If Congress has its way on incandescent bulbs, will our world be darker for it?

"I immediately felt ill and almost depressed, like I should commit suicide." Heath Ledger's untimely death or perhaps even the announced withdrawal of John Edwards from the Democratic presidential primaries might seem like the most plausible occasions for such a dramatic statement to be uttered in Slate's Spectator Fray. 

On its face, the precipitating event was far more mundane: "the horrifying light" emitted from a compact fluorescent light bulb, or CFL, purchased by nerdnam on a recent trip to Home Depot.

Ron Rosenbaum's ode to the soon-to-be-extinct incandescent bulb elicited strong reactions from readers. Indeed, the sentimental attachment we have to the most common of objects can make their disappearance or alteration feel like a profound disruption to the order of things.

Is it all irrational, a reflexive clinging to the familiar? Some of the arguments against CFLs appear to be quite practical. Fitzpatrick expresses frustration with the time needed to reach full illumination, knickname with their limited use in certain fixtures, zahniser7 with imprecise wattage equivalents. Chris_O dislikes their incompatibility with dimmer switches.

After a year "of straining my eyes to read a book, of holding letters over my head to get enough light to read by," darwinite ends an ill-fated experiment with energy-efficient lighting and further vows to "stockpile incandescent bulbs before the ban."

But there also seemed to be a deeper strain of conspiracy theory running through some of the Fray postings. The supposed environmental urgency behind the compulsory adoption of CFLs amounts to a campaign of "fluorescent fear-mongering … on a scale that would impress Rudy Giuliani," quipsstrive. OIFVet might also count himself in the mildly paranoid camp, characterizing the push for these "science lab lights" as "a movement by folks who have invested in the new technology and prey on the conscience of the American people."

viral considers the current CFL mania as a political case study in why reform always fails, as our misguided fixation on a small detail (light bulbs) obscures the aims of a much broader social goal (energy conservation).

The color-rendering index provides some scientific basis for qualifying the "hospitalesque hue" of fluorescents as inferior. timrichardson explains: "A CRI of 100 shows colors like natural light: incandescents are basically CRI 100…fluorescent lamps do not produce the spectrum of visible light in the even distribution of the sun, or a glowing filament." 

Tann upbraids Rosenbaum for his misplaced sentimentality and resistance to change:

He confuses "incandescent" with "warm light" the same way the some people conflate "all-natural" with "healthy." Incandescent light can produce harsh light too, and there are warm spectrum CFLs that produce light better than a soft white bulb.