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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now we welcome New York Magazine writer Tom Scocca, who wrote an article a lot of people are talking about called The New Light Is Bad. There's something off about LED bulbs, which will soon be thanks to a federal ban on incandescence, the only kind you can buy. Tom, thanks for coming on with us and welcome to WNYC.

Tom Scocca: Good morning. Thanks for having me on.

Brian Lehrer: To start out, before we get to your fabulous description of the experience of the light for many LED bulbs, I think it's important to establish that you do believe that ecologically, the case for LEDs is unassailable as you write, and that in many ways, in your words, they're little miracles. Would you start there to establish that you get it about why the law is going in this direction in climate and other environmental terms?

Tom Scocca: Yes, I mean that's the thing about it, and it's sort of embarrassing to have landed on a point of argument that was a big part of Donald Trump's some speech where he was denouncing these lights because the incandescent bulbs had always wasted huge amounts of energy. Most of their output is heat. I remember when I was a little kid, we used an incandescent bulb to hatch some chickens in an incubator.

Brian Lehrer: Not for the light, for the heat.

Tom Scocca: Yes, so like 90% of what comes out of the bulb you can't see. It's just dissipated as heat. You have tremendous, tremendous gains inefficiency with LED bulbs. You're spending like a tenth as much electricity to get the same amount of light, and then the question that comes up revolves around the quality of the light that you're getting from it.

Brian Lehrer: To your headline that the light is bad and that there's something off about LED bulbs, those words "bad" and "off," can you put that visual experience into words?

Tom Scocca: Well, it's often subtle and confounding to see, its colors don't come out the way that you expect them to come out. Color differences that you're expecting to see are no longer perceptible because the old tungsten bulb, while it's spitting out huge amounts of infrared that you can't see, it's also covering the full spectrum visual light, while the LED bulb is trying to fill in the entire spectrum but it's missing things. There are gaps in the coverage, and colors don't resolve the way that you expect them to. They also don't dim in a linear way the way that incandescent bulbs do. As the light goes down, it suddenly looks really gray, which is a natural phenomenon of color perception, but it's one that all our previous artificial lighting technology compensated for by making things look warmer and redder as the light got lower. When you see those reds popping, your eye feels like it's seeing color, and so if the reds are attenuated, it just feels off.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, are you having this experience too? We can take a phone call or two on this, that the light from LED bulbs seems bad or somehow off. Do you think you're going crazy when you can't distinguish your slate grays from your dark blues when you used to be able to, or do you think it's your eyes? Call and describe how you're adjusting and what you would like to see, if anything, as a policy response? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692 for Tom Scocca who has the article on this in New York Magazine, 212-433-WNYC. Let me invite you to go a little further into what you were just describing about trouble distinguishing colors like certain kinds of gray from certain kinds of blue that you didn't have with the incandescent bulbs. Describe that more if you can, and explain the science behind why that would be, if you can. I guess you were starting to get there a little bit with the red.

Tom Scocca: Right. Yes, basically, it's just I find myself having to take things over to the window to get them in the sunlight to tell which socks are which color anymore, which is not something I'd ever had trouble doing before. Basically, it's just a well known effect in color perception that when the level of light is lowered, things just go over to gray. Like if you have daylight outside and something looks really, -- the colors are very vibrant and easy to distinguish. If you come inside and you have that same quality of light but just coming through a window and so the overall amount of light is diminished, things come out looking grayer. There's a whole science of how this color rendering is described. There's systems of measurement.

The one that you might see on a box of bulbs now is called the CRI, the color rendering index, which is just a number theoretically from 1 to a 100, although 90, maybe the low 90's is about where LED bulbs top out, and incadesent would be a 100. The color experts that I talked to said that that's not even a very good measure, that there's a whole other system called TM 30 that allows you to sort of choose what kind of color presentation you want to get from your bulbs. Do you want the colors to be more vivid? Do you want the colors to be more faithful to what the colors would be in sunlight?

Brian Lehrer: Yes, so this is a whole other aspect of your article that was really new to me and that I really learned a lot from. For one thing, that on that one spec, 90 out of a 100 is actually not very good, [chuckles] it has to be in the high 90s. Go ahead.

Tom Scocca: 90 is about as good as you're going to see on a package nowadays. The problem is that two different 90s can give you two different effects. Even that number, a few years ago, the responsibility for the label was handed off from the Energy Department to the Federal Trade Commission, and the Federal Trade Commission's outlook is they think that too much information on the label is going to confuse people, and so the color rendering index became optional. Really, the only thing that the labels were required to tell you is what's called the color of temperature, which tells you how yellow versus how blue the light is, which could be confusing because-

Brian Lehrer: Yes, and then there is-

Tom Scocca: - you want a higher [crosstalk]--

Brian Lehrer: -second speck that you mentioned that wasn't even at any point on the box. Right?

Tom Scocca: Right. If the Energy Department people have their druthers, that would be on the box and you could get the information that you need to choose the kind of light that you prefer.

Brian Lehrer: Bill in Huntington, you're on WNYC. Hi, Bill.

Bill: Yes. How are you guys doing? I'm a retired jeweler, and I did a lot of color correction work for atHome Magazine. There's a thing in your brain called metamerism, which automatically corrects for color temperature differences. The longer you stare at these things, the more that they change because you're [inaudible 00:07:53] it's getting a package to always come out the same color as as when it's printed is a bane to everybody. We have special booths that the color temperature of the light bulbs are 5,500 Kelvin. We grade diamonds under that kind of light. Tungsten bulbs, like he said, are yellower and redder, and fluorescent bulbs are bluer. That's why your old Ektachrome film came out looking so blue when you took a picture of it. When we shot jewelry in cases that had a combination of both those lights, we would have to apply very sophisticated filters to balance things so that you didn't have a red side of the case and a blue side of the case, but to one degree or another, this is going to happen anyway when the color temperature of the light source is off. You adjust for it, you can't stop it, and it doesn't adjust consistently. The more you stare at it, the worse it gets.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting, Bill, really interesting. Now, there are other issues that Tom wrote about in his article in addition to the color seeming off. Joanne in Toms River is bringing up, I think, yet another one. Joanne, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Joanne: Hi, Brian. Yes. This is a good topic. Driving, it's like everyone is driving with their high beams on, it's blinding. I wear blue blockers. I even talk to my eye doctor about it. He said that's good to protect your eyes. I don't know who came up with this, but consumer reports should have done a better study because I think they're hazardous. I even read an article from Australia where they had birds that were crashing into the streets because they seen these lights and they thought they were over the water and they were fish.

Brian Lehrer: Joanne, thank you very much. I don't think this particular issue is in your article, Tom, but Joanne [crosstalk] is not the only person who's complained about this to me.

Tom Scocca: No, because part of the thing about them is because they're so miraculous and energy efficient, you can get things much brighter than they used to be. You see lots of overkill in street lamps and headlights where they're more bright and glaring than they need to be. The underlying breakthrough that made all of this possible was, with some discoveries in the '90s and then technology refined at the beginning of the century, they figured out how to make blue LED light highly energy efficient. The underlying technology is a blue light here. If you want it to not be blue, you have to do something to it. You have to treat it with phosphorous. You have to adjust the color of what's coming out so that it represents a broader spectrum of light. Blue light, it's the color of daylight, but when you get daylight indoors, it looks really weird and harsh. Of course, it's going straight to your brain and telling you that it's daytime. If you're using a blue light at night, your whole circadian cycle is going to get out of whack.

Brian Lehrer: The medical experts advised not to have blue lights on your cable TV box clock or whatever might still be shining when you go to sleep. I'm thinking about the jeweler who called in talking about how the eyes correct and the light is different when you're looking at subtle things. You even take us in your article into The Met, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where we would expect the lighting to be meticulously curated. It's not because of LED bulbs.

Tom Scocca: Well, it was meant to be meticulously curated, and they're on a program of improvement that I think in the end is going to look really great where they're going to go for a consistent 3000-Kelvin white color throughout the building. One of their earliest LED installations in the European painting gallery that they showed me was these things are supposed to have long lifespans. This was supposed to last 7 to 10 years, but by the time it hit year 7, if you looked up at the lights behind the ceiling, some of them were white, and then there were some that were purple, pink, and there's some that were green. [unintelligible 00:12:37] was showing me around [unintelligible 00:12:38] it looked like Christmas lights because one of the issues with people working with LED bulbs at home and trying to get used to them is not just when they're working right, there's still these issues about color temperature and color rendering. It's also that they're much more complicated devices than incandescent bulbs. When they fail, they don't just burn out. I mean, by definition, when they fail, it's just that they get dimmer over time. When they're 70% as bright as they were when they started, that's the official end of their life, but you have to still notice that and take care of it yourself. [crosstalk]--

Brian Lehrer: Here's a little bit of pushback from Richard in Manhattan. Richard, we're running short of time in the segment. We've got about 30 seconds for you, but go for it.

Richard: Thank you so much. Brian, I'm a lighting designer and I just have to say that the entire entertainment and theatrical industry is filled with almost nothing but LED lighting now. It's the most marvelous tool that has come along. All of Broadway is virtually all LED-based, most beautiful lighting on Broadway. Honestly, I just don't see what the problem is. I use it every day and can't imagine my professional life without it now. All these complaints I hear about the eyesores and everything, we have nothing but the best reviews now ever before. I don't get it.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. Even though our other nine lines are all people saying, oh, my bathroom doesn't look the same as it used to, my, this, my that, how do you explain it?

Richard: First of all, I can tell you every time they go to a show, they're seeing LED lighting fixtures almost all the time.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Richard.

Tom Scocca: It's a tremendous tool if you know what you're doing. If you have the expertise to apply them right, then you can get absolutely fantastic results that are much better than what people had before. The question is whether as every single person in the US switches over to using this technology, are they going to have the access to the information and the technology that they need to get that same satisfaction [unintelligible 00:14:51] [crosstalk].

Brian Lehrer: You write there is a world almost within reach in which LED lighting could be aesthetically fabulous, but right now, it's a luxury product. I'm trying to squash this for time into fewer words than you actually wrote, but the rest of the world will look a little more faded unless you can afford a certain kind of LED product. Do we also have an income issue here?

Tom Scocca: Yes. There was one thing that I found in reporting the story, which was I went to a dollar store because The Times had run a story about how dollar stores weren't selling LED bulbs and people were stuck with energy-inefficient incandescents. I was like, "Well, let me see." By now, the dollar stores do have them, but they're at 6,400 degrees Kelvin. Your normal 2,700 is what you're used to from a [unintelligible 00:15:45]. 6,400 is so blue that when I tried to Google it, it's grow lights. It's a savagely blue color that is not at all what you want to have in your house, but if you're buying your LED bulbs at the dollar store, that's what's out there because again, the underlying bulb, the underlying LED technology is blue, and it costs more money to treat it to make it a warmer color.

Brian Lehrer: The other thing just in a sound bite's length here is you wrote about what some people have told me they experienced, I haven't with my LED bulbs thankfully, but they're supposed to last for years compared to an incandescent bulb, but sometimes they don't.

Tom Scocca: Sometimes they don't, sometimes they just glish out as fast as an incandescent bulb would. Again, inside it is a little computer that's basically making it emulate what an incandescent bulb worked like. If those little electronic components cook, and it takes a much lower amount of heat to cook them, then it'll fail.

Brian Lehrer: Tom Scocca, New York Magazine contributor, former Slate politics editor, and the editor of Indignity, a general interest publication on Substack. His New York Magazine article that a lot of people are talking about is The New Light Is Bad, There's something off about LED bulbs. Thanks for sharing it with us and being a conduit for obviously many callers who are saying, "Yes, me too."

Tom Scocca: Oh, thanks so much for having me. I hope that your callers are able to get the information that they need.

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