The city council of Town X has proposed reducing the city s electric expenses by switching all the lights in public buildings from incandescent bulbs to light emitting diodes LEDs The switch would be made gradually as the old incandescent bulbs burn out a

The writer of the argument concludes that the city council of Town X can replace the incandescent bulbs with LEDs in public buildings in order to decline the city’s electric costs since the new type of bulbs would not incur any new purchase cost, and they burn more brightly; however, this argument cannot be accepted as it fails to answer some critical questions which can be challenging in one way or another; moreover the conclusion dismisses some assumptions which are important to draw an accurate conclusion.

The first problem with the argument is that the author mentioned that LEDs make no extra cost to purchase, but the purchase cost is an initial one; in other words, it is a part of total lightening costs. Therefore, the same purchase cost does not mean that the total cost would the same as before. For instance, isn’t that possible the new bulbs use more electricity? As the author mentioned that LEDs burn brighter, it is not an implausible assumption. In fact, while the new bulbs cost same money to purchase, there could be another costs associated with electricity usage.

The second problem with the argument is that the author does not provide any information about the life cycle of these two bulbs. Do LEDs work as the same time that incandescent bulbs do? It is an essential question that the answer can invalidate the conclusion. If LEDs have shorter life cycle, the city council will incur more costs to replace them with new ones. Like last paragraph, there are some possible costs that the argument did not consider in its conclusion.

The third problematic issue of the argument is that there virtually are some unintended consequences in switching programs which need to be addressed before implementing such a plan. In this case, to burn more brightly could leads to produce more heat; therefore it would necessitate more using air conditioning which is equal to new electrical costs. Actually the switching plan increases the electrical expenses in another way in despite of any other possible declines.

The forth matter that the author did not consider is the feasibility of just directly switching. What I mean is that are the older fixtures and infrastructures suitable to run new bulbs, or they need to be replaced with new ones? Indeed, if the answer of the later question was yes, the city council would have to spend some money to replace the old infrastructure with new ones. Again, there would be more costs which should be considered to decide whether the switching plan is practical or not.

To conclude, while the presented hypothesis is interesting, I would assume that according to the above explanations, it suffers from lack of detailed considerations and studies. The result of the research can only be accepted if the weaknesses already referred to are all removed, and the questions are answered properly.