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When I see these types of threads posted, I usually take the liberty of posting this analysis I did...I hope it doesn't rise to "spam level" behavior...

I don't have an issue with the lights themselves. If people want to use them, that is their business if they want to pay the money and a manufacturer thinks they can make money by producing them. What I take issue with is government bureaucrats taking my money via confiscatory taxes, TELLING me how to spend the money they leave me, then passing legislation to DRIVE up the cost of energy so we are FORCED to spend more money to drive our cars, heat our homes and turn on our lights, whether they be incandescent or CFL. These bastards think they are doing us a big favor because they think they know best, and are trying to twist our arms to accept their utopian crap. They think if energy costs go up high enough, their plans to harness unicorn flatulence or whatever will become economically viable.

Well I don't care to take part in their damned experiments. If my town wants to purchase LED based traffic and street lights because it saves the town money and is a guaranteed return on investment, then power to them. If people want these CFL lights in the marketplace as an alternative to make their homes more energy efficient, then I think is is fine and would never say boo to anyone so inclined. Actually, my issue is not even residential lighting. Making citizens purchase stuff we don't want and don't need is NOT going to solve any kind of energy shortage. It is the equivalent of selling carbon credits or putting a magnetic sticker on the back of a car. It is Jimmy Carter wearing sweaters and telling us to turn our thermostats down.

So to make my point that forcing all of us to use these things, have to pay MORE money to buy them (even though most of us have found they don't last nearly as long as the government says they do) Here an the original unaltered graph from Livermore Labs/DOE which I think is a very, very good graphical representation (reflecting the situation in 2009):

As shown below, I cut out a part of that graph and marked it up. Of the four major sectors, residential is the second smallest using just 4.65% of generated electrical power as shown by the graph. Government statistics say lighting consumes 12% of 4.65% of electricity flowing into a house. In the inset (enlarged) part shows the 4.65% pipeline with the red stripe on it showing the lighting share, and the green stripe showing what it would be if we assume 10% efficiency compared to CFL for incandescent bulbs. (The orange pipe leading into the box signifies the RESIDENTAL SECTOR of the energy grid and is representative of energy generated from all sources)

I didn't get this image from some anti-enviroweenie website. I made it myself after analyzing the data on the graph and government data such as estimates of how much lighting uses. And it illustrates the point I make, backed up with the government's own data, that forcing us to do this via statist legislation is basically ANOTHER camel nose in the figurative tent...BECAUSE THEY CAN.

If the market really wanted these lightbulbs, they would have made it on their own without government legislation. But, in my opinion, buying into this without a fight just exacerbates this statist mess we are in covering everything from legislation against transfats and salt in the diet to the amount of water we can flush down our toilet. Liberals think this is great because it is their pet thing that they have bought hook, line and sinker, running around screaming that we are running out of energy. Surrendering to this just invites the government to intrude into EVERY facet of our life.

I don't disparage people for choosing CFL's as a stand to take. I believe I have the data (shown graphically here) to indicate that using CFL's in houses isn't going to save us from anything. It is just a piece of do-gooder legislation that only does just that...makes guilty people feel good. I readily admit that one can make an argument for commercial/industrial building codes and so on, and I might buy into it and agree, the same as I agree with towns purchasing led-based traffic lights. However, building codes are so top heavy with bureaucracy now that I would fight against mandating these in commercial use on those grounds alone.

By my home is my home. And we have gone far too long allowing the government to dictate what we can and cannot do on our own quarter acre of land, small as it is. I am sick to death of it.

The Minard/Sankey diagram created by Lawrence Livermore highlights very clearly how all the other things are minor compared to two huge (uh, I mean hugh) killers:

Inefficiency of petroleum use in transportation
Inefficiency of electrical power generation

But it's easy to fall for the fallacy that the biggest problems are where we can make the biggest savings. If we don't want to throw out SUVs, and if we are at the engineering/capital-cost limit on power-plant efficiencies, then we really need to focus on those things we can affect (mainly the right side of the chart--the energy available for use). And it's really not an insignificant portion of that.

While I agree with you in general, there's the problem of The Tragedy of The Commons, not fully addressed by the Free Market. Or, perhaps, it's best stated as a problem of consumption exceeding production, or of limited supply. The Free Market doesn't account for all of the costs that usage of electricity imposes. There are third-party costs, so claiming that we should be able to buy whatever we want, spend our money however we want, is not as valud as it would be if we were buying pieces of art.

Secondly, because of inefficiency, every unit of energy saved represents a correspondingly large input of fossil fuel. (Note the somewhat interchangeable nature of the inputs...petroleum used to be a very large input to energy generation, but now is a fraction of a percent. That petroleum now goes to transportation.

Frankly, the conservative view would be to account for all of the third-party costs. It's the populist view to say that a person should be able to just buy whatever he wants and not account for other costs.

I'm not saying we should ban the bulbs. (As an aside, it's important to remember that they didn't ban them...they just instituted a performance standard.) I'm suggesting that in a larger picture, there are still some issues that are not being addressed either way.