CENTRALLY PLANNED INVESTMENT

A sure sign that the fluorescent light campaign is devious is that it needs to be waged at all. What campaign caused people to buy personal computers by the million? How were they coerced into getting telephones? What laws were necessary to encourage people to buy TV sets, frozen foods and VCRs?

Well, counter the Green priests, those are all examples of con-sumerism, serving only the individual, not the people and the planet.

Besides, continue the Greens (and especially Lovins), it makes economic sense to switch to fluorescent lights: bulbs at $0.60 each last only 6 months (do they?), whereas fluorescent lamps at $12 last 10 years (do they?), so that after a mere 5 years the investment pays off.

Never mind discounted values; how many of us will make an in-vestment only because, with luck it pays off in 5 years? If you buy a FAX for $400, your letters get there instantly at half the cost charged by the US Snail; at $.58 for two letters a day, the invest-ment pays off in under 4 years.

So why hasn't everybody who mails 2 letters a day bought a FAX machine long ago? Why is there no campaign waged by the Greens, the press and the politicians to install one? (Think of the fuel saved in postal trucks and aircraft! The energy conserved in stamps not printed and envelopes not manufactured! The shoe soles saved by not standing in line for stamps! Perhaps Seabrook could go offline again.)

As a matter of fact, it is my belief that FAX and other electronic communications will cut the US Snail down to size or even kill it. I also believe fluorescent lighting would gradually displace the in-candescent lamp anyway (but with government meddling we will never know for sure). I personally prefer fluorescent lights to in-candescent ones, and installed them in my home in the 1960s. But I did not do it to conserve energy for Society (i.e., to prevent the utilities building new capacity), nor do I go round proselytizing "Thou shalt use the same light as I do!"