(gentle music)
- You might have noticed
that light bulbs have gotten more complicated.
Light bulb technology has exploded in the past few years.
There are incandescents, fluorescents, LEDs,
it's a lot.
New bulbs are more energy-efficient
than they ever were before,
and they're even getting smarter.
But now, all of a sudden, some of the people
who helped drive that innovation see trouble ahead.
- [Noah] America's setting itself up, believe it or not,
to become the dumping ground of the world
for all these inefficient incandescents.
- The story starts here,
with the classic incandescent light bulb.
Thomas Edison got a patent for it in the U.S. back in 1880,
and the fundamentals haven't changed much since.
The bulb works by passing an electric current
through a thin filament, which heats it up.
Once the material gets hot enough, it starts to glow.
It's a product that revolutionized our homes,
but there's a problem.
Incandescent bulbs waste 90% of their energy producing heat,
and that makes them pretty inefficient.
They cost more on our electricity bills,
and we have to burn more fossil fuels to power them.
That got people worrying during the 1973 oil crisis,
when oil got really expensive,
and it has people worried now
about how these inefficient lights
contribute to climate change,
which is why, about a decade ago,
the race for alternatives really heated up.
- Maybe we can go back to 2007.
- That's Noah Horowitz.
He works on energy efficiency
at the Natural Resources Defense Counsel,
and in 2007, he started talking with industry
about new options for light bulbs.
- And Philips Lighting took the leadership role
and said, "Hey, we think there is
"a better mouse trap out there.
"We think we should be moving to more efficient lighting."
Noah helped draft a bill requiring common household bulbs
to use 27% less energy by 2014,
and succeed to 70% less by 2020.
President George W. Bush signed it into law,
and pretty much overnight, manufacturers had to get serious
about new lighting technologies.
- And once that transition occurs in 2020,
we're gonna save billions of dollars per year
on our energy bills,
and prevent the emissions of millions of tons of CO2,
so the shift to more efficient lighting
means we don't need as many power plants,
we've got less pollution,
and people save a lot of money.
- So this is where all those new light bulb options come in.
First up, the compact fluorescent, or CFL.
They've been in development since the 1970s.
A CFL is basically a tube filled with gas,
with an electrical current running through it.
When I turn the lamp on,
electrons in the current bump into mercury atoms.
The collision excites those atoms,
creating ultraviolet radiation.
When that gets absorbed by the white phosphor coating
on the inside of the tube,
it fluoresces, or lights up.
But, not everyone's a fan of that color.
See the difference between a CFL and an incandescent?
Those are actually differences
in the wavelengths of light that each produce.
What you're seeing is a spectrum of light
that a typical incandescent puts out.
You get pretty much a full rainbow of color.
Here's a more accurate graph.
What's notable is that it skews toward
the warmer wavelengths,
so the light typically appears warmer in color.
It also wastes a ton of energy
here in the infrared, which we can't see.
A typical CFL looks way different.
It puts out most of its light in much narrower bands,
and the strongest peaks are at blue, green and red.
It's a much less complete spectrum,
and because of that, it doesn't render color very well.
Which, again, has its critics.
- The light's no good, I always look orange.
(audience laughs)
- But we'll get back to him a little later.
CFLs do represent progress.
A 60 watt incandescent light bulb
will give you up to 14 lumens per watt of power,
a lumen being a measure of brightness.
An equivalent CFL will get you way more,
between 55 and 70 lumens per watt.
But, the mercury inside is toxic waste,
and they aren't as efficient
as the next technology to hit the scene.
- [Noah] The LED light bulbs are amazing products.
They look and behave exactly like
the old incandescents.
- LED bulbs arrived on the market in the early 2000's,
and technologically, they're pretty much
the best of all worlds.
They can put out up to 100 lumens per watt.
An LED is a light-emitting diode,
a device with two layers,
one that's negatively charged,
and another that's positively charged.
As an electrical current moves electrons
from one side to another,
they release energy in the form of light.
The LED spectrum has a nice, even mix of colors,
it can get the closest to resembling this, actual daylight.
So the LEDs are the clear winner,
and have actually helped propel
a massive shift in home energy usage.
In 2010, 68% of light bulbs
installed in U.S. homes were incandescent.
By 2016, that dropped to just 6%.
Meanwhile, CFLs and LEDs really took off.
That's a big reason why residential energy use
has actually fallen since 2010,
after rising for years.
In short, the law worked.
- [Noah] All these bulbs are in the market now,
and we're supposed to transition to those in 2020,
and no longer have the incandescents.
- That was the plan.
Instead, this happened.
- So I signed something a couple of days ago
that gives you the right to continue to use
the incandescent light.
(crowd cheers)
- To be clear, there was never going to be
a ban on incandescent bulbs.
What President Trump did was roll back
those 2007 efficiency standards that Noah helped to write.
That 2020 deadline would have phased out
most incandescents that couldn't evolve, and now?
- It's very disappointing to see this sudden shift.
The industry worked behind these standards,
they've developed LEDs, they had 12 years to get ready,
and now they're saying,
"Nope, let's let the market take care of it."
And they've worked side-by-side
with the Trump administration
to try and roll back these standards.
That's really bad behavior.
- The Natural Resources Defense Council
and more than a dozen states
are suing to reinstate the standards.
The Department of Energy argues
the rollback will give consumers more options,
including sticking with cheaper incandescent bulbs.
It's true that more efficient light bulbs
still tend to be more expensive,
and that's a bigger problem for low-income communities
according to one study by Tony Reames,
a researcher at the University of Michigan.
- And so we went out and did store surveys,
kinda like people do with the food justice studies,
where they look at the price of fresh fruit,
or access to fresh fruit in stores
in different income level areas.
- What they found were big disparities.
Poor neighborhoods had about half as much access
to new, efficient bulbs
as more affluent communities did.
But also, we found in stores in poor areas
that did have the LED bulbs,
they were like twice the price
that they were in the suburbs.
- But here's the thing,
even though incandescents are cheaper,
they waste energy and have to be replaced more often,
so in the long run, they hike up people's energy bills.
Today, one in three Americans
struggle to pay their energy bills,
and the problem is even worse
in many communities of color.
So the people who need the new bulbs the most
are the ones stuck with the old ones.
- And so if you're already on a strapped budget,
then you're probably gonna get the cheapest bulb,
which is then the least efficient bulb,
and not the ideal bulb to reduce your energy consumption,
which is kinda like a perpetuating cycle
of having high energy costs.
- Still, with or without the regulatory roll backs,
more efficient bulbs will stay on the market,
and they'll get cheaper as more people adopt them.
This isn't the end of innovation in lighting,
it just isn't the end of old school incandescents either,
which probably would have been a surprise
to even Edison himself.
According to his great-grandson,
developing the incandescent
was only supposed to be a pit stop.
- [Man] You know, he had over 20 patents
just on the light bulb,
and that wasn't just because he was finished with it
once it was done, but it was because
he was constantly trying to improve.
So, I think he'd be scratching his head,
wondering what the DOE is thinking at this point.
- Hey everyone, thanks for watching.
And if you're curious what happens
to your electronic waste when you recycle them,
check out this video over here.