Dimwits! Those bright sparks over in Brussels have decided to
stop you buying old-fashioned light bulbs
Christopher Booker UK
Daily Mail
Wednesday, Jan 7, 2009
As the Daily Mail revealed yesterday, our shops and supermarkets
will from this week be running down their stocks of familiar
100-watt incandescent light bulbs, the kind most of us use
in our homes when we need a good light to read by.
Soon it will be hard to find a 100w bulb on sale anywhere
in Britain.
After that, all other incandescent bulbs will follow, until
by 2012 they have disappeared altogether - thus ending 140
years of history since an Englishman, Joseph Swan, followed
by the American Thomas Edison, invented the idea of using
an electrically heated filament to light up a glass bulb.
All this is part of a move by which Britain is leading the
rest of Europe in forcing us all within three years to switch
to nothing but 'low-energy' bulbs, or CFLs (compact fluorescent
lamps), which supposedly are going to help us save the planet
from that global warming which has been so much in evidence
in recent days.
(Article continues below)
Incandescent
No doubt there are still wild-eyed 'greenies' who will cheer
at this revolution in our lives. But the more we look into
the story of how this revolution came about, the more it looks
like one of the maddest flights from reality that the political
class which now rules over us has ever taken.
The crucial decision was made at a gathering in March 2007
of the 27 Prime Ministers of the European Union, including
Tony Blair.
This meeting of the European Council marked the high point
of the EU's infatuation with the idea that it should lead
the world in 'the fight against climate change'.
Sitting round in a grand room in Brussels, they cheerfully
nodded through a whole set of proposals designed to save the
planet.
Twenty per cent of all our energy was by 2020 to come from
'renewables', such as thousands more wind turbines.
Vast areas of farmland were to be switched from food production
to growing crops for ' biofuels'.
The EU's industries would be forced to pay tens of billions
of euros for the right to emit CO2 (the bill to be passed
on to all of us).
