Posted on 06/15/2011 8:30:03 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Texans like to think we're forward-looking folks, eager to embrace the newer and better. Sometimes, however, our independent streak gets in the way.
House Bill 2510, a misguided effort based on a flawed premise, is one of those instances. Gov. Rick Perry should veto it. The bill, which the House and Senate approved this year, purports to thumb Texas' nose at those evildoers in Washington by harrumphing about the 10th Amendment and how it guarantees to the states "certain powers."
The bill claims as one of those powers the sacred right to use whatever kind of light bulbs Texans choose to use. At issue in HB 2510 is the 2007 federal law — approved with bipartisan support and signed by President George W. Bush — setting minimum energy efficiency standards for screw-based light bulbs. The law takes effect next year and offers the promise of significant savings in energy consumption with no overly detrimental impact on quality of life (or quality of light, for that matter).
Nevertheless, the Texas Legislature saw fit to weigh in on this. The bill now awaiting gubernatorial action says incandescent light bulbs — including the old-fashioned, less-efficient kind many of us are used to — that are made in Texas with Texas components and have not left the state's borders would be exempt when the federal light-bulb law kicks in next year.
There are a variety of problems with the bill, perhaps starting with legitimate legal questions concerning whether a state can use this kind of legislation as a subterfuge around federal law. The Washington-based Natural Resources Defense Council, which is calling attention to the folly of this law, notes a Reagan-era federal law that protects manufacturers against a patchwork of state regulations by setting national energy efficiency standards...
(Excerpt) Read more at statesman.com ...
Why the heck did George Bush ever sign it in the first place?
Embracing newer and better does not require a law declaring what newer and better is.
Why did he sign half the crap he signed as president? R-I-N-O
It's a fun read.
The truth hurts, but there’s more to the Bush-Perry friction than that. One longtime observer of Lone Star politics described the Bushes’ disdain of Perry as “visceral,” and it is not too terribly hard to see why. The guy that NPR executives and the New York Times and your average Subaru-driving Whole Foods shopper were afraid George W. Bush was? Rick Perry is that guy. George W. Bush was Midland by way of Kennebunkport. Rick Perry’s people are cotton farmers from Paint Creek, a West Texas town so tiny and remote that my Texan traveling-salesman father looked at me skeptically and suggested I had the name wrong when I asked him whether he knew where it was. (Governor Perry confesses that one of the politiciany things he’s done in office is insisting that the Texas highway atlas include Paint Creek, making him the hometown boy who literally put the town on the map.) Bush is a Yalie, Perry is an Aggie. Bush served in the Texas Air National Guard, and Perry was a captain in the U.S. Air Force, flying C-130s in the Middle East. Bush has a gentleman’s ranch, Perry has the red meat. The irony is that Perry, a tea-party favorite, personifies the hawkish new fiscal conservatism that has allowed the GOP to find its way out from under George W. Bush’s shadow, but he himself remains in the shade of that politically poisonous penumbra. NRO: Rick Perry's Tenth Commandment
Who is to say what constitutes an overly detrimental impact on quality of life or light?
It seems that this decision could best be made by the individual consumer. If CFLs are so wonderful, they will drive the incandescents out of the market. This has happened over and over again in the free market. Automobiles completely displaced horse and buggy, for instance. Typewriters disappeared from the marketplace without any government intervention.
People are able to decide what is best for them, if they are allowed.
Unconstitutional on it's face.
/johnny
People miss the point with this whole discussion. Essentially there is no viable replacement for the incandescent bulb. The CFL bulbs being forced upon us are a serious environmental hazard. This has been stated by the EPA. They are more of a concern than the coal plants the EPA is shutting down.
The problem is that GE produces the new bulbs in China, at great profit, and Obama wants to shut down coal to support GE’s Green companies. It is all politics.
Once the incandescent bulbs are gone Congress will probably require a large deposit on the new bulbs to assure they are disposed of properly. I wonder if GE will handle disposal also.
Typical lying leftist tactic - start with a false assertion, with no supporting evidence for your claims, and wilfully ignore the counter evidence, and then work off of your flawed assertion to build the faulty case for your Socialist utopian micromanagement of peoples' lives.
We've been through this before - just look at the low-flow toilet debacle for one example (millions of plumbers thank you for the pipe-unclogging business opportunities you've given them, but toilet owners are less satisfied). Or look at the folly of mandating the mixture of ethanol or MTBE into gasoline (and the subsequent starvation of low-income people around the world and/or the water pollution it caused). And so on...
And if Boeing union workers were so wonderful and helping the company compete in the global market, Obama wouldn't have to block Boeing from opening a plant in South Carolina, a right to work state.
But there it is.
Control.
Austin American Snakeskin up to the same old.
In a nutshell.. That is one of the big problems of government. People who cannot say they made a mistake and I am sorry. Look at Romney. I would have a bit more respect for he just said I thought it would work..it hasn’t and that’s why, if elected, I will stop Obamacare the first day in office.
A surge in coal exports from the port of Baltimore has turned the Chesapeake Bay into a maritime parking lot.
Demand from China, India and other countries for high-priced metallurgic coal to fuel steel production has grown so strong that ships are backed up south of the bridge waiting to gain a berth at one of Baltimore's two coal terminals.
To Helen Delich Bentley, the former congresswoman and federal maritime commissioner for whom the port of Baltimore is named, the vessels are reminiscent of the city's shipping heyday in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
"It's kind of like the old days when we had ships waiting in the bay for their turn at the pier," said Bentley, now a maritime industry consultant. [end excerpt]
"Nevertheless, the Texas Legislature saw fit to weigh in on this. The bill now awaiting gubernatorial action says incandescent light bulbs — including the old-fashioned, less-efficient kind many of us are used to — that are made in Texas with Texas components and have not left the state's borders would be exempt when the federal light-bulb law kicks in next year."
I really kind of like this law.
“whether a state can use this kind of legislation as a subterfuge around federal law.”
These pointy-headed editors need to read the constitution.
The important question is when will the states insist that the Federales stop misusing the interstate commerce clause and general welfare clause to unconstitutionally expand federal government power.
Screw D.C. Return power to the states, where it belongs.
I anticipate that Gov. GoodHair will sign the bill, since he is considering running for president. Were he not a potential candidate and not running for another office, I would have my doubts.
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