I absolutely love this one.
Legislators: Make Your Incandescent Bulbs Here
S.C. legislators have come up with a bright idea: make the Palmetto State a rebel and a refuge for incandescent light makers.
A bill filed last week by Republican state Reps. Bill Sandifer and Dwight Loftis encourages incandescent light bulb manufacturing in South Carolina. It says light bulb parts can be brought into the state, assembled and sold here with a Made in South Carolina label.
Federal law phases out incandescent light manufacturing beginning in 2012 with 100-watt bulbs. In 2014, manufacturers will stop making 75-, 60- and 40-watt bulbs. The change is part of the federal Energy Independence and Security Act that then-President George Bush signed in 2007.
What a wonderful twist on the morons who declare themselves “Sanctuary Cities” for illegal aliens. And why not when we have governors and Presidents that refuse to defend some laws in court.
And by the way, I hope the righteous right and looney left all note who signed this piece of Chavez-like, central management legislation. This light bulb mandate will no doubt do for illumination and power saving what the National Energy Policy Act Of 1992 did for toilets and water saving.
In case you don’t know about water saving Federal Government style, allow me to rant on. EPACT mandated that in less than two years, no new toilet could use more than 1.6 gallons per flush – down from 3.5 gallons per flush which was the standard here since about 1857. Now if you were unfortunate enough to need a new toilet after 1994, you learned these things first hand:
· Toilets no longer flushed number two; a toilet plunger became a necessary bathroom accessory.
· Vigorous plunging often blows out the wax seal between your toilet and the soil pipe requiring removing and replacing the seal or living with smelly stuff on the floor after each flush.
· The toilet no longer cleaned itself after number two.
· Even when clearing a clog was not necessary, the toilet still had to be flushed 3 or more times to clear itself completely, thus increasing water usage.
These conditions remain to this day in all places across the nation that have not yet replaced toilets that were manufactured in the first 10 years. But wait, the tale is not yet finished.
Many of us found that low flush toilets had a second major problem – there was not sufficient water flow to clear the paper and number two from our pipe that ran to the sewer in the street which created clogs where none had been before.
In a nice piece of schadenfreude, you may know that San Francisco raced to replace all city owned toilets when the law was passed and paid private owners to do the same – nobody gets incentives as backward as do-gooders. But what happens in small pipes can happen in big ones and San Francisco has a sewer problem:
· Low flow toilets don’t move enough water to clear sludge from big sewer pipes either so now there is a big build up and a rotten-egg stench in some places around the city, especially during the dry summer months.
· The city has already spent $100 million over the past five years to upgrade its sewer system and sewage plants, in part to combat the odor problem.
· Now officials are stocking up on a $14 million, three-year supply of highly concentrated sodium hypochlorite – better known as bleach – to act as an odor eater and to disinfect the city's treated water before it's dumped into the bay.
· That translates into 8.5 million pounds of bleach either being poured down city drains or into the drinking water supply every year. There are other chemicals than bleach for this but those are more expensive.
It couldn’t happen to nicer political activists.
But don’t get me wrong, conservation is a good thing and governments have an important role to play in our ever bigger and more complex nation. San Francisco has been saving 20 million gallons of water per year. We just need to remember the basics:
1. Government cannot do anything well – less is more; recommend more than mandate.
2. Lawyers should never be allowed to design anything – certainly not toilets or light bulbs. I further recommend that they never be allowed to write anything either.
3. Implementation should always be pushed down to the lowest level of government possible.
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