They're slated to phase out incandescents by 2017 I believe in Canada. Personally though I'm elated to know that we're being forced eventually into LED technology. I just hope that OLED lighting becomes a thing, since it can accurately reproduce natural light, iirc.
All CFLs and LEDs have very spiky emission spectra, which are dramatically less pleasant (IMO) and distort color relationships (causing potential problems for anyone who cares about the way their photographs/paintings/clothes/... looks). They tend to also emit more light toward the blue end of the spectrum, again with a few spikes at particular wavelengths, which can make it harder to sleep.
OLEDs are better than most CFLs/LEDs in this respect (one flawed metric for this is the “color rendering index”), but not nearly as good as incandescent bulbs. They definitely don’t “accurately reproduce natural light”.
Although, I worked for a retail store when the initial cuts were announced, and people came in purchasing incandescent bulbs by the cartful, I think the change over made a lot of people real angry.
For good reason. It’s a really stupid set of laws bullied through legislatures. Incandescent light bulbs are amazingly cheap and robust technology and if it really matters there are several ways in which they could be made more efficient without swapping to a completely separate technology.
Residential lighting is not the main bottleneck in world energy use or the main cause of CO2 emission – it would have a much bigger impact to dramatically raise car fuel efficiency standards and get old inefficient cars off the road (or even just force SUVs to meet the standards for cars instead of trucks) or abolish coal power plants; those industries just have much more powerful lobbying efforts and people have now been brainwashed into thinking that incandescent light bulbs are bad.
It does make sense to try to be as efficient as possible for stuff like street lamps and lighting in warehouses though.
Other good changes would be to encourage people to live in smaller houses; adjust their thermostats less aggressively; buy smaller refrigerators and freezers; take jobs closer to home to cut their commutes and work from home more often; build denser neighborhoods to get people to spend more of their time biking, walking, and taking public transit instead of driving everywhere; travel longer distances by train instead of car or plane; eat less-processed food; cut down on the amount of packaging in everything they buy; &c. &c. Instead we get a crack down on light bulbs.
If we just taxed CO2 emissions at a level commensurate with their true costs to the planet, people might want to figure out how to be more energy efficient naturally, just to save money. There’d be no need for a separate light bulb policy at all.
