“Saving the planet” with your money is making many bad actors really rich.
Quadrant.
In February 2007, Australia became the first country in the world to announce that it was phasing out incandescent light bulbs in favour of compact fluorescent bulbs (CFLs). The Environment Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, said in a statement, “The climate change challenge is a global one. I encourage other countries to follow Australia’s lead and make the switch to more energy efficient products like compact fluorescent light bulbs.” (There is no indication that Turnbull intended a pun with his reference to a “global challenge”.)
CFLs use 70 per cent less electricity than traditional bulbs and were claimed to last ten times longer. Australia’s bulb ban was good news for General Electric (GE), Philips, Honeywell and other compact fluorescent lightbulb manufacturers, as well as retailers.
Turnbull was praised for demonstrating his “environmental prowess”, for “recycling” an idea that Jon Dee from the group Planet Ark had been working on with Philips and with Turnbull’s predecessor, Ian Campbell. This coalition was about to launch a “Ban the Bulb” campaign, but Turnbull acted first. Planet Ark’s enthusiasm was understandable, but what was the motivation of Philips?
While we are used to corporations today signalling their wokeness, it was less of a factor then, and Philips’s main motivation was arguably financial. CFLs had been around since about 1980, but people did not buy them in great numbers—because of price, aesthetics and health reasons. Philips had introduced the first commercial CFL, after GE developed the technology in 1976 but decided against commercial development. While others had subsequently developed CFLs, the bulb ban effectively removed from the market not just a competing product, but one that the market preferred overwhelmingly.
While Australia was the first to adopt the ban, thanks to Turnbull’s enthusiasm, other jurisdictions followed, and in most cases this came after lobbying campaigns by Philips. Its approach in Australia in partnering with Planet Ark was duplicated in the Netherlands, and possibly elsewhere (although there is no evidence of this). In the Netherlands (the home of Philips) an investigative journalist revealed that the adoption of the ban by a parliamentary majority in The Hague came after combined lobbying pressure by Philips and Greenpeace. The parliament also instructed the Dutch Environment Minister to push for an (ultimately successful) extension of the ban to the European Union.
The Dutch and Australian campaigns were perfect examples of what Bruce Yandle termed “Bootlegger and Baptist” coalitions: the normative actors run a virtuous argument and provide a moral cloak that masks the interest-based activities of the “bootleggers”. (Yandle grew up in Georgia, where the Baptists thought the sale of liquor on Sunday was sinful, and the bootleggers could not make money without a ban.) Thus, Turnbull’s ban was not introduced in order to advantage Philips and other CFL manufacturers, but to “save the planet”. Continue reading How Many Ministers to Change a Light Bulb?
