Nu-Lab’s campaign against ‘traditional’ light bulbs gathers pace.

Son of staring eyed Left Winger Anthony Wedgwood Benn, Hilary, Nu-Lab’s Environment Secretary, informed their conference he wanted to see sales of 150-watt bulbs banned from next January.

But of course it is not just 150 watt bulbs - He wants to take the same ‘defeat in detail’ route Nu-Lab so successfully applied with HIPs, that minimises resistance to the point where it can be ignored.

He stated "our aim is for traditional 150-watt light bulbs to be phased out by January next year, 100-watt bulbs the year after, 40-watt bulbs the year after that and all high-energy light bulbs by 2011."

This might be worthwhile if it had a reasonable chance of ‘doing what it says on the tin’, as they say.

Mr Benn claims that the ban could save five million tonnes of CO2 a year. Typically he appears to fail to take several factors into account:

Firstly he appears to fail to take into account that the heat generated by incandescent bulbs, that he is counting as wasted, actually contributes to heating the premises the bulbs are used in - and this reduction in heat will actually largely have to be made up by additional heating costs and result in increased CO2 emissions required in heating that will offset the supposed saving to be gained in introducing the bulbs.

So a lot of expense in changing all the bulbs for far less gain than touted. Then there are the disparities in production costs… All this will be coming out of the consumers pockets.

Then there is the small matter of the mercury that goes into making the ‘low energy’ bulbs. Nu-Labs Euro MPs were so concerned about the threat of mercury to the environment that they banned mercury barometers, but they seem happy turn a blind eye to the threat of a metric ton of Mercury being dumped in the UK each year that these bulbs pose.