Republicans have spent months raging against any government-mandated shift away from gas stoves. All the while, the focus of a previous culture war — the incandescent lightbulb — will meet its official demise by the end of the month. Manufacturers and retailers have already been removing the inefficient bulbs from their shelves, a trend driven in large part by Energy Department rules that bar their sale. It’s a quiet end to a political battle that had Republican lawmakers railing against federal overreach more than a decade ago. The same kinds of fights will probably play out again and again as governments and companies look to slash the climate impact of everything from home appliances to cars, said Alex Flint, executive director of the conservative Alliance for Market Solutions. These debates “will happen at the scale of what power plants to build. They will happen at the scale of what lightbulbs to install and everything in between,” Flint said. “There is change coming in all aspects of our energy economy, and there will be fights like this along the way.” Recall: The fight over incandescent lightbulbs was set into motion more than a decade ago, when Congress mandated higher efficiency standards, as your Power Switch host reports. The issue was the focus of Republican ire for years, animating tea party conservatives and GOP presidential hopefuls who accused Democrats of trying to limit consumers’ choices. The Obama administration eventually took action in its waning days on lightbulb efficiency, only for former President Donald Trump — who once proclaimed energy-efficient bulbs made him “look orange” — to block the rule. Under President Joe Biden, the Energy Department finalized rules last year that expanded the list of regulated bulbs and imposed an efficiency standard that Congress had set in 2007: 45 lumens per watt. A lumen is the measure of brightness for a lightbulb, while watts measure the power consumed. A typical 60-watt incandescent bulb produces about 800 lumens, according to the Energy Department, translating into about 13 lumens per watt. While there’s no direct ban on incandescent bulbs, experts told Brian Dabbs that most — if not all — of the products can’t meet the new efficiency standards. LED bulbs, however, can easily meet the standard with existing technology. End of an era: The Energy Department has begun enforcing the new rules, giving retailers until this month to transition. “This is the end of the road for most incandescent bulbs,” said Andrew deLaski, executive director of the Appliance Standards Awareness Project, a group that supports energy efficiency standards. With the rules now quietly going into force, Republicans seem to have shifted their focus toward other efficiency measures, including for gas stoves as well as dishwashers and refrigerators. They’ll have plenty of targets as the Biden administration works through a backlog of efficiency measures as part of its plan to cut planet-warming emissions and transition off fossil fuels.
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