The LED Problem - with Mark Baker
- Green Street Radio
- 2 days ago
- 1 min read
LED lighting may use less energy, but it comes with a host of serious problems, including threats to your health.
Electronic LED lighting may save energy, but is it completely safe? This week on Green Street, Patti and Doug talk about a cancer-causing pesticide still being used in the US, why chemical air fresheners may be harmful to your health, and the Trump administration's push to get rid of proposed limits on emissions of soot from power plants and vehicles. Then Mark Baker, founder of the Softlights Foundation talks about the rapid proliferation of LED lighting, the lack of proper safety testing, and how LED lighting is causing significant health problems for a growing number of people.
Links from the Interview
• The Softlights Foundation website: https://www.softlights.org/
• The Petition - Ban Blinding Headlights and Safe Lives: https://www.change.org/p/u-s-dot-ban-blinding-headlights-and-save-lives
Grassroots' fact sheet on LED lighting: https://www.grassrootsinfo.org/_files/ugd/2cea04_50af2b9a1c3b42eaafaeeb6560d57ad0.pdf
Links from the News
• Atrazine still being used in the US: https://usrtk.org/pesticides/atrazine/
• Air fresheners may be harmful to your health: https://www.umass.edu/ehs/air-fresheners
• EPA trying to ditch proposed rule on emissions of soot: https://apnews.com/article/epa-soot-air-pollution-trump-zeldin-deregulation-d7df5b24a159284e96b12958a840c3d8
I caught most of your show just now (28-Nov) on LED's including your interview with Mark Baker. I thought at first it was a rerun of a similar episode I heard a year or so ago, but perhaps not.
Either way, it's disheartening and infuriating to hear such a one-sided presentation of an important issue. Why do I say "one-sided"? Because you soft-pedaled the enormous energy / environmental / climate / cost savings from substituting LED's for incandescents, leading listeners to storm the barricades (metaphorically) and overturn perhaps the brightest spot (so to speak) in energy / enviro / climate policy and technology in the past half-century.
LED's consume 80 to 90 percent less electricity than incandescents to produce the…