This law pisses me off as much as anything. It is emblematic of how the govt wants to control every aspect of how we live, and how the govt is not willing to allow the free market to operate normally, and allow consumers to select the bulb of THEIR CHOICE.
But being relatively open-minded, even in this age of the obamanation, I decided to buy a couple of the new squiggly bulbs and put them in the fixture in my kitchen for a test run.
Guess what? They suck! they are clearly inferior to what we are accustomed to.
And to answer your question of how this law was passed, it is my understanding that the bill was signed into law by george bush, the very same potus who gave us the first bailout- who went against free market prinicples to save the free market.
What a bunch of small-minded jerks we have had in DC.
It was run through as one of the first orders of business of the then-new Democrat Congress of 2007 - part of an energy bill.
Bush signed it for various reasons, but the Democrat Congress is to blame.
If the idiots would just let us build clean, energy efficient Nuclear Power plants and let us build safe storage facilities for the spent fuel, then we could keep the good light bulbs.