'Green Jobs' in Action- Last Incandescent Bulb Factory in USA Closes Doors

Back in 2009, I remember watching C-SPAN showing live Nancy Pelosi from the floor of the House of Representative smirking that the Cap & Trade vote would mean 'Jobs, Jobs, Jobs'...

I suppose I was a little harsh on the Speaker of the House Human Lamprey at the time, since she was technically correct.

The 'Green' economy this Administration and Congress has been cheerleading for so far has indeed meant more jobs. Particularly in China.

WINCHESTER, VA. - The last major GE factory making ordinary incandescent light bulbs in the United States is closing this month, marking a small, sad exit for a product and company that can trace their roots to Thomas Alva Edison's innovations in the 1870s.

The remaining 200 workers at the plant here will lose their jobs.

During the recession, political and business leaders have held out the promise that American advances, particularly in green technology, might stem the decades-long decline in U.S. manufacturing jobs. But as the lighting industry shows, even when the government pushes companies toward environmental innovations and Americans come up with them, the manufacture of the next generation technology can still end up overseas.

What made the plant here vulnerable is, in part, a 2007 energy conservation measure passed by Congress that set standards essentially banning ordinary incandescents by 2014. The law will force millions of American households to switch to more efficient bulbs.

The resulting savings in energy and greenhouse-gas emissions are expected to be immense. But the move also had unintended consequences.

Rather than setting off a boom in the U.S. manufacture of replacement lights, the leading replacement lights are compact fluorescents, or CFLs, which are made almost entirely overseas, mostly in China.

So the death blow for the plant actually came two years before Cap & Trade.

This leads me to wonder how many 'unintended consequences' are contained in the Cap & Trade bill that passed the House last year but has yet to go before the Senate.