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I grew up poor.

We didn't know we were poor, of course.  We thought everyone's dad had to work three jobs to pay the bills, and drive horrible old clunker cars that required constant work just to keep running.  But we were poor, and if there was a benefit to a lack of money it was that our technology-minded mother always had some startling new idea to save a few cents.

Which is how, in the Sixties, I ended up living in the only house I ever heard of in which the incandescent lights were all replaced by fluorescent bulbs.  At night, our house looked like a set from Night of the Living Dead, with human flesh cast in a ghastly pallor of fluorescence.

When President Bush signed into law a sweeping new energy bill last week -- the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, for those who want to look it up on Thomas -- I had flashbacks to that childhood. 

Overall, the bill is good tech.  It is not exactly the draconian intrusion into our personal lives that conservatives fear.  Neither is it the Great Leap Forward that many liberals wish it to be.  It is on balance a measured step toward new goals in a host of energy areas.  Automobiles and appliances will have goals to make them more energy-efficient over the next couple of decades.  Biofuels and energy alternatives get more research and seed money.  And incandescent light bulbs get new goals for energy consumption and life.

I doubt that means that most of us will be switching to those spiral fluourescents anytime soon.  The law does not actually ban incandescent light bulbs by 2012, despite the news reports claiming that.  And consumers have a legitimate beef with the harsh, grusesome light cast by these bulbs. (To put it another way, there's a reason why people put candles in their bedrooms, not fluorescent lights.  I personally believe that the rise of fluorescent bulbs in bedside reading lamps is one of the leading reasons the US birth rate has fallen in recent years.  "Not tonight, dear, you look like a frozen rotting corpse.")

What it does mean is that we will get better light bulbs.  Bulb makers that include market leader GE are hard at work trying to make fluorescentsmore attractive, but that is not the only technology under development.  And some of the new ideas will frankly outpace the fluorescents handily.  I suspect that just as LED lighting now dominates the flashlight industry, something will come along to save the lights in the living room.  In recent years, GE alone has experimented with bulbs that give a peach tint to a room, or blue.  Other companies are doing other things, and consumers will eventually move toward these new ideas if for no other reason than to escape the fluorescents.

Congress walks a funny line these days, caught between those who point out that the Constitution doesn't give them the right to regulate what light bulbs we use and those who demand environmental action right now.  Often, this line leaves Congress either doing nothing or doing the wrong thing.  But with the new energy bill, it looks like they are stepping gently in the right direction.