come from them.  So they have assigned a cost to it, and since majority rules (and the cigar chomping beer swilling sport fan is in the minority), everyone pays for it.  But that sport fan has a choice.  he can leave that society and move to one that puts football (or soccer) above opera and then use his taxes to pay for the sport.  Again, while "Art is not about money", it is all about money.

The problem with most is they do not realize they are making money decisions every day in almost every way (economic decisions).  But if you think about one thing, it becomes clear.  There is not an infinite amount of resources.  So there must be some way to allocate those resources (regardless of what the resource is).  Man has evolved (some would say devolved) to the point that they use money as the means of allocating resources.  Government can affect that (in a very negative way - again see the old USSR or present day Cuba/NK), but then it only makes it worse.  Government can also facilitate it, and that will actually endorse it (by removing the litigation in the benzene case you cited, more resources are spent on the end product insteadof wasted on courts).

They may say they refuse to look at worker health as commodities, but that is their own illusion.  it still is.  They are just assigning a higher value to it than the market will bear.  And in the end, all that accomplishes is to make the resource too expensive to use in the production of the product.  In otherwords, unemployed workers.

Government oversight is probably a better phrase than intervention. Apparently I am more socialist inclined than you, but I don't know if the reasons I gave conincide with a socialist market theory. The ones I know never really cared about safety and health issues or the enviconment.

I really had to think about those principles because I was in an exercise and the task was to evaluate different potential building sites for a fiction industrial park according to a biocentric ethical viewpoint - we were a fictional ethics commission assigned to a county board or something like that. It was quite the problem for us (none of us were economists) how exactly placing different values should be done. The biocentric environmental view states that every living matter has equal value, including plantlife and animals. There are great philosophers that make excelent arguments why that is so, which is entireley useless because there is no accompanying manual on how to apply that to reality.

Long story short, it comes down to a systematic approach on assigning values to different things like scarcity, biodeversity etc. - probably a form of CBA, just not strictly in an economic sense. How exactly that apporach should look like - well, we only recommended the development of it and luckily didn't have to do it ourselves.

I found quite a few essays regarding CBA in a book called The environmental ethics and policy book, Philosophy, Ecology, Economics. The easiest to understand (no overly complicated language, concrete examples) studybooks I found are all from american authors. Germans always write way too complicated and longwinded.

Clusters do work in applications like vehicle light. I am actually quite curious as to why lighbulb replacements use the "single diode" mode. My guess is that it is a matter of production cost. There is also the issue of directionality. car lights are highly directional which lends itself well to focusing the light via reflectors. While light bulb replacements should emit light in all directions. LEDs do wonders in the spotlight department where their limited light can be focused into a small angle.

I can buy the leds I described, but I have not seen an LED cluster in the store yet. Maybe they are there and I just have not noticed.

every illumination technology has its plusses and minuses. And I am certain that the LED tech has great potential, enough to become the dominant light tech in the near future. It just makes sense to do so after the technology exists, not before we actually have a product.

as for the heatsink + fan LED: http://www.earthtechproducts.com/led-bulb.html

its actually 13 watt replaced 100 watt incandescent.

This one replaces a 45 watt  incandescent without a fan: http://www.earthtechproducts.com/p2636.html?gdfdomain=.store.yahoo.net&gdftrk=gdfV2538_a_7c634_a_7c2338_a_7cLEDCL3

here is a 60 watt equivalent (7 watts): http://www.earthtechproducts.com/p2637.html

So yea, I was wrong about the 60 watt replacement thing, it was the 100 watt replacements. they are better then they used to. Still, a 60 watt equivalent @ 40$ is quite a lot of money. when a 4 pack of 60 watt equivalent CFLs (14 watts actual) costs 7$

http://www.amazon.com/Compact-Fluorescent-Temperature-Incandescent-Equivalent/dp/B00029QUWG/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=home-garden&qid=1267360016&sr=8-2

To pay for itself the LED needs to be vastly longer lived and more power efficient. at 7 watts difference, thats about 7$ a year savings when on 24/7. (depending on your electricity cost)

it claims 11 years when on 8 hours a day (~3.6 years @ 24/7/365), but also claims over 50,000 hours life (~5.7 years). I am sure both figures are exaggerated.

If its closer to the 3.6 yeras figure, it will only save 25$ or so over the lifespan of the bulb in terms of electricity compared to CFL. 40-25 gives 15$, thats enough to buy 9CFLS. the CFL are rated for 1/5th the lifespan, but are much cheaper. And you get to reap the benefits of improved technology earlier (by replacing bulbs more often and paying less each time. I still have CFLs I bought years ago @ about 10$ per bulb).

if it is closer to the 50,000 hours figure, then it can actually pay for itself, as it will save ~40$ over CFLs in its lifetime, and it costs 40$ to buy. making it the better deal.

I think you have more socialist tendencies than I do, but I would not call you a socialist.  I think the difference is just in how we were raised - you in a society that tends more socialist than I.

It always comes down to that.  But then how do you assign values?  What is the basis of the value?  IN any society today, the basis always comes back to money.  In one society, they may value a human life for pittance (most dictators do that), and in others they place a much higher value on it.  In some areas, a human life is worth more than anyone can afford, and so the CBA always comes out with very high safety features.  In others, they assign a lower value, so safety, while important, is not the make or break factor in the decision.

The question is wether moral values are valuable on their own or only because we assigned value to them. I'd like to believe the former.

Does the environment have (moral) value because it exists or only because we as humans assigned value to it, like aesthetic, instrumental, sentimental, religeous etc. values. You could ask the same for a human life. Does human life have value on its own, without human influence, or because we decided that it does? Pricing moral values just feels wrong, even if a CBA can accomplish it.

A ethical counterargument against those supporters of AGW who claim that exploitation of resources on the cost of the environment is amoral and wrong could be this: If you state hat the environment/the whole world has a moral value that is independant from humans, then the environment has value no matter what we do. So even a dead nuclear wasteland (very extreme case) or a world with drastically changed eco- and climatesystems would still have the same moral value because it is independant from human oppinion. There is no moral obligation to the environment to do anything to protect the environment or to stop change in this line of argument - that is, they would have to come up with a convincing ethically sound counterargument, which is possible without too much difficulty, but it's a fun challenge.

This is getting very philosophical. But I will try to keep up.  The answer is yes.  We as moral and ethical human beings assign a value to life that far exceeds the chenical cost of the components.  But we assign it never the less.  We value some lives over others (my family means more to me than a stranger's life).  Whether we sit down with pen and paper and calculate the cost is another matter.  But we will assign a value to it.  The moral and ethical part comes into play by valuing it greater than the cost of creating another life (which is the usual valuation method of assets).

yes is does sound wrong when discussing morals and ethics.  It sounds wrong because you are mixing morals and values - an important aspect of valuation - with economics.  The Mona Lisa is a few dollars of oil and canvas, yet it is considered priceless.  Because we placed a value on it for more than just the replacement cost.  Human life is the same way. 

It is hard to think of it that way, because that is being cold and heartless.  And that is what is needed to do this type of analysis.  That does not mean it is cold and heartless, only that if you start injecting feelings into it, you would never get anywhere.  On the titanic, the captain and crew assigned a value to life, and decided that women and children were worth more than men.  It was necessary.  Was each woman better than each man?  Hardly, but he had to make a cold heartless decision to save some, as not all could be saved.  he placed a value on life based upon criteria that others may not.  But he did so to save some, since not all could be saved.

From a pure valuation standpoint, they have some merit.  But then who is doing the valuation?  God?  Aliens?  No, in all cases man is, for it is man that controls his world to some degree and must allocate scarse resources to infinite problems.  So a sterile world has no value - there is no one there to value it.  A destitute world has very little value - as there are very few to value it.  it is to our (collectively man) beenfit to value a livable planet with very high since as of now it is the only one we have.  But the cost of not exploiting the resources has to be weighed with how many would perish for lack of warmth, clothing, food and shelter.  Clearly if we disrregard the ecology, we destroy that which we need to survive.  But if we put the ecology on a pedestal and make it scared, we destroy human life in the process.  A balance must be struck.  And it is up to the collective man (not one man or a cabal of men) to place the value on the polar opposites and then to see where they intersect.  because man places such a high value on life (relative to other things), then man moves the intersection to a point where resources are exploited, but man survives.

Since man has not reached the stage where he controls his environment, the intersection is a guesstimate.  And until man can control it, it always will be.  But woe to the greens and gore should they get their way.  For when it causes mass starvation and hypothermia, the revolt will be worse than anything they think they want to impose on this world.  And it will be their fault - the road to hell is paved with good intentions (although in Gore's case I think it is just greed).

lol - thanks for keeping up! I find it a fascinating topic to have a conversation about.

Philosophy is the foundation of natural science, of all science. Philosophers were the first who tried to come up with a systematic model to explain the universe and the world, and out of that evovled the rest. So even if this getting philosophical might seem totally off topic from the op, I see a connection. Just think about people like Alexander Humboldt, adventurer, explorer, botanist and philosopher who had a concept of how the world worked and tried to map that in nature only to discover that it didn't really work the way he thought it did.

Hey!  Lightbulbs were Off topic too!  And Taltamir left me in the dark when he started talking about heatsinks on them!

Like I said, you never know where a topic will go.  And for those who are bored, they just dont have to respond.  but as for this topic, I will concede you probably can beat me to death with it.  I am more hard science than philosophy.  And it was hurting my brain trying to keep up with you.