I generally admire the work of Roger Pielke Jr., a political scientist in the University of Colorado‐Boulder’s Center for Science and Technology Policy Research. His new book on climate change is refreshingly honest and non‐ideological, if a bit overly technophilic. His broader work offers the important insight that science alone cannot direct public policy, but rather it can only lay out possible results of different policy choices.
Given the quality of his work, I was disappointed by Pielke’s op‐ed in today’s NYT defending Congress’s legislated obsolescence of the incandescent light bulb. He argues that government standard‐setting is an important contribution to human welfare, and the light bulb standard is just part of that standard‐setting (though he does suggest some minor policy tweaks to allow limited future availability of incandescents).
To justify his argument, Pielke points out the great benefit of government‐established standard measures, as well as quality standards:
Indeed, [in the United States of the late 19th century] the lack of standards for everything from weights and measures to electricity — even the gallon, for example, had eight definitions — threatened to overwhelm industry and consumers with a confusing array of incompatible choices.
This wasn’t the case everywhere. Germany’s standards agency, established in 1887, was busy setting rules for everything from the content of dyes to the process for making porcelain; other European countries soon followed suit. Higher‐quality products, in turn, helped the growth in Germany’s trade exceed that of the United States in the 1890s.
America finally got its act together in 1894, when Congress standardized the meaning of what are today common scientific measures, including the ohm, the volt, the watt and the henry, in line with international metrics. And, in 1901, the United States became the last major economic power to establish an agency to set technological standards.
Alas, this argument doesn’t support Pielke’s light bulb standard.