I really wish congress wouldn’t mandate technology. A friend of mine ran into this sort of thing. Someone got the bright idea to essentially ban mercury in Maine. One of the largest employers at the time freaked out because they need a special type of mercury bulb to do a type of photolithography. They are safe with it, only have a few of the bulbs, and disposes of it properly. The legislation was eventually killed because the company screamed bloody murder loud enough, but it shows the point.
Don’t fucking ban things unless they are truly awful. Blank bans are as horrible as three strike laws and zero tolerance policies. Tax it. Take whatever you think the cost of the externality is toss it on top as tax. Want to play it safe? Take whatever you think the cost of the externality is and triple it. Don’t fucking ban it.
Do you think that inefficient light bulbs are bad? Cool, put a price on the badness and then triple it. Further, do it based upon a metric, not a technology. If someone can make an incandescent light bulb that takes less power than an LED (they can’t, but for the sake of argument…) than that should be judged on the same standard. Congress are roughly the last people on this planet that should be picking technlogical winners and losers.
Tax externalities based upon metrics. If someone is willing to shell out for an incandescent that costs more than an LED after the brutal externality tax, there is probably a good reason.
