Story here from the leftist Washington Post. (H/T Wes Widner)

Excerpt:

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.

[…]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.

[…]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.

Consisting of glass tubes twisted into a spiral, they require more hand labor, which is cheaper there. So though they were first developed by American engineers in the 1970s, none of the major brands make CFLs in the United States.

Lights out on American jobs – not because of competitive pressure from free market competitors, but because of government regulators who probably have money invested in the companies that stand to benefit from this outrageous government intervention into the free market. The green movement is a scam. It costs jobs when you take money out of the private sector and put into environmentalist scams.

You can read about Al Gore’s profiteering here, for example. And you can read more about what happens when governments waste money on green jobs programs. Or read about the Finnish car company backed by Al Gore that got US government loans. Or the US government money funneled to pay for a George Soros-backed oil drilling firm – in BRAZIL.