Quality of Light, Quality of Life

Excerpts from Heritage.org Blog

Howard Brandston is a renowned lighting designer who has over 50 years of experience and an impressive project record: To date, he has designed over 2,500 projects, one of which was the 1984 relighting of the Statue of Liberty. When Brandston makes a statement about the relative quality of the two types of light, as he did in The New York Times recently, it does well to listen:

“I think the government’s use of lumens-per-watt as a metric is a mistake. It doesn’t follow lighting practice. It’s one tiny part of what lighting design is all about. And by using that one metric, you are limiting the choices of all lighting designers and not following good lighting practice…. It’s not even an accurate measure of efficiency because in order to make their case they are to some extent misrepresenting the value of these lamps that they’re suggesting, which are compact fluorescents to replace incandescents…. The quality of light from the compact fluorescent is about the worst of the major light sources manufactured today.”

What this means is that, by being forced by law to purchase a specific type of light, consumers will see the quality of lighting available being limited…

… And that is why the ultimate decision should be left up to the consumer: to protect personal choice and freedom. The ban of the incandescent bulb is one of the most egregious examples of government intrusion into the marketplace and into our lives. As Brandston asserts in National Review:

Here we have the government entering all of our homes. Our homes are our castles…. Now they are telling us how to light our homes, and they are putting onerous burdens on us in terms of handling these toxic CFLs. The government should not enter our homes, tell us how to live, endanger our health, and ruin our quality of life.