Pick your poison: Carbon or mercury?
Knight in Dragonland took me to task for using who he considered a biased, anti-environmentalist source for my recent post about how
Replacing a 75-watt incandescent bulb with a 20-watt compact fluorescent (CFL) bulb reduces the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by 1300 pounds in the life of a single bulb. It also saves the consumer up to $50 in energy costs during that same time period, according to the Rocky Mountain Institute.
There are, however, environmental trade-offs to consider. Using CFLs reduces the amount of carbon dioxide released from coal-fired power plants, but it also has the potential to increase mercury pollutants when the bulbs are disposed.
Levine’s office says it is working on an amendment to provide for a recycling program to handle the mercury. It says “neither (the mercury in CFLs nor the lead in incandescents) is 100 percent environmentally friendly without some sort of recycling program.”
There are people who are environmentalists because they are educated and they are concerned. And there are those who do so because it’s trendy. It’s the latter who are like sheep and will jump on the CFL bandwagon. Which is fine for them, but I object to legislation mandating these things be used. One-size fits all legislation never works.
Today’s fashionable environmentalist worships at the Church of Carbon Reduction, and its Bible is Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.” If GE had come out with these odd-looking, mercury-filled things 20 years ago and tried to market then as a way for consumers to save cash, these same environmentalists would be indignant.
Hat tip, former Peorian Kevin Reynen, now with OurTahoo.org
Billy Dennis is a former reporter and editor at small daily and weekly newspapers in Illinois and Missouri. He comments on media, news and politics. He also owns and operates 
Where did he expect you to get it from, The KAOS KIDZ?
I still think that most of the anti-CFL stuff is either FUD or ignorance, but I’m solidly in your camp on one issue: CFLs should not be mandated by law! If the government wants to create a lumens-per-watt tax or something, that’s one thing, but mandating or outlawing specific technologies just keeps the market from working most efficiently.
I think there is no single magic thing that you can do to save the world. People treat CFLs like they are that thing.
Mandating them would be absurd, but we have done worse…
As for me, I like them for light fixtures that enclose the bulb in some sort of globe. Why? I don’t like to change light bulbs. I use incandescents on lights where the bulb is part of the asthetics.
Yeah, like 1.6 gallon toilets that you have to flush twice.
Burning coal to light up those regular light bulbs releases mercury into the air so not using CFLs doesn’t get rid of the mercury problem.
I just did the math and coal plants release 48 tons of mercury each year (US gov numbers) thats equal to the mercury in 11 BILLION CFLs (4 mg per bulb). CFL’s reduce power usage by 75%, they seem like winners to me.
Would you want YOUR infant child sleeping in small bedroom where one of those mercury-filled things things exploded? This is about a device that brings EXTRA mercury into peoples’ homes IN ADDITION to the mercury released into the atmosphere by burning coal.
I read an article yesterday that detailed a woman who had to spend over $2000.00 to have her daughters room cleaned by a HazMat team, because she dropped one and it broke. Mercury is one of the most toxic materials known to man and I would prefer to breathe a diluted form of it in the air, then live with a more concentrated form in my house.
I read the story you are talking about and did not have to be such a big deal. All she had to do is not vacuum it up but use a paper towel and open a window. We have all been living with mercury for years in much higher amounts in tube fluorescents and nobody cared about that.
Good information about this issue from Snopes.com, devoted to sorting truth from urban legends: http://www.snopes.com/medical/toxins/cfl.asp
Cruel twists of fate…
Do compact fluorescent bulbs present an unreasonable hazard? Maybe, maybe not. (I lean more toward “not,” myself, but that’s just me.) Still, it’s not like we otherwise never have any dealings with dangerous stuff: [B]enzene — the primary comp…
[...] Actually, I wouldn’t call it a “primary” component: it makes up maybe one percent of your average tankful, and the EPA proposes to reduce this by 45 percent starting in 2011. Still, gasoline is nasty stuff, quite apart from that highly-flammable vapor, and we’ve learned to deal with it. I have no doubt we can learn to deal with CFLs. If nothing else, they remind us that ultimately everything is a trade-off. [...]