re: Do compact fluorescent lights really save energy?

Michael Huntington — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 07:25:03 GMT

In addition, as Bastiat would remind us, we need to consider the unseen. In the case of flourescent lights, it may be true that consumers would use less electricity (or, as you argue, perhaps not), but is their manufacture more efficient? Is any potential decrease in electricity used by consumers offset by an increase in energy used during the manufacture of flourescent as opposed to incandescent bulbs?

More than energy use, there is also the question of the use of all the other resources that go into producing one type of bulb or the other. The "Autobiography of a Pencil" should remind us of the complexity of the network of knowledge and resources lying behind any seemingly simple commodity. Only a truly free market can effectively allocate resources to their most valued uses; and that, only through a pricing system based on money (real market based commodity money, not Fed generated fiat dollars).

Any government intervention in the market for bulbs (whether through restrictions or subsidies or whatever) automatically skews the market system for allocating resources, so that it becomes impossible to determine whether more or less resources are being used by one type of bulb or another. The fact, however, that intervention is called for, almost seems to guarentee that the flourescent bulbs are in fact less efficient overall; otherwise why would any intervention be considered necessary?