I disagree totally. Furthermore an incandescent lamp adds heat at
ceiling level usually where it is useless for warming a room.
Mostly radiant, so with reflectors, or high efficiency white
reflective surfaces, a lot of it can be reflected down. What little goes
upwards might help (minimally) to reduce heating requirements for people in
rooms above.
LED lamps are currently hugely expensive and the light they create is
even wierder than CFLs. No, CFLs do fine at this.
That's true, about LED light, but that's exactly what will make it
attractive to many. What's also vital is that good colour rendering can be
had with RGB that is much easier to filter out, which should please the
astronomers, as well as those who need more efficient whitelight sources.
CFL's on the other hand, have a light quality that is far harder to control
than LED's and LED's in the end will be more appealing, easy to dim,
therfore easy to get different colours immediately on demand in a way that
no previous tech has allowed. They will become enormously popular.
I happen to disagree with simply 'banning incandescent bulbs' but
that's more from a libertarian perspective than anything else.
Banning incandescents totally would also have the effect of banning
modern high efficiency halogens too, some of which currently can be
twice as efficient as standard tungsten incandescents and both Philips
and GE have plans to improve this figure further still.
Agreed, I think that it is a technology that will always find uses, and
banning it before it's reached the best possible development would be daft.
Anyway, as most lamps have special characteristics that are suited to
certain tasks, industrial process use won't be banned, I think. It's the
general long-term human environmental lighting that really needs to be
thought through because the bulk consumption is there.
The main thing is that govt reactions with no engineering thought behind
them need to be stopped, and I hope that some of the smarter politicos read
Usenet threads like this one. They could save SO much time, as they're up
to date, filled with various opinions and facts, and if govt wants to find
people who discuss this stuff they should go where they can find it
naturally occuring, instead of listening to pundits with private agendas
whispering in their ears, or just going for a big media news-story to steer
their course by.