This story on the BBC news website, explaining the virtues of the new EU legislation to ban 100w incandescent bulbs features plenty of quotes from the Energy Saving Trust, who explain why Compact Florescent Lighting (otherwise known as “the shitty bulbs they’re going to make you use from now on, whether you like it or not”) are completely awesome:

According to the Energy Saving Trust, compact fluorescent lamps (energy-saving bulbs) use 80% less electricity than standard bulbs.

They could also save the average household £590 in energy over their lifetime of between eight and 10 years, and if all traditional bulbs were replaced, the carbon saving would be the equivalent of taking 70,000 cars off the road.

Good reasons.

Thanks Auntie. But who are the The Energy Saving Trust? Well they’re a ‘non-profit’ organisation 90% funded by the Government and includes as members The Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, The Secretary of State for Transport, The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and The First Minister for Scotland. It gets 2% of its funding from the private sector, and boasts the membership of most of the utilities and energy producing interests, all of whom seem terrified of being perceived as un-Green by consumers.

So when the BBC reports the views of the Energy Saving Trust like this, they’re not really quoting an independent, reliable source – it’s the Government advising the Government – again. It may be factually true that energy saving bulbs are cheaper to run, but ‘equivalent to 70,000 cars taken off the road’ is a completely bollocks statistic – and even if it were true, I have one simple question to ask:

So what?

In fact, I reached the end of the story wondering why, exactly, there’s this overwhelming need to take political action against the humble light bulb.

Handily the Government is on hand to explain to us what our criticism of this plan should be (because they’ve got a response pre-cooked for it, unlike, say, ‘hey, you’re taking away my decision to choose for myself, you authoritarian shits!’)

Claims of poor lighting were also untrue, [a Government spokesman] said.

“The light is bright and clear and tests conducted by the Energy Saving Trust suggest that the majority of people cannot tell the difference between the light of a new CFL and an incandescent bulb.”

Right, let’s rip this to pieces nice and quickly : ‘the majority’ (anything over 51% of the sample) couldn’t tell the difference in a trial. In other words, anything from 49% of people in the trial could tell the difference. The spokesman makes no reference to what their test subjects said about their quality of the light or which one they preferred. How do they get from ‘majority couldn’t tell the difference’ to ‘claims of poor lighting are untrue’? The mind boggles. It’s a piece of political propaganda and a conclusion not supported by data.

The reason all florescent lighting is inferior to incandescent lighting is simple: Normal bulbs emit the full spectrum of visible light, whilst Compact Florescents don’t. You get the full spectrum from the Sun, and you get partial spectrums from things like televisions – that eerie glow when a television is left on whilst the lights are turned out.

I used to do a lot of 3D Computer Graphics, and one of the hardest things to simulate is human skin. That’s because skin isn’t just ’skin’ – it’s multiple layers of different types of tissues, and light is diffused and scattered around underneath the surface, each layer handling photons in its own way. Put your hand over a powerful light source and your skin seems to glow bright orange. In computer graphics it is fantastically difficult to get right, and is the main reason why it’s almost impossible to create a truly photo-realistic human in a computer.

What I learnt from this is that how we look is very much dictated by the light that illuminates us. The partial spectrum light from Compact Fluorescents makes skin look very different. I can’t explain it. It just feels eerie. Whenever I’m in space lit only by Florescent lighting I feel like I’m in a dystopian horror, as if we’ve crossed some invisible line in creating artificial environments for ourselves.

Yet despite “claims of poor lighting being ‘untrue’” the EU wants to have a go at reducing the perceived quality of lighting from the old style bulbs regardless, by making it illegal to sell a standard bulb that tints or diffuses the light. Hmm. Does this not suggest that someone, somewhere, is concerned enough about a difference to warrant legislating against it?

And once again I’m brought back to wondering why. Why do this? Presumably the answer is “because the market has failed! People are still buying cheap bulbs that give off better lighting instead of expensive bulbs that aren’t as good. We must do something!”

Yet the market hasn’t failed. The market’s working perfectly well. People aren’t switching because the new bulbs aren’t better and cheaper than the ones that came before. I mean, even if you decide that 100w bulbs are wasteful and it’s not enough that people simply waste their own money paying to run them, why make it illegal to sell a bulb with diffusion or tinting?

This is purely to rig the competition and deny us the ability to choose for ourselves.

So the EU, a ‘Free Trade Zone’, is deciding that the manufacturers of energy saving bulbs are to be favoured (they’re produced by Great Britain, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain) and the manufacturers of incandescent bulbs are to be fought against. It is economic planning, without question – done on an EU wide level, using The Environment as the excuse for restricting yet another personal and economic freedom.

Is there any wonder that Green is the new Red?