The Carr Blog

Well maybe not directly but as this study points out the push for fluorescent bulbs may have unintended consequences like most well meaning laws do. But like everything else, the government will make a law that ends up bad and then act like that didn't happen and outlaw the thing they pushed to begin with. It seems that melatonin production is suppressed by light from the blue part of the spectrum and could be linked to higher cancer rates.

Lights at Night Are Linked to Breast Cancer - washingtonpost.com: "Abraham Haim, a University of Haifa chronobiologist involved in the study, said the findings raise questions about the recent push to switch to energy-efficient fluorescent bulbs, which suppress melatonin production more than conventional incandescent bulbs. 'This may be a disaster in another 20 years,' Haim said, 'and you won't be able to reverse what we did by mistake.' He called for more research before policies favoring fluorescent lights are implemented, and for more emphasis on using less light at night."

Once again governments just need to get out of the way and let the market and people decide what they want and what science reveals about what is chosen. Then the market can adjust quickly without the red legal tape in the way. Who knows without this huge premature push for fluorescent bulbs LED lights may have taken a foothold or another technology would have been developed had companies not had to change course of production to focus so much on fluorescent bulbs.