Many electrical products sold in Europe have a colour-coded energy rating system, from A to G. A is the most energy efficient and G the least. It’s as simple as that. The label has been copied all over the world. It has worked so well in promoting energy efficient products that most products sold in Europe have an A or a B rating. So, if you buy a product rated B you may think it’s still pretty good, when in reality it’s the most inefficient!

We now need to upgrade the label and make sure A and B only really include the best products. But some companies who manufacture these products do not want this upgrade (See Guardian blog)

Is it perhaps that they don’t want us, consumers, to know their products are not as efficient as we think? That’s not what they claim. Of course, they claim if we don’t accept their labels, then millions of jobs will be lost. With this argument, they have heavily lobbied the European Commission and Member States to change to a different, incredibly confusing label, including both letters and numbers.

Now governments in Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland and other Eastern European countries are supporting this very questionable proposal, which goes against our interests as consumers and as citizens concerned about energy bills and climate change. If they win, we will lose one of the most successful tools in the world to reduce energy demand and people’s electricity bills.

The year 2009 started with a big controversy in the British media about… lightbulbs. And as Europe prepares for a big round of votes this month on requirements and labels for a variety of products, we can expect more debate. But is the media doing its best in helping readers understand the facts, or does it sometimes contribute to creating unnecessary confusion? Are policy makers looking for yet more excuses to delay the fight against climate change?
More precisely, the controversy in January was about the UK government and EU plans to phase out inefficient incandescent lightbulbs as part of eco-design legislation and to fight climate change. The Daily Mail initiated the whole controversy with a front page story about ‘panic buyers’ in the UK making a mad rush for the last incandescent lightbulbs. Consumers, it is said, will soon be ‘robbed of their right’ to those traditional bulbs.

In our view (and that of many experts), this was all a bit sensationalist and in many ways inaccurate. But things got really interesting when The Sun newspaper criticised its competitor for getting its facts wrong and later responded by giving away not one but three super–efficient Compact Fluorescent Lightbulbs (CFLs) for each reader. Then The Guardian tried to help their readers understand the debate by going back to basic facts – albeit only after having allowed writers on its ‘Comment is Free’ section to go as far as invoking Stalin’s work camps and genocide when talking about CFLs (hmm…seriously?). Then it all went quiet again.
Until, that is, The Guardian noticed that another controversy was brewing – over A–G energy efficiency labels (more about this in the next blog entry). Who would have guessed that this could become a controversial issue? Well, it now is.