Comment Re:Rhetorical (Score 1) 109
Sorry about that!
Light bulbs are very small things; the energy that goes into making them is likewise very small, regardless of type. The electricity an incandescent bulb burns is, by contrast, not at all small. You also have to replace the incandescent bulb far more often.
There's all sorts of exhaustive analyses out there, but the TL/DR is:
One incandescent bulb takes ~1-1,5kWh to manufacture and lasts ~1000 hours
One LED bulb takes 8-20kWh to manufacture and lasts ~25000 hours (commonly modern home construction doesn't even use lightbulb sockets anymore; the fixtures are designed to not need "bulb replacements")
So even on manufacturing, the LED bulb wins because it's up against 25 incandescent bulbs. But that's all trivial, because:
60W × 25000h = 1500 kWh
9W * 25000h = 225kWh
So a few extra or fewer kilowatt hours in manufacturing is irrelevant. It's totally dominated by usage energy.
Incandescent only wins one category: disposal (it's just glass and a little metal, you can just throw it in the trash; LED is e-waste and gets recycled). But in both cases, you're talking tenths of a percent of lifetime energy usage.