Congress caused a factory to close this month and the jobs to go overseas.
GE has a factory in Winchester, VA, that makes incandescent light bulbs. Does until the end of September. Then it will close due to an act of Congress and 200 people will see their jobs shipped overseas.
In 2007 Congress made the big decision for you*. Instead of each of us making the decision to save money by consuming less electricity for lighting, Big Brother took away our choice. They outlawed the incandescent light bulb invented by Thomas Edison in the 1870s. Now we all have to buy the CFL bulbs that are all made overseas or find another alternative.
And CFLs are hazardous; they contain mercury, which is toxic. Keep them out of the house. No, can't - act of Congress.
Ask Congressmen running for reelection why sent these jobs overseas. And why they require us to use hazardous lighting in our homes.
Washington Post
* HR 6: Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 Technicality: This law does not outlaw incandescent bulbs, but puts in place standards that don't allow their use.
Posted by Ron Hebron at September 09, 2010 07:42 AM | Email ThisThe effects of the action will not be as immediate, but the long term negative impact for the enemy will be catastrophic.
Posted by: Johnny on September 9, 2010 08:47 AMJohnny, can we add lawyers to your list?
Posted by: TP Dave on September 9, 2010 10:17 AMWe do these things for your own good. We big brains here in the Mother Ship have this stuff all figured out.
Quit your whining and go out and buy some milk with your food stamps.
Like our Dear Leader says: "They should be thanking us"
Posted by: Alan Davidson on September 9, 2010 11:25 AM"Technicality: This law does not outlaw incandescent bulbs, but puts in place standards that don't allow their use."
Go Galt! Open your own incandescent light bulb factory and show dem Big Guberment idiots a thing or two.
Cripes! Do you really think GE is closing the factory primarily because of a regulation?
Posted by: MikeBoyScout on September 9, 2010 11:47 AMAnd of course no one ever mentions Halogen bulbs which are even less efficient than a typical incandescent, quite popular and in widespread production.
It's like Hybrid vehicles. Thrust upon the market as an eco-solution, but net not saving much due to all of the manufacturing costs and extra shipping costs associated with the batteries and dual drive systems and their more lengthy bills of materials. In the end, a ULEV vehicle with a conventional combustion engine is a much better buy, and much better for the environment than a hybrid.
But there's money to be made in eco-religion, so we have CFLs and Priuses.
Posted by: Jeff B. on September 9, 2010 12:06 PMLast year I replaced a PAR reflector can incandescent with a CFL reflector bulb in a can package. The bulb's drive electronics failed in less than one year due to incompatibility with the other incandescent bulbs on the same lighting string. (I know this because I have an EE degree.) That CFL bulb cost about $12. For just about double that price, I now have an LED bulb in place and the lifetime is 50,000 hours vs. the alleged 6,000 hours of the CFL bulb. The other problem with CFL bulbs is that the drive electronics are prone to failure. Aside from the much longer life of the LEDs themselves, there is much less complication with LED drive circuitry, therefore much less failure.
If the market had made the determination for when to transition away from incandescent bulbs instead of eco-crats, CFL bulbs never would have seen the uh, light of day.
Posted by: Jeff B. on September 9, 2010 12:55 PMOne of my customers watched about 14% of all the gas station/convenience stores in California close down for good a few years ago based on new environmental mandates. (The stores - of course - had the option of spending six figures per location to update their stores, but it just couldn't pencil out.)
These weren't big Oil Company owned stores either - the big guys could afford the upgrades. These were several hundred small businesspeople most of home one or two stations in smaller towns. (Some of which ended up without a gas stations at all after the closures.)
In this particular story, the most interesting point is that GE - or at least their workers - are getting hurt. With all the political contributions that GE corporation gives to dems and all the propaganda coverage that GE's television network gives Obama, it's a real surprise to see even them getting damaged.
I'm sure that while this factory is going out of business, our children and grandchildrens "stimulous" tax dollars have probably paid for a new automated factory with 1/10th of the workers cranking out the crappy eco-bulbs that no one really likes. The factory is probably owned by a dependable democratic party contributor or maybe just some democratic politicians' inlaw or mistress.
Posted by: johnny on September 9, 2010 04:19 PMSo those jobs are going. Jobs have been lost with Obamacare....just heard recently of a health insurer back east who started letting people go due to Obamacare regulations. I TOLD local employees of my own health insurer that Obama wanted to kill off their jobs. Some understood, some didn't. Now they will be believers.....
Please spare us these kinds of laws that try to destroy industries!
Posted by: Michele on September 9, 2010 05:13 PMLiberal fascism on display....while they wonder where the jobs have gone....
Posted by: Michele on September 9, 2010 09:24 PMTruth is that if you want to talk about making our children pay for waste, you need to look at government - not business. A great place to start is with that trillion dollar "Stimulous" porkfest. Your children and grand children will be paying for that bigtime.
You speak about CEO's pushing jobs offshore as if that's what they want to do. You know, manufacturing used to be done in places like St. Louis MO, Detroit MI, and Dayton, OH. and still would be if unions and government didn't push them offshore. You think these CEO's want to deal with supply chain and shipping logistics over international borders, much less the red tape of two governments? They would really sleep a lot better if they didn't have to.
You speak about the housing bubble as if it's really the problem that sank our economy. Do your homework - the housing bubble is a blip compared to the derivatives mess that was created right under the nose of our government regulators.
(It was pretty hard to miss to mess developing mess either - few businesses in the world have as much regulatory reporting involved with them as those in investment and banking. This is why I laugh out loud when I see Obama trying to make the case that failures in business are the reason to ramp up government control.)
Electricity is easy to produce if environazi's back off and let us use hydroelectric and nuclear power just like the rest of the world is using. (Small footprint nuclear reactors compact enough to be housed in a building smaller than an average gas station are coming, but I doubt the granola eating hippies out there will ever allow one to be built in U.S. neighborhoods though they'll probably sprout up like weeds all over Europe and South America.)
Wood, too, is a re-usable resource and last time I checked, the raw materials that are used to create cement aren't rare either. Housing is not something we have to rob children for in order to have a comfortable home.
I have no disagreement that we should watch what we dump in the Earth, but thats a sanitation problem that I tend to believe we can answer. The solution is not to throw on the breaks and go back to the stone age.
Posted by: johnny on September 10, 2010 08:17 AM