Last Call For Incandescent With Rage

The ban on the sale and manufacture of most incandescent light bulbs was signed into law in 2007, before ZVTS here was even more than a vague idea in my head after penning my political thoughts over at Booman Tribune all those years ago.  The energy industry (and Donald Trump) slowed the implementation of the ban for sixteen years, and finally the Biden administration put the rule into effect this week.

 

Under new energy efficiency rules that took effect Tuesday, shoppers in the United States will no longer be able to purchase most incandescent bulbs, marking the demise of a technology patented by Thomas Edison in the late 1800s.

Taking their place are LED lights, which — love them or hate them — have already transformed America’s energy landscape.

They’ve driven down electricity demand in American homes, saving people money. And by using less power, LEDs have also helped lower the nation’s emissions of greenhouse gases, which warm the planet and are a major cause of climate change. (LED stands for light emitting diodes.)

The new efficiency standard announced by the Biden administration requires light bulbs to meet a minimum standard of producing 45 lumens per watt. (A lumen is a measurement of brightness, and incandescents typically produce far less than that per watt.) An accompanying rule change applies the new standards to a wider universe of light bulbs.

Neither rule is an explicit ban on incandescents. And a few specialized kinds of incandescent bulbs — like those that go inside ovens, and bug lights — are exempt. But most if not all other incandescents will struggle to meet the new efficiency standards, and the same goes for a more recent generation of halogen lights.

“Energy-efficient lighting is the big energy story that nobody is talking about,” said Lucas Davis, an energy economist at the Haas School of Business, part of the University of California, Berkeley. “Going from an incandescent to an LED is like replacing a car that gets 25 miles per gallon with another one that gets 130 m.p.g.,” he said.

With the new rules in place, the Department of Energy expects Americans to collectively save nearly $3 billion a year on their utility bills. In the past, a knock on LEDs was that they were more expensive to buy, but prices for LED bulbs have fallen rapidly to near parity with incandescents.

The cost savings could come as a boost particularly to lower-income households, which spend a larger proportion of their income on utilities. Research has shown that retailers in poorer neighborhoods had also been among the slowest to phase out energy-guzzling bulbs.

Over the next three decades, the rules will also cut carbon dioxide emissions by 222 million metric tons the Energy Department said, which it compared to the emissions from 28 million homes in one year.

LEDs have other advantages. Consumers can expect less running to the store for new bulbs or teetering on foot ladders to replace them: LED light bulbs last 25 to 50 times longer than their incandescent counterparts.

The new regulations may go over with little fanfare. Over the past year, most retailers have taken inefficient bulbs off their shelves in anticipation of the rule, said Andrew deLaski, executive director of the Appliance Standards Awareness Project, which advocates for appliance efficiency rules.

“I don’t think most people even noticed,” he said.

 

I don't think I've bought an incandescent bulb in ten years or so, and this is Kentucky.  FOX News is already very angry:

 

 

By the end of the week this will be Another GOP Talking Point, and all the 2024 GOP candidates, starting with Trump, will pledge to repeal enforcement of this rule as soon as they take office.

 

The dim bulbs that they all are.

The Red, White, And Blue

Democrats appear to be serious about building on 2020 and 2022's gains among white non-college men in states like Georgia and Pennsylvania, gains that produced Senate wins for John Fetterman and Raphael Warnock, but were nowhere near what was needed for Tim Ryan in Ohio, Mandela Barnes in Wisconsin, or Cheri Beasley in NC.

 

A new Democratic-aligned initiative — dubbed the White Stripe Project — has a novel idea for winning white working class voters back to the Democratic Party: lean more into talk of equity and race.

Organizers say traditional methods in wooing white voters are ineffective, often relying on knee-jerk recommendations from an elite group of Democrats that pushes a race-neutral economic message. White Stripe organizers say this approach is misguided. They are calling for a more targeted and data-driven approach that they argue will be a better return on investment.

The project has plans to build a robust infrastructure to attract white voters who are open to Democratic messaging but who are less likely to vote. Once identified, organizers are betting with targeted messaging and pinpoint engagement that enough of these voters will show up for the party at the ballot box.

“White voters have disproportionate political power,” Erin Heaney, Executive Director of Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) told organizers during the Monday afternoon launch of the project. “We need a strategy for engaging and organizing them alongside communities of color.”

While President Joe Biden’s performance among white voters in 2020 improved over Hillary Clinton’s in 2016, Republicans still dominated this segment of the electorate. According to Pew Research Center, Biden carried 33 percent of this bloc, while then-president Donald Trump carried 65 percent. The caveat, according to Pew, was that the vote total Trump carried with non-college educated white people was “nearly identical” to what he pulled in 2016.

The White Stripe Project believes these voters are gettable.

“We need to have a public, non-defensive, data-driven conversation,” said Steve Phillips, a Democratic political analyst and author who serves as President of the Sandler Phillips Center which studies voting demographics. It’s one of the progressive groups that formed the project.

One group that may not buy the message is Democratic donors. Phillips says far too often Democrats and deep-pocketed donors settle on narratives about past elections that then inform future contests with little empirical data.

As an example, he said he has heard rumblings from those in the party that Stacey Abrams’s two-time loss in Georgia’s gubernatorial contest is proof that race and equity issues do not fare well in close elections.

Phillips doesn’t believe that race-centered issues should be abandoned in favor of a more race-neutral economic message. He is quick to point to another Democratic loss in Ohio last cycle.

“We also don’t talk about Tim Ryan in Ohio, who really did manifest this playbook about downplaying race and leaning into economic issues, and he lost badly,” Phillips said. “So what do we make of that?”

But race as a wedge issue can’t be ignored, say the White Stripe organizers. Instead, it should be tackled head on as Republicans embrace culture-war issues like critical race theory and battling the so-called “woke agenda.”

“We know that race is an incredibly powerful tool to keep people, white people, silent and separated from the multiracial coalitions we need to win,” said Heaney, who leads one of the principal groups spearheading the project.

 

The numbers are hard. In some states, white non-college voters make up a majority of the electorate, and two-thirds to three-quarters voted for Trump/Republicans in the last two elections. 

But a lot of non-college voters sat both elections out. I can understand the plan: targeting white non-college voters with "people are suffering because of these MAGA bastards, and your vote, you choosing to join this fight, can make a real difference." Even a percentage point or two in the right couple of states means the difference between Trump or Biden, and control of Congress.

Even if all it does is counteract the Christofascist recruitment and radicalization efforts to keep us at 2020/2022 numbers, the Dems will prevail.

It's not a panacea. but at this point we can't abandon any bloc to the GOP. We all have to fight, that's what a coalition is.

We'll see if it works.

 

Tales Of The Shattered Rainbow, Con't

Once again, if you legally define away your enemies as entities that have no existence and therefore no rights as human beings, it makes it far easier to destroy them with the power of the state. 

 

Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt on Tuesday directed state agencies to use narrow definitions of “female” and “male,” in the latest attack on transgender rights in a state that already has laws targeting bathroom use, health care and sports teams for transgender people.

Stitt signed the executive order flanked by women from the anti-trans group Independent Women’s Voice, including Riley Gaines, a former University of Kentucky swimmer known for criticizing an NCAA decision allowing transgender swimmer Lia Thomas to compete against her in a women’s championship race.

“Today we’re taking a stand against this out-of-control gender ideology that is eroding the very foundation of our society,” Stitt said. “We are going to be safeguarding the very essence of what it means to be a woman.

“Oklahomans are fed up with attempts to confuse the word ‘woman’ and turn it into some kind of ambiguous definition that harms real women.”

In addition to requiring state agencies and boards to define the words “female” and “male” to correspond with the person’s sex assigned at birth, the executive order also includes definitions for the words “man,” “boy,” “woman,” “girl,” “father” and “mother.” The order specifically defines a female as a “person whose biological reproductive system is designed to produce ova” and a male as a “person whose biological reproductive system is designed to fertilize the ova of a female.”

It also directs schools and other state agencies to use these definitions when collecting vital statistics.

Stitt’s order, dubbed “The Women’s Bill of Rights” by its supporters, is the latest Oklahoma policy to attack the rights of transgender people and is part of a growing trend in conservative states. Stitt signed a bill earlier this year that made it a crime for health care workers to provide gender-affirming medical care for minors, and has previously signed measures to prohibit transgender girls and women from playing on female sports teams and prevent transgender children from using school bathrooms that correspond to their gender identity.

“This executive order is neither about rights, nor is it about protecting women,” said Nicole McAfee, executive director of Freedom Oklahoma, which supports the rights of trans people. She called it a “thinly veiled attack” that codifies discrimination against transgender women.

 

There are no trans or non-binary folks in Oklahoma, you see. They don't exist. Everyone is male or female as defined by the state and must be defined as such by all state agencies.

 

It's hogwash, but if you define them away, they'll cease to exist. It's illegal to be trans according to the state.

One way or another, Oklahoma will get rid of trans and non-binary folks. And it's being done to "protect women". Just like banning abortion.

 

That's been the plan now for some time.