As the Daily Mail revealed yesterday, our shops and supermarkets will from this week be running down their stocks of familiar 100-watt incandescent light bulbs, the kind most of us use in our homes when we need a good light to read by.

Soon it will be hard to find a 100w bulb on sale anywhere in Britain.

After that, all other incandescent bulbs will follow, until by 2012 they have disappeared altogether - thus ending 140 years of history since an Englishman, Joseph Swan, followed by the American Thomas Edison, invented the idea of using an electrically heated filament to light up a glass bulb.

All this is part of a move by which Britain is leading the rest of Europe in forcing us all within three years to switch to nothing but 'low-energy' bulbs, or CFLs (compact fluorescent lamps), which supposedly are going to help us save the planet from that global warming which has been so much in evidence in recent days.

(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW)

Incandescent

No doubt there are still wild-eyed 'greenies' who will cheer at this revolution in our lives. But the more we look into the story of how this revolution came about, the more it looks like one of the maddest flights from reality that the political class which now rules over us has ever taken.

The crucial decision was made at a gathering in March 2007 of the 27 Prime Ministers of the European Union, including Tony Blair.

This meeting of the European Council marked the high point of the EU's infatuation with the idea that it should lead the world in 'the fight against climate change'.

Sitting round in a grand room in Brussels, they cheerfully nodded through a whole set of proposals designed to save the planet.

Twenty per cent of all our energy was by 2020 to come from 'renewables', such as thousands more wind turbines.

Vast areas of farmland were to be switched from food production to growing crops for ' biofuels'.

The EU's industries would be forced to pay tens of billions of euros for the right to emit CO2 (the bill to be passed on to all of us).

Full article here