Thanks for the warning. Time to restock my cache of incandescents, before they are completely unavailable anymore.
You can make LEDs with good color accuracy but you lose efficiency making them worse than equivalent CFLs.
Then buy CFLs? They help keep toxic mercury out of the air from burning coal.
Do you seriously believe CFLs emit any mercury, or are you trolling?
[1] And not all canned tuna is Albacore. The stuff sold as "light" tuna is typically lower mercury content (don't have a source handy at the moment.)
Basically: If you want people to use less power, then increase the price or ration it. Don't ban an unrelated technology. If you want people to use less glass, haha are you kidding me, glass is made of dirt and easy to recycle.
Is there any harm caused by incandescent bulbs specifically that I have somehow missed?
The reason for why we want to have energy efficiencies is simply because we only have to produce so much more electricity to power everything else. We have not reached a point where nuclear, solar, or wind is cheaper by the MW than coal and as a result we'll continue to build those for the foreseeable future. Banning inefficient and obsolete light bulbs will prevent us from needing to burn more coal and other harmful fuels.
If we didn't have this problem with electricity generation then banning something may become less desirable.
Lots of people would agree with that or the point in general that financial penalties work better. Legislation should mandate results, not dictate methods.
The conventional wisdom here (Denmark) has been that a mixture of the two achieves best results: a high tax on energy to provide an across-the-board untargeted price incentive, plus specific targeted regulations aiming at cutting out the largest sources of inefficiency and encouraging economies of scale in more efficient technologies. So for example district heating is now mandatory if you're in an area where it's available (no furnaces in new construction), and this seems to have been quite effective in increasing its adoption, which in turn makes it easier to build efficient district-heating networks and cogenerating power plants, since there is a dense customer base.
Or you could be really direct and make a law against powering incandescent bulbs on coal power, letting everyone choose if they want to buy some renewable/nuclear energy for their wasteful bulbs.
No, but for the moment it does actually do that. And you can change what sort of light bulbs people use faster than you can change your large-scale power generation technology.
(I do agree that making environmentally-better energy cheaper is likely a more powerful way of reducing the environmental cost of electricity use than telling everyone to stop using incandescent bulbs. But "X is better than Y" is a reason for doing X, not necessarily a reason for not doing Y.)
> a law against powering incandescent bulbs on coal power
Enforcing that one would be an interesting challenge. A law that says "no selling incandescent bulbs" is rather easier to enforce.
The only cases where I don't see a CFL replacement yet are decorative clear lamps where the filament being visible is part of the aesthetic.
* There are notable gaps in the spectrum causing color distortions. CFL light mostly features a greenish or violet shade and looks "hollow". Tungsten and halogen are way better, even after 20 years of CFL development.
* Most, even the more expensive ones are not really instant-on. They reach their max brightness after some time
* As I regularly switch off lights in rooms that are empty, they tend to fail rather fast.