Why I Am Not Going to Use LED Light Bulbs
Have you heard about the light bulb ban? This year, by August 2023 incandescent light bulbs in America will be phased out by the Department of Energy for good. Going on a drive to see the Christmas lights will never be the same.
I try to keep my head out of current events and comment on them even less, but I have quite a bit to say about this one. I know this seems like such an odd thing to even have an opinion about, but noticing the very visable shift over the years has been unavoidable. Evenings around the neighborhood are different now. Christmas doesn’t look the same. I encourage you to pay attention, too. Drive around town at night. Which houses look most like homes? Like a warm, inviting, “cozy” environment? Which windows look lit with a happy home life?
“We shape our dwellings and afterwards, our dwellings shape us.”
The Christian home must light a candle in the window for the cold, harsh, sterile world. That candle must burn bright and glow warm. The physical does matter. Edith Schaeffer, Elisabeth Elliot, and countless other Christian women have paved the way for this high value of the home environment.
The inward will naturally influence the outward. A warm, cozy environment will be a natural outflow of a heart that desires to beckon people in and offer them a safe place to land. This means our design choices hold significance. We have the freedom to explore design in the context of our own personal styles while still recognizing that beauty is objective and God has set the standard in His Creation.
The opposite is also true, that the outward affects the inward. LED lights emit blue light that disrupts our natural circadian rhythm, melatonin production, and other sleep cues. They emit harmful UV rays that cause skin cancer and also flicker at a rate that the human eye cannot see but still registers, causing increased cortisol levels leading to anxiety, stress, fatigue, migraines and more. On top of that, LED lights will eventually phase in what they are calling “LiFi”— where our lighting is hooked up to the internet, causing even more EMF exposure in the home than there already is.
LEDs are also ugly. Sterile, cold, and harsh. But the push for something like that isn’t surprising coming from a culture that views the home as a prison.
“Peace at home, that is the blessing...Home should be made so truly home that the weary tempted heart could turn toward it anywhere on the dusty highway of life and recieve light and strength.”
Aside from the physical effects of LED lights, the reason they are being pushed is in the name of “energy efficiency” as if the consumer is actually the one destroying the planet right now. Even without switching our home to LED lights, my household already uses significantly less energy than the average American just by buying a large majority of our food direct from local farmers instead of importing it.
Can you see it? Stewardship is personal. The government doesn’t get to decide how we do it. Not when they are the ones building the dams that ruin fresh water systems, approving chemicals in our land, food, and water, spraying the skies daily, cutting down the rainforests to grow more GMO corn, and building more factories to produce “lab grown” meat. No, they don’t get to decide.
The manufacturing of incandescent light bulbs becomes illegal in July. Companies face a fine up to $542 per incandescent light bulb produced after this ban. But using them in the home will not be regulated or illegal (yet).
I will honor the emperor, but I will do so from the warm glow of my incandescent lamps.
If I have to I’ll buy them overpriced on eBay. Import them from a different country. Light a candle. Or maybe I will do what has always been done: wake and work when the sun shines, and sleep peacefully under the protection and provision of the Lord when it’s dark. It’s a foreign concept to the modern world, but it’s not a new one.
These next few months we will most likely see closeout sales of incandescent bulbs in all stores. I’ve already purchased a lot.
Anyone who cares about truth, beauty, and freedom should do the same.