That Charlotte Gore needs taking down a peg, you know. Far too big for her boots nowadays. Particularly now she’s Officially the Number One Lib Dem blogger. She’s barely even a Lib Dem, you know. Except by choice.

No question, something needs to be done about this.

And by an astonishing coincidence – her first post-hiatus post contains this beauty of a misconstructed argument:

The reason all florescent lighting is inferior to incandescent lighting is simple: Normal bulbs emit the full spectrum of visible light, whilst Compact Florescents don’t. You get the full spectrum from the Sun, and you get partial spectrums from things like televisions – that eerie glow when a television is left on whilst the lights are turned out.

[…]

How we look is very much dictated by the light that illuminates us. The partial spectrum light from Compact Fluorescents makes skin look very different. I can’t explain it. It just feels eerie. Whenever I’m in space lit only by Florescent lighting I feel like I’m in a dystopian horror, as if we’ve crossed some invisible line in creating artificial environments for ourselves.

Hmmmm.

Hmmmm, I say.

A dystopian horror? Really?

Well, okay. That’s fair enough, I suppose. It’s an opinion. Different people like different things, you know. For example, I happen to like haggis, which loads of people don’t like – sometimes they won’t even try it. You wouldn’t believe the amount of anti-haggis prejudice there is out there; all the more ridiculous when you consider the popularity of black pudding. You say to some people ‘would you like some haggis?’ and they say ‘nah, man, I don’t eat no haggis. Haggis is made of pigs’ insides and stuff’. You can try countering that with ‘but don’t you eat black pudding?’ and they’ll be all like ‘yeah, man, I eat black pudding, but I ain’t eatin’ no haggis!’ and then they’ll tell you they’re thinking of laying off the black pudding from now on.

It’s terrible. The poor, misunderstood haggis.

But, I digress.

My inner pedant is screaming at me, you see – screaming, in its tiny, tiny voice – asking me to point out that Charlotte’s ‘normal’ bulbs also produce a markedly different spectrum to the Sun. Completely different. If you don’t believe me, try turning off the automatic white balance on your digital camera1. Go take a picture outside, and then come back in and take a picture inside.

How’d those pictures compare?

If you think about it, it sort of makes sense that the light from the sun would be different to the light from a bulb, since the sun is several million times hotter than a bulb, and it isn’t made of tungsten. Apart from that, yeah, sure, they’re identical.

But then, if incandescent bulbs don’t provide natural light any more comparable to the sun than fluorescent bulbs, why is Charlotte so upset about the fluorescent ones? It shouldn’t make any difference, should it? Switching from one imperfect artificial light source to another ought to be much like switching between hard and soft water, no?

In the time-honoured favourite answer of the Liberal Democrats: No. And, yes.

To use an analogy from a field I’m ever-so-slightly more knowledgeable about, this is the same argument many people use when they express a preference for analogue recordings over digital ones. Regardless of the technical merits of each recording medium, there’s just something about analogue recorded sounds which excites many listeners’ cochleae in a way that digitally recorded sounds don’t. Ask a sound technician and they’ll tell you it’s all about second harmonic distortion2 – but we all know that really it’s more than just that – there’s just something special about that analogue sound.

And yet to our collective chagrin, for some godforsaken reason the latest generation of music lovers don’t just seem prefer the digital sound – they prefer compressed MP3s to vinyl or CD.

Don’t they understand? The Shame! The horror!

In the same way, most people don’t have too much problem with fluorescent lighting. They live with it at work, after all, and at school, and in shops, and in many cases in the kitchen. Most people have generally been quite willing to replace their home lightbulbs with energy saving fluorescent ones, too. The light they emit is a little different, but you get used to it – and, well, they do use a lot less energy. Many houses have rooms with multiple bulbs in them, sometimes as many as six 100W bulbs in a single room – replacing all six with 20W energy-savers would save 480W-h. That’s Four Hundred and Eighty Watts Every Hour They’re Switched On, which is a hell of a lot more than those other paltry recommended energy saving activities like turning the TV off at the plug, or boiling less water in the kettle. So, there’s a sound economic case for buying energy saving bulbs to reduce your fuel bill, and in turns this means that many people are willing to pay a little more for the bulbs themselves at the till.

But Charlotte isn’t. She likes filaments. Her reasons for liking incandescent bulbs are manifold and complicated. Clearly I could not presume to understand them all, but I’d hazard a guess that it’s to do with what she’s used to, what she feels comfortable with, where and how she was brought up. That particular hue is part of what makes up the ever-elusive feeling of being at home for Charlotte.

It’s her analogue.

On the other hand, thanks to connections with the EU and the environmental lobby, the light of a fluorescent bulb – however innocently installed it may be – brings to Charlotte’s mind a sense of foreboding and distrust. Those bulbs are representative of everything that’s wrong with society, in microcosm.

No wonder she doesn’t like them. No wonder she’d pay extra money to avoid using them.

So, she’s right that this isn’t a ‘market failure’. Those who wish to pay more money on their electricity bill and less money upfront can buy the ‘cheaper’ incandescent bulbs. What it really is is a market irrationality (for want of a better word). People are willing to pay extra for an inferior product for no reason other than the sentimental value they attach to its inferior nature3. They’re not acting like rational economic operators, but they’re at least paying extra for their irrationality.

And so clearly, I’m not saying that we should be banning ‘standard’ bulbs. Charlotte’s absolutely right to get irritated at those who seek to distort our buying decisions in an underhanded manner without ever giving a full explanation as to why they believe it’s necessary to do so. There may be a valid argument that the possible environmental impact of normal light bulbs is an externality which needs to be compensated for, but if that’s the case, the Energy Saving Trust should make that argument, instead of claiming the light from fluorescent bulbs is exactly the same as the light from tungsten bulbs.

Buyers informed of the relative merits of each type of bulb should be allowed make their own decisions on how much they’re willing to pay (upfront and in the long run) without coercion. Free market can show us which type of bulb is more popular. In my house, we buy the fluorescents to try and get the energy bills down, but others ought to be free to make their own decisions.

Does a difference of opinion on matters of quality mean that we should ban the thing we don’t like? No. Not at all.

But that doesn’t make it right to spread disinformation and FUD by claiming that fluorescent bulbs are empirically inferior to incandescent ones, just because you prefer the light from one to the light from the other.

So come down off that there high horse this instant, Charlotte, and start acting more like the top-class blogger we all know you are.

  1. Look in the manual if you don’t know how, it’s 90% certain that there’ll be an option somewhere. [↩]
  2. Well, actually most of them will stare at you blankly for a few dumbstruck moments before assuring you that it’s got warmth, taking another toke and telling you all about their valve amp, but that’s a different story. [↩]
  3. Put it this way – if you were buying a bulb for a situation where it was to be powered by batteries – say, in a torch, would you prefer it to produce a ‘warmer’ light, or use fewer batteries? [↩]