BobG said:
In other words, your idea does work with some artificial control of pricing. In fact, with no artificial controls, the prices won't rise until the shortage actually hits and then you get price gouging. You have a situation where people waste during times of plenty and the times of shortage are more severe than they have to be.
This is patently false. Imagine that you observe people wasting some good (say, grain) during times of plenty (say, harvest season) and then starving during times of shortage (say, winter). As a self-interested businessman, how would you respond?
By buying up the wasted grain, and selling it back at prices you would probably consider "exhorbitant" the next winter, right? Now, how many seasonal cycles do you think it would take before everybody else caught on, and the market more or less normalized so that the change in the price of the good (again, grain in this case) changed very little between cyclical periods?
Look at 100-year price charts for a commoditity - any commodity - that are inflation adjusted and tell me what you see. Here's a Canadian 40-year chart I found with a quick google search to put you on the right path. 100 is index baseline.
http://www.ontariocorn.org/facts/crnppi04.gif
Rather than go the "freedom" direction, because that's been done on this thread, how about "because it's dumb".
It
is dumb and essentially meaningless. A ban on incandescent lightbulbs presupposes that there is some sort of external cost to their use which is not captured by both bulb and electricity prices, which is absurd.
If the concern is global warming through electricity useage, then what kind of fool would assume that keeping electricity rates constant but mandating a change in light bulbs will have any kind of useful effects? Sure, in the short run, consumers will respond to the higher price of CFL's by reducing consumption elsewhere, and we might reasonably assume that a lot of the reduction will come in the form of less electricity usage (but I haven't seen any empirical data to back that claim up, and frankly I'd be surprised if anyone looked actually modeled it back in '07). But we
already ration our electricity usage -we use as much electricity as we can afford to keep ourselves comfortable. If the amount of our electricity budget devoted to lighting goes down, and electricity rates and income stays the same (true in the long run, once the fixed costs of the conversion are paid), then the amount of electricity used for, say, cooling our homes or watching football games will go up; even if the effect isn't this direct, whatever economic activity I do engage in with my savings (going out to dinner, watching a movie, whatever) is almost certain to be
electrically powered to some extent or another. The net effect on electricity usage will be close to zero.
The politicians suppose that their wasteful citizens already use more electricity than they could ever possibly
want or need, and that therefore mandating more efficient lightbulbs will produce a direct watt-for-watt reduction in electricity demand. This sort of static analysis is silly, and easily debunked. Does Al Gore use more electricity than me? How about James Cameron? Yes on both counts. Why? Because I can see better at night, or prefer sushi to pork roast? No, silly, because they make more money and can afford more electricity, a scarce good the three of us each want an infinite amount of but have to buy in limited quantities according to our respective means.
Now, there's no denying that the CFL is more efficient - technologically and maybe, in some cases, economically, though the latter is less clear given the disposal and startup costs (and this opacity is reflected in the tepid consumer adoption of CFL's on the open market; if there were a clear advantage you wouldn't need public intervention). My dispute is with the claim that this will somehow make a meaningful difference in net energy consumption. It's a flight of political fancy.
