Thomas Edison’s great-grandson is using the new year to praise the light-bulb law that makes it illegal to import or manufacture for sale light bulbs that don’t meet federal efficiency standards. This effectively bans the traditional incandescent invented by Edison.
David Edward Edison Sloane writes that his ancestor would have welcomed the law because “he was green” and because “Thomas Edison would have been the first to support technological advances.” These are both red herrings.
The greenness is debatable. The current incandescent replacements, compact flourescent lamps, or CFLs, are made with mercury gas in dirtier plants in China and then shipped across the sea to reach here, while the traditional incandescents used to be made in factories in Ohio, Virginia, and Kentucky. Lower cost of electricity causes some people to use more electricity, and if your bulbs take a while to warm up, you’re more likely to leave them on all day.
But Sloane also makes the standard conflation of many light-bulb-regulators, assuming that without banning the cheaper older bulbs, nobody will be able to get the more expensive newer ones. But nobody’s banning hi-tech bulbs. People just aren’t buying them as much as the manufacturers would like.
That’s why General Electric, Thomas Edison’s company, lobbied in favor of the light bulb law that forces consumers to buy the more expensive, higher-profit-margin fancy bulbs.
So, yeah, Edison might have liked this law for the same reason his company’s current management likes it: it profits GE.
And, if you believe the followers of Nicolas Tesla, Edison was all about public-policy profiteering, trying to convince governments and power companies that Alternating Current was dangerous and must be stopped. He even electrocuted an elephant as part of this misinformation campaign.
