Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Your Modern GOP At Work

Back to the Future!

The GOP House is urgently taking up jobs tax increases on the wealthy economic stimulus aid to education the war on CFLs.  Compact Fluorescent Lightbulbs.

You see, there is a plan to switch over from the incandescent lightbulbs invented by Thomas Edison to CFLs. The reason is pretty straight forward.  CFLs last a lot longer and use a lot less energy.  Put another way: they are better freaking lightbulbs.

The plan is to get incandescents off the market.  There are currently about five and a quarter billion lightbulbs in US households.  Right now less than a third are CFLs.  If 100% of lightbulbs were CFLs, power companies - especially coal companies - would stand to lose $26,000,000,000 every year.

I can't do the math, but I would imagine that's approximately... carry the 3... take the square root of pi... a shitload of coal that isn't being burned into the atmosphere.

Global climate change is happening.  The only legitimate scientific question is: Is human activity causing climate change or simply making a cyclical event exponentially worse?

There is pretty good evidence that the political unrest roiling the Middle East has been spurred by food prices rising because of climate events (droughts in Russia, floods in Australia).

So, given the choice between carrying water for coal power or caring for the planet, guess which way the GOP jumps?


Source: http://washingtonindependent.com/105964/group-of-house-republicans-push-pro-incandescent-light-bulb-bill-that-would-net-billions-for-energy-industry

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