GE is shutting its last light bulb factory in the US. The jobs destroyed in the US are now in China. The new product is harder to use (e.g., outside) and often gives off a dim, unpleasant light. And some more bad things, but first read this. WaPo:

The last major GE factory making ordinary incandescent light bulbs in the United States is closing this month, marking a small, sad exit for a product and company that can trace their roots to Thomas Alva Edison’s innovations in the 1870s. The remaining 200 workers at the plant here will lose their jobs…

Rather than setting off a boom in the U.S. manufacture of replacement lights, the leading replacement lights are compact fluorescents, or CFLs, which are made almost entirely overseas, mostly in China. Consisting of glass tubes twisted into a spiral, they require more hand labor, which is cheaper there. So though they were first developed by American engineers in the 1970s, none of the major brands make CFLs in the United States.

“Everybody’s jumping on the green bandwagon,” said Pat Doyle, 54, who has worked at the plant for 26 years. But “we’ve been sold out. First sold out by the government. Then sold out by GE.”…The company developed a plan to see what it would take to retrofit a plant that makes traditional incandescents into one that makes CFLs. Even with a $40 million investment and automation, the disparity in wages and other factors made it uneconomical. The new plant’s CFLs would have cost about 50 percent more than those from China, GE officials said…

In announcing the plant closure here, GE said in a news release that “a variety of energy regulations,” including those in the United States, “will soon make the familiar lighting products produced at the Winchester Plant obsolete.”

Here are some other excellent product features, as highlighted by GE itself:

CFLs, like many electrical or electronic products, can sometimes fail in a way where one of the electrical components or plastic materials will briefly produce a very irritating odor and possibly some smoke…the easiest way to eliminate any odor is to follow the same approach that one would use to eliminate any other unpleasant odor or smell. Briefly leave the immediate area if it is very irritating. Next, after waiting 10 or 15 minutes, air out the room…

Like paint, batteries, thermostats, and other hazardous household items, CFLs should be disposed of properly. Do not throw CFLs away in your household garbage…If your waste agency incinerates its garbage, you should search a wider geographic area for proper disposal options. Never send a CFL or other mercury containing product to an incinerator

So let’s see. A simple, very effective and cheap product is replaced by an inferior, more costly product, produced in a fashion that eliminates American jobs, and that creates completely unnecessary bad environmental consequences.. And all so some nincompoops can feel good about themselves. What’s a good name for a scam of this nature? Ah yes, the “green economy.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 9th, 2010 at 12:40 pm and is filed under business, China, Democrats, General, idiots!, Republicans. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.