Stupidity, arrogance and a failure to think are everywhere in US government — for example, the Department of Energy and its light bulb standards

17 February 2025

MedCram brought the following . . .

. . . technology-versus-health issue to 'light' in a YouTube video:

Roger Seheult, MD of MedCram explains a new Department of Energy rule that will force LED bulbs to be manufactured to more restrictive standards, with potentially detrimental health consequences.

Some of the video credits Dr. Martin Moore-Ede with pertinent light bulb wavelength spectrum analysis.

See, for example:

Dr. Martin Moore-Ede, Why LED Light is Becoming Increasingly Bad for Your Health, lightdoctormartinmooreede.substack.com (14 January 2025)

At issue is . . .

. . . the DoE's narrow-minded focus on energy efficiency at the expense of public health.

In short, the DoE is imposing a rule that mandates that light bulbs produce about 125 lumens per watt by 2028:

Light bulb efficiency standards finalized today by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) will lower energy costs for households and businesses. The standards will require common light bulbs—nearly all now LEDs—to achieve the efficiency levels of today’s top-performing models.

The standards will require the most common light bulbs to produce about 125 lumens per watt, up from the current requirement of 45 lumens per watt.

Overlooked in this new bulb requirement are two important issues:

First, accumulating experience and research indicate that full solar spectrum sunlight — and especially its infrared components — are vital to human health.

And second, the mandated 'more efficient' bulbs eliminate all of those necessary wavelengths.

This deficit occurring for the simple reason that we do not know how to include the arguably beneficial wavelengths and achieve the arbitrary energy efficiency standards that the DoE is setting.

An observation about American government

DoE has gotten itself so wound up with telling people what to do, that they have forgotten that they are neither medically nor technologically expert in ramifications of the rule that they (so regulatorily arrogantly) are trying to impose.

American Government is, we can conclude, carrying its 'what's in dumbass fashion' ball. It is ignoring what more soundly analytical people would have investigated, before coming up such a society-mangling rule.

From this — and virtually everything else that US Government does — one might conclude that what is bad for health is promoted. And what is good, is either destroyed or buried.

Consider a similar example of regulatory dysfunction . . .

. . . that is familiar to car and truck enthusiasts.

US stupidity still places a 'chicken tax' on small, light and fuel efficient pickup trucks. This tax eliminated those once fuel-efficient contraptions from the American market.

And simultaneously, US CAFE fuel economy standards were set in a way that encouraged manufacturers to build larger and larger vehicles. That taking place, so as to escape CAFE's 'light duty' fuel economy mandates.

In consequence today, the United States has not achieved the advances in fuel economy that it easily could have done (in accord with its own policy goal) by making use of the human brain and analyzing how incentives (and disincentives) shape behavior.

In ironic addition to the overall economy screwup, these American pickups and full-sized SUVs are being spotlighted for killing more people in vehicle accidents than before, just because they are so high, big and heavy.

Talk about missing an easily foreseeable double whap to the self-claimed efficiency policy's skull.

The moral? — US Government is, arguably, We the People's most deadly enemy

You might want to ask yourselves, why this is so.

Being a 1776-1789er myself, I fail to see why Government should have any tasks that do not predominantly embrace boosting the population's liberties and wellbeing.

I also do not see the claimed — societally beneficial — purpose of American Government's employment of such a high proportion of clueless and Reality-defying people in its highest ranks.

It is almost as if American Government serves as a finishing — mugger-training — school for the worst people among us.

Even communist China appears to focus on both Government officials' competence and the public's wellbeing much more emphatically than we do.

Curious, no?

A person (meaning one who is not destined to be, or remain, a dumbass) might begin to think about why this is so.

Such an analytical endeavor might raise that individual to the quasi-Philosopher King level that some of America's Founders achieved.

A pity that those types, flawed though they debatably were, are long vanished from the American scene.

One could (tentatively or not) conclude that subsequent American culture bred them out of existence.

We have, arguably, become a stupidity-generation machine.

PeteFree.com

Stupidity, arrogance and a failure to think are everywhere in US government — for example, the Department of Energy and its light bulb standards