Even more lightbulbs will be illegal now after the Biden administration finalized its rule expanding the 2007 lightbulb law, which is sending the very affordable, traditional incandescent bulb to the grave.
It’s a good case study on the ratchet of regulation, how it undermines democracy and trust in the media, and how it causes clever corporations to undermine their own enterprise.
In 2007, Republican congressman Fred Upton teamed up with Democrats to push a measure that would ban the manufacture or import of bulbs that didn’t meet strict new efficiency standards. The intention was to ban the traditional incandescent bulb, which turns much of its energy into heat and thus is often very inefficient.
The law exempted specialty bulbs from its efficiency standards. This was a selling point. But Democrats had also written into the bill a couple of kill switches, so to speak. If people who disliked the “green” lightbulbs started turning more to three-way bulbs or globe-shaped bulbs, which were exempted from the regulations, the Department of Energy could strip those popular bulbs of their exemption.
Sure enough, on the final full day of his presidency, Barack Obama redefined the phrase “general service lamp” to include specialty bulbs. Obama, for example, declared that three-way bulbs, which have two different filaments and can operate at three different brightness levels (efficiency!), were now general service bulbs.
The law had allowed the DOE to redefine exempt specialty bulbs if it became clear that folks were buying them simply because they were exempt. But Obama’s DOE didn’t find evidence for that. Instead, it simply decided to crack down for fear that people would choose the exempt bulbs in the future. “DOE expects these sales will likely increase since these lamps could be used as replacements for other regulated lamp types,” the Obama administration stated in justifying their regulatory expansion. It did the same to globe-shaped bulbs.
So that’s the regulatory ratchet. The law outlawed some bulbs but exempted others. Then, the regulators came in and reinterpreted the law so as to outlaw more bulbs.
The Trump administration dialed down Obama’s regulations, but now the Biden administration has stepped in and taken things further than Obama ever did. President Joe Biden has invoked the law’s “backstop” — a novel provision imposing far higher efficiency standards for all regular lightbulbs. He also reimposed Obama’s redefinition, stripping specialty bulbs of their exemption. The backstop was supposed to kick in if the DOE failed to issue new regulations establishing whether the efficiency standard should go up. This allowed Biden to raise efficiency standards without needing a rule-making process.
So the ratchet turned slowly and steadily, with the lightbulbs that were spared by the law getting banned later on by the regulators. This wasn’t surprising, but nevertheless, it has left the lightbulb lobby in a bind.
The National Electrical Manufacturers Association aggressively supported the regulations in 2007. Now they are opposing Biden’s implementation of them.
NEMA lobbied publicly and privately for the lightbulb law. “NEMA views any lighting market transformation as a matter of national importance that must come about through a federal solution by setting technology-neutral performance-based standards that would eliminate today’s inefficient general service lightbulbs from the market,” a NEMA official said.
Upton regularly defended the ban by pointing to the industry’s support. U.S. Fed News reported in 2007, “Upton and Harman worked very closely with industry and environmentalists to craft common sense legislation that seeks to clean up the environment, all the while protecting American jobs.”
Yet it didn’t protect American jobs. The General Electric lightbulb factory in Winchester, Virginia, closed in 2010 due to the lightbulb law. The bulbs replacing the Winchester bulbs were made in Mexico and China.
And now that Biden has dialed up the regs, NEMA says they are too strict.
This is what happens when companies support regulations that they think will enhance their profits — they get burned in the end because government is a faithless partner.
