Forbidding incandescent light bulbs while forcing inferior expensive replacements on consumers to prop up the light bulb cartel.
All while you can burn 100l of petrol per day, no questions asked.
Forbidding new construction sites lest the yellow speckled violet frog's breeding habits are disturbed in order to prop up the rental extraction by oligarchs.
But seriously: it's not like it's a zero-sum game and it's disingenuous to pretend it is as it justifies inaction and not having small wins that can add up over time. Specifically about lightbulbs, reducing the energy use of lightbulbs across the board is a win, just like reducing the amount of petrol burned.
The cartels were for incandescent light bulbs [1], rather than other kinds of lighting. It's harder for cartels to exist now, given that we can buy alternatives from other countries on Ebay and AliExpress.
Who buys bulbs in the stores when there's a hundred thousand small vendors on local e-commerce sites, selling super cheap LED bulbs imported straight from Shenzhen?
(The race to the bottom in LED lighting is another environmental issue, though. The cheap bulbs I see people buy are mostly garbage that's barely fit for purpose, and in a sane world would not be allowed to leave the assembly floor.)
I talked about local vendors reselling things from China. Pretty much their entire value is in shielding the buyer from the inconveniences you listed.
The real experience of a typical person I know is:
- Go to your local eBay equivalent, look for LED lightbulbs, sort by price.
- Pick the cheapest offer that doesn't look super-sketchy, place an order for half a dozen and pay for it, all with a few clicks.
- Wait 2-5 days, depending on seasons and phase of the moon.
- Depending on the delivery method you picked in step 2, a courier comes and brings you a package, or you visit the parcel locker 2-5 minutes from your home at a time that's convenient for you.
- Repeat the process when the cheapass bulbs invariably all burn out within a year.
At least in Europe, shopping on-line is a solved problem.
Maybe this works in the US or some of the large European countries, but that has not been my experience. Local online stores are such a poor experience and unreliable that I'll usually get a product faster from Amazon.de than my own country, despite the former taking almost a week to get to me.
It took me over a month to buy a harddrive that was shown as in stock, but it really wasn't. When it did become available 2 weeks later, they wanted more money than what I had already paid them.
