I like LED bulbs, but they're still absurdly expensive.
People keep going on vacation too, even though that's damaging the environment. What are you going to do about that?
And it's not even true that incandescents are a tragedy of the commons situation. They aren't. Consumers who use them pay more for their use (and thus the environmental damage they cause). So there is, in fact, already a built-in incentive for everyone to use them less, and that incentive operates on an individual level. And plenty of people have switched over without having to be forced to, precisely because their use costs money.
That's what I did a few years ago. I've got almost exclusively CFL bulbs in my house because I wanted to lower my energy bill. But I resent being told I don't have any choice in the matter. I resent being told that there are no reasons that could justify choosing differently. I resent being told I'm not an adult who can make my own responsible choices. Maybe you feel like it's fine for the state to treat you like a child, but I don't.
This may have been discussed on this thread already (I haven't scanned back through it all - so if I'm repeating anything, sorry!), but there's a fundamental fallacy about energy efficiency of CFL lighting vs incandescent tungsten filament lighting, if one lives in a cool or cold climate. The entirety of the the energy "wastage" of tungsten-filament bulbs is through heat. In other words, as well as converting electrical current to energy in the form of light - seen as the primary function of a light bulb - a greater amount of electrical energy in these bulbs is given out in the form of heat.
Conventional wisdom suggests that this heat generation is "wasted" energy, and it's this "wastage" against which newer CFL (and other) bulbs are compared. But if one lives in a cool climate, in a house with normal levels of access to daylight (i.e. normal amounts of windows!), then there are two important factors at play: 1) You usually only put lights on when there is little or no daylight, and 2) At the times when there is little or no daylight, there is usually a requirement to heat the house to some degree.
Suppose that you wish the interior temperature of your house to be 20 degrees celsius, and that the outside temperature is (say) 10 degrees. you will probably have to heat your interior air in order to achieve your desired interior temperature - particularly if the outside air temperature has been lower than you desired interior temperature for some hours.
Now, if you have "low energy" light bulbs, there are probably only two or three heat sources in the room in which you are sitting watching TV (or reading Proust, or playing charades, or whatever
): the radiant heat from human bodies, heat given off by any electrical equipment, and heat provided by dedicated heating devices (fan heaters, central heating, gas fire, etc). These will all have to work together - and consume energy from food, gas, oil, coal, wood or electricity proportionately - to raise the air temperature to the desired level.
BUT...... if you have tungsten bulbs in the lights in the room, then the "wasted" energy is not really being wasted at all. In fact, these bulbs are providing heat through conduction and convection to the surrounding air, in exactly the same way (though on a much smaller scale) as a wall-mounted radiator would do. Therefore, physics dictates that it would now require proportionately less energy to be consumed by the other heat sources to bring the interior air temperature to the desired level. Thus, the heat generated by incandescent bulbs is not "wasted" in this scenario - instead, it translates into a commensurate energy saving in other heat sources for any given desired air temperature. The only issue is whether the heat energy from an incandescent bulb is efficiently transferred to the air, to which the answer is that yes, it's pretty efficient. Touch the outside of a tungsten bulb that's been on for 30 minutes, and you risk burning your hands. So the bulb is acting as a very hot mini-radiator.
The upshot is that it's often fallacious to think that one is saving considerable household energy by switching to the newer bulbs, if one lives in a reasonably cool climate. Conversely, in warmer climates, there is a very strong argument for getting rid of tungsten bulbs - since not only is this heat energy now truly "wasted", but it either makes the interior air temperature even more uncomfortable, or it necessitates even more energy to be spent on air conditioning to reduce the air temperature to the required level.
Again, apologies if this has been discussed at any length before!!
