NYTIMES TODAY FRONT PAGE ILLUSTRATION FULL

NYTIMES TODAY FRONT PAGE ILLUSTRATION FULL

The Department of Energy is scheduled to start penalizing incandescent distributors and retailers this month, levying fines of as much as $542 per illicit bulb, with full enforcement of the ban beginning in August. Some rearguard action by the Trump administration delayed the process, but a new lighting-efficiency standard has finally taken effect. The federal government has fully committed. Their widespread appearance on store shelves was supposed to mark not another depressing trade-off but rather a Nobel-worthy breakthrough: They provided brilliant illumination at a fraction of the old energy costs and were nearly immortal by the old tungsten standard. My generation, presented with thrifty overhead fluorescents in ’90s dorms, countered by plugging in the newly popular halogen torchieres, whose 300 blazing watts would incinerate wayward moths or occasionally a stray curtain along with the university’s planned energy savings. New lighting tech was something people resented and worked around.

A new generation of streetlamps somehow made city nights seem darker CFLs shattered into mercury-flecked shards. Traditional fluorescents, buzzing in grim-colored tubes, were synonymous with institutional austerity and migraines. It sits there feebly glimmering, its perimeter a semicircle of white jelly-bean light blobs, until you turn it off and wait a while.įor most of my life, I expected energy-saving lighting to be bad. At story time, the LED in the clamp light on his bunk revolts if you cycle the power too fast. When I left them alone for a week, they inexplicably came back on at full blast. The two in my youngest son’s bedroom went near dark not long after I installed them. Instead, the bulb was a dim, dull orange, its levels of brightness visibly fluttering through the frosted dome. In theory, it should have been the last I would put up there for years, maybe even a decade. I’d put one in the bedroom-ceiling fixture only a few months before. Not the idealized cartoon lightbulb, the universal symbol for a flash of inspiration, but a Philips-brand 800-lumen A19 LED bulb.

The lightbulb was flickering over my head.

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