The only carrot offered by the pathetic campaign to persuade us to adopt the bulbs of our own volition (before being compelled by law to do so) was the promise of (marginal) reductions in our electricity bills which would, eventually, repay our investment. No gentle persuasion, no helpful advice on how to find bulbs to suit your existing lighting arrangements, or meet the particular needs for illumination for older eyes or those craft hobbies which require the making of fine distinctions between colours.
I have only recently noticed that the energy saving light bulb which is currently installed in the bedside lamp has an orange afterglow which lasts for a very noticeable period of time after the thing is switched off. No doubt it is not using any energy during this time. These bulbs do not, however, last much longer than the old ones.
People do nothing but grumble about how they don’t fit under their lampshades, or take forever to warm up, or provide insufficient light (which is dirty & yellow) when they do. Did anybody do proper research on the problems older eyes would have before these laws were passed? The amount & range of printed material that I can read without carrying it over to hold directly under the bulb is distinctly limited now, & I can just forget about doing embroidery after dark.A helpful website offers some advice about how to test which bulbs will suit your purpose, but why on earth should we have to do this.
But Green business is hard to sustain - The Ecologist magazine has been sold to Resurgence for the princely sum of £1. Until I read that, I had forgotten that the first edition of this magazine – containing a much-talked about Blueprint For Survival – was published at about the same time as the Club of Rome’s Limits To Growth. It makes interesting reading now.
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