OK, I know the credit crunch is flustering the banks, and everyone’s very upset about it. But I cannot see how this excuses the way the press has let pass largely without comment what strikes me as one of the biggest stories of the year. Europe is banning the lightbulb. In two years, no less.

On October 10, the European Union’s 27 energy ministers called for a law banning incandescent bulbs from 2010. That’s your ordinary bog-standard bulb-shaped bulb, the kind cartoonists draw over people’s heads when they have a bright idea.

Not coincidentally, import duties are about to disappear for what is now the main alternative – compact fluorescents made (of course) in China. So with luck, one of the most ubiquitous and venerable artifacts of modern technology – and by modern we mean, since the industrial revolution – is about to disappear.
It sounds enormous, but it brings Europe into line with similar, largely unheralded decisions in the rest of the world.    

Brazil and Venezuela already tried to ban incandescents in 2005, while in 2007 Cuba is said to have simply recalled them all and issued compact fluorescents. Australia has banned the import of the old-fashioned bulbs as of November this year – that’s next month – and their sale from 2009. The Philippines wants them gone by 2010, Canada by 2012.

Last year California (who else) introduced the “How Many Legislators Does it Take to Change a Light Bulb Act” banning incandescents by 2012. The rest of the US plans to phase out 100-watt bulbs by 2012 and 40-watters in 2014.

The sad thing is that all this effort doesn’t actually cut CO2 emissions by a vast amount.

Lighting gobbles nearly a fifth of domestic energy consumption. According to the green group WWF, replacing the worst old bulbs with the best new ones now will cut the EU’s energy use for domestic lighting by 60%, saving 30 million tons of CO2 yearly, which is nearly half the 2006 greenhouse emissions of… Sweden.

Yet compact fluorescents consume three to five times less energy per light produced than incandescents do.

What this tells us is that compact fluorescents are worth it, and we should have done this long ago – but also that this is a drop in the bucket, and we produce a vast amount of CO2 doing things other than turning the lights on, which we really need to tackle.

At least the appearance of all those futuristic lightbulbs will make the need for non-19th century technology more visible, and maybe boost demand for improvements and even better bulbs, such as light-emitting diodes.