If only I drew a measly 75 watts in standby mode. But then again, I'm not typical. CCTV eats at least that much, X-10 gear, nearly as much. Most low-tech homes don't come near that, I agree, but there are exceptions. (-:
Their statement isn't untrue, it's merely misleading. It just depends on what and how many "other electronics" you're talking about. Old PC's with fairly stupid power management draw a lot. I'm beginning to wonder if it doesn't pay to move some of the stuff I have on old PIII's to newer boxes that consume far more juice when running but far less in standby. It's a tough call because of all the collateral, hard to quantify expenses.
As for recycling, I watched this morning as the four 48" fluorescent bulbs I had packaged and left out in the bright yellow recycling bucket got thrown in the back of a garbage truck and pulverized. It's clear if I want it done right, I have to do it myself, and that adds even more cost to bulbs because it means a trip to the recycling center that I wouldn't have taken otherwise.
It's Disraeli's law: "There are lies . . . damned lies . . . and
*statistics.*"
I would imagine that taking the two extremes, say from coal and oil company PR on the one hand and the total eco-enthusiasts (you know that 'tree-huggers' is not [ahem]100% politically correct, I assume and will make greenies see red!) on the other would reveal the actual rates.
That is if anyone really knows the answer to how much electricity is used for lighting.
I would be suspicious of any poll that presumed to know how my particular electric dollar is spent. I'd be hard pressed to calculate it myself with any degree of accuracy. Any number you read in the press is likely to be wrong. I recall seeing an article that said bloggers were far more accurate than traditional news sources in calling winners of last year's election. Of course, since I read it in a newspaper . . . (-:
The "we know what's good for you" folks have always lied through their teeth. The are so wrapped up in trying to make other people's lives match what they think is good for themselves that facts shouldn't have to get the way of better good.
Nuclear energy is inherently evil. How many people die every year from the energy sources that we have to use instead of it. How much green house gasses does a nuke facility put out? Other than in the Soviet Union (which was always willing to sacrifice lives to look good) how many people have died from nuclear power.
What percentage of imported fuel has been replaced by Alcohol? Even if we convert all our existing plants over to the next promised (no one can show that it actually works at all), how much can we replace?
How much better mileage (using the more realistic 2008 system) do hybrid cars carrying toxic batteries get. How far can you actually drive them in the hybrid mode?
How many times have we been promised (and now had claims the they were intentionally killed off) electric cars? Not relying on a miracle for new affordable battery technology, how far is the practical range of an electric car?
Why does biodesel get to count the plants that are cultivated to make it as a lack of carbon footprint? The same land left out of agriculture would be doing better for taking carbon out of the air.
When we get out of energy, the list of lies would swamp this one.
The link is still active. You need to paste the lines together. Here's a tinyURL leading to the same page:
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FTR, the article quotes Sam Kazman of the "Competitive Enterprise Institute" (CEI). Kazman's organization is actually an industry front set up to fight against government regulation.
This is the same Competitive Enterprise Institute that produces TV spot ads promoting carbon dioxide as a beneficial agent. They want us to keep believing that global warming is a good thing.
Here's what SourceWatch says about the CEI:
"The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) is a neoliberal think tank based in Washington DC. It calls itself 'a non-profit, non-partisan research and advocacy institute dedicated to the principles of free enterprise and limited government. We believe that individuals are best helped not by government intervention, but by making their own choices in a free marketplace.'"
"On its website CEI states that it 'serves as both a think tank?creating intellectual ammunition to support free markets?and an advocacy organization?putting that ammunition to use in persuasive ways.'"
"It postures as an advocate of "sound science" in the development of public policy. However, CEI projects dispute the overwhelimng scientific evidence that human induced greenhouse gas emissions are driving climate change. They have a program for 'challenging government regulations', push property rights as a solution to environment problems, opposed US vehicle fuel efficiency standards and been a booster for the drug industry."
The CEI is closely linked to Phillip Morris. 'Nuff said?
I would be very cautions about citing anything that comes out of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) in the same sentence with the phrase, "whose statistics can be trusted."
The CEI is a notorious source of disinformation. Here's a quote from Wikipedia on CEI:
"Environmental Policy"
"According to CEI, the Wall Street Journal has called it "the best environmental think tank in the country." CEI says it promotes 'free market environmentalism' and says market institutions are more effective in protecting the environment than is government."
"Among other things, CEI has been an outspoken opponent of government action on global warming that would require limits on greenhouse gas emissions. In March 1992, CEI?s founder Fred Smith said of global warming: 'Most of the indications right now are it looks pretty good. Warmer winters, warmer nights, no effects during the day because of clouding, sounds to me like we?re moving to a more benign planet, more rain, richer, easier productivity to agriculture'. One of CEI's projects was the now defunct Cooler Heads Coalition, which operated the website globalwarming.org. Myron Ebell was the chairman of CHC, and is the Director of Global Warming and International Environmental Policy at the CEI."
"In December of 2005 CEI participated in the UNFCCC negotiations in Montreal as an NGO, sending back several dispatches summarizing events of the conference."
"In a 2006 letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury (after the Archbishop urged Christians to take action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions), the CEI said that reducing these levels, even in 'baby steps,' would 'result in the deaths of more people in the U.S. than global warming would worldwide.'"
These are clearly not the kind of people "whose statistics can be trusted."
Here's a little more information on the "source" which the author used as the basis of the NYT article.
=========
Smoking as a civic duty From SourceWatch
Only a tobacco-funded think tank would ever go so far as to describe smoking as a civic duty. The tobacco industry has been a regular funder of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, (CEI) which in turn has gone to bat repeatedly and eagerly for tobacco in its battles with government agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Following the 1993 release of EPA's risk assessment linking secondhand cigarette smoke to lung cancer, CEI cranked out opinion articles for major newspapers with titles such as "A Smoking Gun Firing Blanks," "EPA's Bad Science Mars ETS Report," and "Safety Is a Relative Thing for Cars; Why Not for Cigarettes?"
CEI policy analyst Alexander Volokh went even further. "Perhaps, in the fine tradition of civil disobedience championed by Thoreau, we should even think of smoking as a civic duty," he wrote in the July 1994 issue of the CEI Update. "Perhaps," he continued, "every January 11th -- the anniversary of the Surgeon General's original 1964 report on smoking -- we should all light up, giving a filter-tipped finger, as it were, to a health-obsessed government." Volokh admitted that the government's efforts to discourage smoking "may further the cause of health," but concluded that "there are things more valuable than health."
In 1996, CEI was one of eight think tanks named in a report by Ralph Nader's Public Citizen titled "A Million for Your Thoughts: The Industry-Funded Campaign by Conservative Think Tanks Against the FDA." The report identified $3.5 million that these think tanks had received in funding from pharmaceutical, medical device, biotechnology and tobacco companies to help them pump out a "steady stream of reports, fact sheets, op-ed articles and newspaper, radio and television advertisements purporting to document the FDA's deadly overcaution and bullying of manufacturers." CEI's Julie DeFalco responded to the Public Citizen report by claiming that its positions on government regulations were developed "years before we ever received tobacco or drug industry money. Our position on FDA reform -- that the FDA is inherently prone to 'deadly overcaution,' and its veto power over new therapies should be removed -- hasn't changed in the nine years since then. How, then, does the fact that our support base has grown to include tobacco and pharmaceutical companies affect the validity of our position?"
Subsequently, however, additional information has become public about CEI's ties to the tobacco industry (including funding from Philip Morris that was not mentioned in the Public Citizen report). The 1997 settlement between tobacco companies and U.S. state attorney generals obligated the tobacco industry to place millions of pages of its internal documents online at locations such as the Philip Morris documents website. Those documents show that there was a hidden tobacco agenda behind CEI's attacks on FDA policies for regulating pharmaceuticals. Those attacks came at the very same time that tobacco executives were scrambling to head off the possibility that the FDA might acquire jurisdiction to regulate cigarettes. During the mid-1990s, Philip Morris alone gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to CEI and other think tanks and front groups such as the Washington Legal Foundation, Newt Gingrich's Progress and Freedom Foundation, the Cato Institute, and Citizens for a Sound Economy, which then argued publicly against FDA regulation of tobacco. According to the Wall Street Journal, "antipathy toward David Kessler's Food and Drug Administration, which wants to regulate cigarettes," was a major common denominator among the think tanks and policy groups to which tobacco companies donated during that time period. Rather than acting independently, CEI and other tobacco-funded think tanks coordinated their activities closely with the tobacco industry's attorneys, lobbyists and PR firms.
In February 1994, FDA Commissioner David Kessler suggested that the agency might have "a legal basis on which to regulate [tobacco] products," based on evidence from internal industry documents and industry insiders that nicotine in cigarettes was being manipulated to cause addiction -- in essence acting as a drug. This was the backdrop to the now-infamous incident in April 1994 when top tobacco executives testified before Congress that nicotine is not addictive. That same year, Philip Morris received a request for funding from CEI titled "The Human Cost of Regulation: Reframing the Debate on Risk Management." The proposal stated, "Risk has become the secular version of sin in our society, and risk management is the modern-day equivalent of religious crusades. ... From Superfund to indoor air quality to medical drug and device approval, bureaucratic initiatives on this front have ended up as incredibly costly failures whose only real achievement has been the creation of public alarm." To counter this purported threat, CEI proposed to raise "public recognition of the adverse public health effects of medical drug regulation and nutritional labeling" by demonstrating that "risk management by government can often have lethal effects."
Philip Morris had already given $50,000 to CEI on June 29, 1993, and it sent another check for $25,000 on July 27, 1994. The quid pro quo came a few months later. In the fall of 1994, notes an internal Philip Morris memorandum, the tobacco company approached CEI, along with the Washington Legal Foundation and Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE), seeking their help "to define the FDA as an agency out of control and one failing to live up to its congressional mandate regarding regulation of drugs and medical devices."
"To the extent FDA regulation was wrapped up in the youth smoking issue, it was hard to argue against," Steven C. Parrish noted in an August 1995 presentation to the Philip Morris board of directors. They therefore wanted CEI and the other think tanks to build a case against the FDA surrounding issues unrelated to tobacco. As Parrish explained, "Philip Morris representatives with scientific credentials were assigned the task of meeting with various 'think tanks' to discuss the issue of FDA regulation and encourage guest editorials and comments to the media." PM was "pleased," he said, "to see a chorus of rising criticism of Kessler and FDA." Beginning in December 1994, CEI joined CSE and the CEI in what Parrish described as "aggressive media campaigns ... through newspaper ads, policy papers, symposia, or by filing petitions directly with the FDA, and speaking directly to politicians."
A January 26, 1995, attorney's memorandum by David P. Nicoli to Philip Morris, marked "privileged and confidential," details the company's behind-the-scenes role in a coordinated rollout of media attacks on the FDA by PM's "non-tobacco" allies. CEI began the attack on January 11, "running inside the Beltway anti-FDA radio and TV ads." The following day, CSE held a press conference with a sympathetic congressman and began running its own inside the Beltway ads. Simultaneously, the Washington Legal Foundation ran a full-page ad in the New York Times and a three-quarter-page ad in the Wall Street Journal. The FDA's first public response to these attacks occurred on January 17. This was followed, Nicoli noted, by an industry "counter attack that both AP and Reuters pick up. Further volleys fly between the two, as trade press, general media amplify the fight." Other voices began chiming in -- the drug industry, the Washington Post, Business Week. Nicoli added that further attacks were already in the works, organized by Jim Tozzi, one of PM's top lobbyists, in coordination with the Progress and Freedom Foundation and the blue-chip PR firm of Powell Tate. "Progress and Freedom Foundation, through Tozzi, set to release FDA piece on
2/1/95 with Powell Tate publicizing," Nicoli reported.
"Robert Green" wrote in message news:dqidnUc12vspos3bnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@rcn.net...
There's a lot more the First World could do with their guilt. Instead, we believe we have offloaded the problem by letting the Chinese poison *their* air and buying their cheaper, less "green" products by the containership. "Their" air turns out to be "our air" eventually.
That's why it makes so much more sense to catch carbon and mercury at the stack, not introduce a new standard using bulbs that contain one of the very substances we're trying to control! But business has become very adept at blaming John Q. Public for any problems that arise. Just listen to Big Oil whine about how those pesky environmental rules *forced* these price rises as they bank their largest profits in history.
When there are just a few players, like the cable, cellphone, oil and utilities industries, they pretty much can set the prices where they want to. The EU's gotten together to try to put an end to $12 calls between countries that are only 4 minutes long. They've woken up to the fact that with these huge industries, there aren't any real competitors, so of course they set their prices as high as the public will bear. Look for $5 a gallon gas by this time next year. Big Oil knows that people will just suck it up so what's to stop them? When was the last time you saw the price of anything like gas or electricity or lumber go backwards as much as it leaps forward? There's a ratchet effect to prices and worse things are coming, and soon.
Looks like he's as wary as I am about calculations that "prove" the excess electricity saved won't simply be squandered elsewhere or exactly how many milligrams of mercury are going to be added per cubic inch of soil by switching to CFLs. Too many unknowables to form concrete conclusions, particularly since personal behavior like willingness to recycle is such a large element in the equations. Worse, still, no one seems to agree on simple things, like how much juice is used in lights per year in the entire country.
We've had this discussion before. High efficiency on many occasions seems to be synonymous with "no excess capacity." We just replaced a standard toilet with a low-flush model and for the first time in twenty years I've had to plunge the toilet at least half a dozen times in the last two months. I wonder how many double and triple flushers such toilets have spawned?
Forcing people to use an immature technology could easily sabotage it. I think that's what happened with CFLs. They started out with a big lie: "Lifetime" rated bulbs were really two or three year bulbs. People felt cheated, particularly since they were often sacrificing light quality, dimmer capabilities to achieve the "savings" that never materialized.
You misunderstand the concept, Bobby. The idea isn't to require a specific bulb type but to move away from using wasteful ones. Also, although some bulbs contain a small amount of mercury, the power to light the others introduces far more mercury into the environment and does so in a far worse manner than that in the high efficiency bulbs.
While I agree that bug oil and the Bush administration have done dastardly things to the economy, the environment and all us humans, that does not mean that we as individuals should not do all we can to reduce our use of polluting energy sources. In fact, it means just the opposite.
It's not necessary to squint. The message is misleading.
He says so but he offers no proof that data with which the scientific community overwhelmingly concurs is not accurate.
One doesn't save up electricity to squander it elsewhere. It's not a bag of coins in the dresser drawer. The more you use to light your home the more you contribute to the destruction of the atmosphere and the more oil Big Oil gets to sell. When you turn off an unneeded light or turn down the heat an extra degree you reduce the total demand -- plain and simple.
Documentation currently available shows that using more CFLs and lkess incandescents will result in a significant reduction in mercury in the food chain. This we already know. Othewrs have pointed out repeatedly that the amount and form of mercury introduced to landfills from used CFLs is less than atmospreric pollution from lighting conventional bulbs. It is also in a form which is far less likely to enter the food chain because it is largely contained, whereas airborne mercury goes directly into the food chain. These are not chimerical ideas but hard facts which the author you cite chooses to ignore.
That is not true.
It is not even a small element in the comparison of CFLs vs. incandescents. They all end up in the landfill and they all use electricity which in turn burns coal which in turn spews mercury and lots of other noxious crap into the air. We already know for a fact that using high efficiency bulbs will reduce atmospheric mercury. The only unknowable is whether people will bother in the next 10-20 years. It is without question that they will use more efficient everything
20 years from now as coastlines begin to move inland, crops fail and storms become worse and more frequent than anything we've seen so far.
I saw an excellent ad about global warming the other night. It showed a middle aged man standing on a railroad track with a freight train approaching from behind. He said that global warming isn't supposed to make a catastrophic impact for at least 30 more years. He doesn't expect to be here 30 years from now so he's not worried about it. Before the freight train gets near he steps off the track and out of harm's way, never noticing the 5-year old girl still standing on the tracks behind him.
The point, in case anyone misses it, is that we *might* not feel the impact of what we do now in our lifetimes but our children most assuredly will. The question is what kind of world do you want to leave for your children and grand children.
Actually, there is considerable agreement among the scientific community. There are also a number of outlier "scientists," mostly hired by big business interests, who spread disinformation in hopes of staving off regulatory restrictions on their activities.
No, I understand it completely. Too completely to believe that adding more mercury to the equation is really going to solve the pollution problem.
As I've said numerous times, the place to catch the CO2 and other pollution is at the smokestack, not jury-rigging some secondary solution that depends on a lot of "what ifs" that may end up as "what weren'ts." Adding mercury to millions of small consumer items in an attempt to reduce mercury and other pollutants emitted at several hundred power plants isn't a good idea on the face of it. It's power company propaganda that attempts to shift the cost for cleanup away from them and onto us. It is, as the article's author said, a lightbulb version of the low-flow toilet. The more Band-Aid-type solutions we use, the less likely we are to seek the "tough" solutions like scrubbers on power plant smokestacks.
It depends on where that power comes from. I don't believe that hydroelectric dams generate airborne mercury, nor do nuclear plants, nor does solar, etc. Installing scrubbers on the power sources that do emit mercury is the right solution to the problem. Why? Because those small amounts of mercury in each CFL add up when millions of bulbs get sold. Remember that toxic spill article about a broken bulb on a carpet? If one broken bulb can summon the EPA, the mercury content is not the trivial thing some people insist it is. Another part of the "what ifs" that worries me is who's to say what will end up being incinerated and not recycled? CFL proponents strike me as believing all those bulbs will be dutifully recycled, or so it seems when they run the numbers. I'm not that optimistic.
No one I know, including me, wants to wantonly pollute the environment. Yet we're cast in that light repeatedly by people who either don't understand or don't *want* to understand the true and very complex nature of the problem. For any number of reasons, CFLs are NOT adequate substitutes for incandescent bulbs, and ramming them down the throat of consumers who clearly don't want them in their current state of development is a diversionary tactic. I tend to focus in direct solutions rather than multiple level social-scientific predictions of how people will behave in the future. There's just no guarantee that if you lower people's electric bills this year that they won't make up the difference next year. Yet those assumptions and more like them are an integral part of the pro-CFL propaganda.
Do you *really* want to clean the air? Start with the things that make it dirty. Coal-fired power plant smokestacks. Direct solution. No mumbo jumbo magic schemes based on predictions that are likely to turn out to be just as phony as the bulb maker's longevity claims. CFLs are David Stockman's "trickle down" theory of economics transmogrified into conservationist clothing but what's trickling down this time is BS and more mercury into landfills.
I want to barf when I hear BigOil crybabying about how those pesky laws we forced on them are causing the shortages that drive up price. Now they are carping about how ethanol is going to make gasoline MORE expensive because it's SO much trouble for them to handle, yada yada yada. There's really only one course of action that's going to solve the problem: Scrub CO2 and mercury at the stacks.
We cleaned up car exhausts (over the absolutely unrelenting protests of the BigAutomakers who insisted the cars would be too expensive to purchase or drive - you remember that canard, don't you?). We can clean up power plants if we direct our national will toward that end and not towards a stopgap measure like mandating CFLs.
Sorry, but my own personal experience says it is, using the N-Vision bulbs I just bought a few months ago. I found myself in the kitchen, squinting, trying to read a label on a box and having to wait until the CFL warmed up so that I could read it without a magnifier. That would not have happened with an incandescent bulb: they're "instant on" devices and have rightfully created the expectation that any replacement light source should be similarly capable. How about that Edison? All this new-fangled technology and it still can't compete on such a primitive level.
He documents his case exactly was well as you've documented yours. (-: The "overwhelming concurrence" of the scientific community doesn't mean something's true. For nearly 100 years, the ENTIRE medical community believed ulcers were caused by stress and prescribed BILLIONS of dollars worth of useless medications to treat it. One lone Aussie scientist in 1982 did his own research and found that ulcers were caused by bacteria. It took a lot of convincing over a number of years, but the scientific "concurrence" is now quite different than it was and Australian researchers Professor Barry Marshall and Dr Robin Warren won the 2005 Nobel Prize for Medicine as a result:
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That's just one of hundreds of "re-sets" scientists have made as new data comes in. The world's climate has changed drastically over the last million years and yet there were no people here to cause it. It just happened. Makes you wonder if they've really got it right this time. Read here:
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to discover how many times *in human history* alone that the world climate has dramatically and rapidly shifted for reasons that could not have possibly had anything to do with industrialization because there was none. Just very clear fossil, ice core and dendrochronological records
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of the wild swings in average temperature that occur from apparently very natural sources. "Analysis of bubbles in ice cores shows that at the peak of glacial phases, CO2 was about 30% lower than during interglacial conditions." Hmm. Carbon dioxide fluctuating wildly and not a single power plant in sight. Makes you wonder. Well, it makes *me* wonder.
This is all basically irrelevant because the solution is to scrub at the stack and not depend on a Rube Goldberg chain of alleged savings, alleged minimal mercury contamination, etc. It's believing in a band-aid fairytale that misses the main problem: Hundreds of coal-fired plants belching CO2 and mercury into the air we breathe. That's the problem and the solution is the same for power plants as it was for cars and trucks: clean up the exhaust. Power companies just don't want to do it, that's all. It's easier to foist it off on us in a scheme that doesn't just double, it quintuples the price of a light bulb. Now *that's* a solution Big Business surely loves! Stick the consumer with higher prices AND the potential cost of the mercury cleanup. Sweet! What CEO wouldn't like that deal?
You make it sound all so incredibly simple but it's not. Peak capacity is what we're talking about and if light bulbs are used at night when commercial power drain is low, it may be that CFL's really have far less benefits than advocates claim. It may be that incandescents don't really cause anywhere near the excess load attributed to them, either. Why do I doubt the veracity of those claiming to know exactly how much we'll save? Because implicit in knowing the "green-ness" of CFL bulbs is intimate knowledge of how the US power grid works, exactly what percent of what type of power (nuke, hydro, coal, other) was in use at any moment as well as what part of the total load was lighting and what type of lighting it was.
Even if you knew all that, and it's basically unknowable as a certainty, you'd have to know other things like the real lifespan of CFL's and not the claimed lifespan. You might need to consider the eventual cost of taking all those minute quantities of mercury out of the landfills if, as we did with asbestos, we come to find out it's not just bad, but very very bad. Big Business already knows it will be us, the consumer, and not them that pays for the cleanup so why should they give a hoot about mercury pollution. We, the people, will pay for it via the Superfund and some extra taxes.
The worst part is that we'll have been suckered every step of the way into thinking that balky CFLs were the answer, and not smokestack emission controls or solar power research initiatives or better, more efficient tungsten or LED bulbs.
Let me make another analogy. Ever notice how fast new, huge 12 lane highways end up getting clogged at rush hour? Our appetite for power appears to be ever-growing, just like our appetite for highways. Making lighting cheaper doesn't guarantee a drop in electrical demand for very long. Plug-in hybrid cars and other new devices coming on line could eat up all the "capacity" saved by using CFLs and guess what? Because we chose CFLs and not scrubbers, all that mercury and CO2 is still belching. Mandating CFL's and thus adding a toxin like mercury is the wrong solution to the problem.
Increasing the efficiency of lighting is great - but if, as a result, people now spend more on bulbs that don't last as long as they claim, don't light as well as they claim, have end-of-life recycling and greater manufacturing costs embedded in them, don't work well with dimmers or home automation equipment, then maybe those efficiency equations aren't telling the whole story. Maybe domestic tranquility isn't important to you, but the author of the original piece thought it has value. So do I. A bulb that emits toxic smoke or toxic mercury in a failure mode is NOT an improvement. It's a step backwards. A pretty big one. And all because the power industry would rather not have to deal with emissions control and their propaganda machines have convinced a lot of folks that's a good idea. Well, it's not.
Only if you FAIL to take the correct step of scrubbing at the power plant smokestack. This is part of the equation that seems to be repeatedly omitted, and with good cause. Once you scrub, you don't need to add more mercury in the light bulbs in some strange offset scheme. You've fixed the problem directly. That's what's remarkable about this "fix." It's like
9/11. Want to fix the hijacked plane as missile problem? Lock the cabin doors. El Al had been doing it for 20 years. Instead, we create bureaucracies, invent entire ways to erode our own civil liberties and spend billions of dollars of treasure from our taxes to fight wars when the solution was remarkably simple. Lock the cabin doors.
The warming and pollution problem has a simple solution, too. Scrub emissions at the smokestacks if you want to reduce CO2 and airborne pollutants. Don't depend on dubious CFL bulb schemes to clean the air.
Only IF you don't take the correct step of scrubbing at the power plant smokestack.
Only IF you don't take the correct step of scrubbing at the power plant smokestack.
Are you detecting a pattern here? The arguments for CFL's start to fall apart when you consider that the only way to be SURE to eliminate the output of mercury and CO2 into the environment is to catch it at the stack.
Speaking of "not true", that's another assumption of the sort I take issue with. I'll bet they don't "all" end up and the landfill and that at least a few of those bulbs end up in incinerators.
Only IF you don't take the correct step of scrubbing at the power plant smokestack.
And increase the amount of mercury going into landfills if those bulbs contain mercury, and so far, the bulk of the bulbs proposed to solve the problem contain that toxin. Fixing a poison problem with another poison isn't smart. It's what I call anti-common sense science.
I suppose what irks me the most is that there's an automatic assumption that if someone says they're against CFL's, they are somehow branded as someone who doesn't give a fig about the environment. That's patently untrue. I care deeply about the environment and that's precisely why I believe replacing incandescents, that only *indirectly* cause mercury and CO2 airborne pollution with something that causes DIRECT mercury pollution is a bad idea. We've been mislead before by scientists who promise the next great discovery will cure all our problems. The latest "cure all" in medicine, Vioxx, had to be pulled from the market when one of the indirect results of its use as a pain killer was that it killed people, too. Whoops! Right until the very end they had documentation and scientific concurrences out the ying-yang. But it didn't make the product work safely. In fact, a lot of the "well known facts" Merck dispersed about Vioxx were simply bogus.
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Worse still the FDA and Merck say that they don't know even know if the increased risk of heart problems will go away after people stop taking Vioxx. That means lots of people may have invited Mr. Death for a visit when all they wanted to do was soothe their aching joints. Beware of the promises of scientists for they are often bargains with the devil.
More importantly, there are lots of industry propagandists that try to make us believe that the problems lie with those rotten consumers and not with the power plants belching all that pollution. Seems like at least a few people have bought into that line. As for business hating regulation, that's untrue. They love it so much, they help Congress write the laws. Why? Because that way they can tailor them to reduce competition. Phillip Morris has been helping the FDA regulate smoking. Since they hold the largest share of the market, an advertising ban would simply "lock in" their huge slice of the market, so they're all for it.
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Big Business also loves to deflect solutions away from themselves and onto third parties like consumers as part of the great epidemic of cost shifting going on in the world. Why scrub at the stacks if you can convince people that CFL's are going to magically make for cleaner air? So far, they seem to have gotten at least a few takers on that idea. What was Exxon's first response to Exxon Valdez oil spill? They "unflagged" and spun off those nasty ships and made it someone else's problem.
According to that same EPA document, mercury in CFL's is not the problem. Coal fired power plants emit vast amounts of mercury into the atmosphere in the process of providing electricity for conventional bulbs.
"Mercury is an element (Hg on the periodic table) found naturally in the environment. Mercury emissions in the air can come from both natural and man-made sources. Utility power plants (mainly coal-fired) are the largest man-made source, because mercury that naturally exists in coal is released into the air when coal is burned to make electricity. Energy efficient CFLs present an opportunity to prevent mercury emissions from entering the environment because they help to reduce emissions from coal-fired power plants. Coal-fired power generation accounts for roughly 40 percent of the mercury emissions in the U.S."
"EPA is implementing policies to reduce airborne mercury emissions. Under regulations EPA issued in 2005, mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants will drop by nearly 70 percent by
2018."
"For more information on all sources of mercury, visit
Not the problem . . . YET. They, like the FDA, have been gutted over the last decade. Both agencies, like the FAA and numerous others pretty much represent industry, not the consumer. How else would an Arabian horseman end up running FEMA?
No one is denying that mercury from coal-fired plants is indeed a problem. So is CO2. But the simple, common sense solution is to fix the problem where it occurs: at the smokestacks of the coal fired plants. Certain very powerful financial interests don't like that idea because the money would come out of *their* pockets, not yours. There's one very important fact to remember because it's at the foundation of the problem: No amount of CFL bulb use by anyone will scrub one atom of mercury from power plant emissions.
CFL proponents are quite hopeful that by making electricity cheaper and more plentiful (by reducing the consumption from tungsten bulbs) that people will magically not make up the consumption in other ways. I say that's remarkably flawed reasoning given what we've seen in other areas (think freeways). It's particularly flawed when it comes to the problem at hand: reducing overall mercury emission *both* airborne and *all other* kinds. CFL's fails that test because they add to the general "mercury load" of the environment. My feeling is that whenever you propose to fix a problem with a different problem, you're cane-toading.
Proponents merely hope that the reduction in overall electrical demand will result in those coal-fired plants emitting less mercury. It depends on the flawed assumption that there won't be any increase in demand to offset those savings. That's where the proposed CFL solution falls flat. There's absolutely no proof that the demand for electricity won't keep rising anyway, as it always has. Capture at the stack is the right answer.
The CFL solution is merely a stopgap that helps avoid a course of action power plant owners don't want to implement: a reduction of profits and increased expenditure on stack scrubbing and more research into pollution control. Worse, still, it fools people into thinking that the problem is somehow solved when in fact, more and more mercury is entering the air and, as a result of the "CFL solution" the landfills and incinerators as well. Anyone remember SNL's "Bad Idea" bluejeans? Same thing.
No argument there. So why not catch it at the stack instead of depending on Rube Goldberg schemes that "hopefully" reduce the amount of mercury by "hopefully" reducing the overall demand for electricity, something that historically has never happened? Until some posts a reputable figure for how many grams of mercury are emitted for every tungsten watt or CFL watt, we're arguing in a factual vacuum. Hell, we can't even determine how much juice is used for lighting.
There are far too many "soft points" in the numbers. CFL's don't last as long as claimed. We don't know how much coal-fired power *any* sort of lamps consume, let alone differentiating between CFL and tungsten. We don't know how CFL's affect the "peak load" that causes new generators to be built and old dirty ones to be brought on line during peak loads. We don't know where all the "minute" amounts of mercury are going to end up and who will pay to clean them. That's enough ambiguity to raise serious questions.
What sense can the average Jane or John Doe make of this? They can start with the facts they can verify for themselves. The packages say "lifetime" and "10,000 hours" and proclaim 100's of dollars in savings. If the Does have used any CFL's lately, they'll know that "10,000" *useful* hours is a laboratory pipe dream. That should alert them in that other claims concerning benefits are similarly inflated or bogus.
"Present an opportunity?" That's a "we hope it works out" weasel-sort of wording. Be afraid, be very afraid. Replacing one form of mercury pollution with another, no matter how allegedly "benign" the second form, is a bad idea. "Present an opportunity to prevent?" Wouldn't it just be better to prevent?
Which means that we should catch the mercury at the stack, not hope that selling expensive bulbs containing one of the very poisons we are trying to control will do the trick. I just had one of my N:Vision bulbs burn out, and it can't be more than a few months old. I know the payback claims are bogus.
Until CFL performance is vastly improved, people are going to try them, experience one of the many issues affecting CFLs (slow starting, dimming problems, temperature problems, burn-up problems, much higher "buy-in" costs, size problems, premature failures) and end up being convinced CFL's aren't suitable substitutes for incandescents. My wife's words: "lightbulbs were never a problem of any kind for us until CFL's arrived." And ya know? She's right.
Guess what those initiatives consist of? Stack scrubbing, flue gas desulfurization units (baghouses), electrostatic precipitators, special sorbents fluidized-bed combustion and other methods.
These new technologies are coming on line too slowly because we apparently would rather make war on Iraq than declare war on the serious problems facing us here at home. What's needed is political will to overcome the same objections we heard from Big Auto about car exhausts. "Oh, it's *too* hard and *too* expensive and we'll NEVER be able to do it without adding thousands of dollars to the cost of each car." When the haze over big cities like LA became too hard to ignore, it was the Japanese who solved the problem that Ford and GM whined about as insoluble. And they solved it using cars that cost less than any from the Big Three.
What was Big Auto's reaction? Not to build better, less polluting more fuel efficient cars but to demand tariffs from Congress disguised as "Voluntary Export Restraints." We're hearing the same damned lies and whines all over again except this time we can't punish the Japanese for building better equipment because, as you noted, power can't be "banked" or "exported" very easily. We should be a leader in developing pollution controls instead of being a leading polluter. The Germans are way ahead. We call them for advanced pollution control technology:
Not the major problem, period. The major problem is mercury from coal burning power generating plants. You've been told this repeatedly but you choose to ignore it because it doesn't fit your dislike for CFLs.
That is a direct result of the Bush administration's policy of installing incompetents whose only qualification is loyalty to Bush and a willingness to do whatever Bush's industrialist and energy company pals want.
By doing a "heck of a job?" :^)
What you miss is that it's not just US agencies that are saying we need to cut back on pollution caused by coal generating plants. This is a matter which has garnered pretty much world-wide scientific consensus.
It is in fact a many fold greater problem than mercury in CFLs.
If the fix were simple we wouldn't be having this discussion. Unfortunately, it's not as easy as you might think. There are three major types of coal used for electric generation -- bituminous, subbituminous and lignite. Current scrubber technology removes anywhere from none to one third of the mercury in lignite plants. Precipitators used on the other types remove between 3% and one third of the mercury from bituminous and subbituminous coal.
Fabric filers are more effective but they tend to break down, releasing 100% of the mercury, sulfur dioxide and other nasty stuff.
No matter what we do the public pays for it. Any and every cost is passed along. Bush calls it trickle-down. Don't ask what color is the liquid you feel trickling down on you. :^)
The problem with that statement is it misses the point. By reducing power demand you reduce pollution.
You misunderstand energy usage. No matter whether we use CFL, incandescent or whatever else is developed, other energy demands will certainly increase over time. They don't "take up the slack." They simply use a given amount of energy. Suppose all other users together require a total of N megawatts and electric lighting requires L megawatts. The total is N+L megawatts. Reducing L does not increase N. It simply reduces the total.
And I say that your reasoning is flawed (no offense; we simply disagree about how things work).
Good example. We have built the world's most advanced highway system in this country. There are multi-lane roads to go from any major city to any other in the mainland USA. In spite of that the traffic in some areas is a mess, especially during rush hour.
Our traffic increases because Americans love cars. We drive to work. We drive to the store. We drive everywhere. I read online that in 1988 Americans drove about 18,600 miles per household. By 1994 we were averaging 21,100 miles per household. This is more significant than the number of vehicles since there's a correlation to highway crowding. During those years the US spent billions improving roads -- adding lanes, improving freeway design, etc.
Had we not continued to maintain and improve the roads we would not have seen a decrease in miles driven or even in the number of vehicles per household. We'd simply have more congestion.
You say that as if airborne mercury was not the greatest part of the problem. Unfortunately, it is by far the worst part. Following is a quote from Senator Patrick Leahy's website which discusses the issue:
"While national policies have been successful at reducing mercury emissions from medical and municipal waste incinerators by over 90 percent since 1990, mercury pollution from coal-fired power plants (the largest remaining sources) remains completely unregulated. As our country continues to grow mercury pollution from power plants is predicted to increase with increased electrica demand, which is why it is so important that we do something now to reduce this pollution. Up until the spring of 2003, EPA was working toward finalizing an effective regulatory policy to reduce mercury from power plants by over 90 percent beginning in 2008. Unfortunately, the Bush Administration unilaterally derailed this goal and EPA instead proposed a rule in January 2004 that rolls back the progress and will at best reduce emissions by 70 percent but not until
2018. Under the Bush proposal yet another entire generation will have to be exposed to unhealthy levels of mercury and women and pregnant mothers will continue to worry about safety of the fish they want to feed their family."
You've already been told by more than one person that this is wrong math. CFLs introduce far less mercury than what they save and what they do introduce is in a more contained condition. It isn't the existence of mercury that's at issue but *where* the mercury goes. Neither the manufacture of CFLs nor the burning of coal creates a single drop of mercury. It's already present. The problem is that coal fired electrical plants throw mercury into the atmosphere, from whence it finds its way into the food chain.
Perhaps an analogy will help explain my position. I have monthly expenses for telephone, broadband Internet access and CATV. Base charges for each phone line are $65 per month, including unlimited calls anywhere in the USA. CATV is about $100 a month. Cable Internet is anouther $65. DSL backup is another $240 a month. That's $470 a month plus taxes and fees.
To reduce expenses I opted for fiber optic services from Verizon. They will charge me $126 a month for all three services. That's a $126 monthly load on my wallet. However, I'm eliminating a $470 load for a net reduction of $344 per month (plus tax).
CFLs do the same thing with mercury. They add a small load on the environment while decresing a bigger one.
This is where your assumption is flawed. You mistakenly believe that any savings will be taken up by other uses. The truth is that those other uses will increase *regardless* whether we economize on lighting. The one doesn't cause the other.
No, that is where your argument falls flat. You equate energy usage to a cookie jar. You figure if you don't eat the cookie, Houston will so there's no point in dieting. That is flawed logic. Electric generation is demand based. The more we use the more the plants will generate. Saving in one area doesn't create waste in another.
The goal is to reduce total demand. Regardless what one user demands, if we reduce another usage we reduce the total demand.
If scrubbing worked well enough it would be the answer. Unfortunately, it only captures a portion of the mercury and other noxious gases from two of the three types of coal and none of it from the other type -- lignite.
That is wrong. High efficiency lighting is one part of what needs to be a multi-faceted solution. No single solution exists. Each effort will help alleviate the problem. With improved scrubbing and efficient usage we can gain more than with scrubbers alone. Scrubbing technology is nowhere near the level it needs to reach. We agree that polluters, including energy giants need to do more to solve the problems they create. But that alone isn't going to save the planet. Ignoring other things *we* need to do to improve the situation while demanding that
*they* fix it is no more realistic than the typical bullshit we get from the Bush administration.
You're wrong on this count again. While coal burning plants are the major source of mercury pollution, incinerators are not. Those have been pretty much 100% clean of mercury pollution for some time now.
Try not throwing around denegrating but irrelevant terms like "Rube Goldberg". It muddies the argument and does nothing to prove your point.
The fact is that reducind total demand can and does help reduce pollution.
That's a red herring. We don't need the precise numbers to know that reducing electrical demand will reduce the amount of toxins spewed into the atmosphere. Your problem is you dfon't understand (or are deliberately ignoring) the economics of energy usage.
We know for a fact that CFLs use far less current than incandescents. We know that every watt used adds to the amount of mercury in our food. We know that by reducing the demand we can reduce the amount of poison in the air.
They last significantly longer than incandescants. They use far less power per lumen, reducing the mercury in the air far more than the miniscule amount they place in landfills.
No, it's not. It's a clear statement that by using CFLs instead of incandescants we can reduce the amount of poison in the food supply. You do nothing to advance your position with such meaningless remarks.
Of whom?
Again you miss the point. CFL usage reduces the total amount of mercury pollution. This is a good thing. Furthermore, the small amount CFLs do use is nowhere near as harmful as airborne mercury which we know for fact winds up in our food.
Yes, if there was a way to prevent. There isn't. There are only ways to reduce. CFLs are one of them. Insisting on using wasteful lighting is one of the things you can do to make the world a little worse every day.
I think I've answered that enough times.
On that score we agree 100%. The Bush administration and it's ultra-right wing supporters have buried their collective, empty heads in the Iraqi sand for years. Sadly, they've also managed to ruin our economy, set us back decades on the environment, stacked the US Supreme Court and many appellate districts with incompetent fools, burned virtually all of our allies and turned our Constitution and the Bill of Rights upside down. Other than that, you have to like them, eh. :^)
Coal is a DIRTY energy source. It's extraction, transportation and preparation cause extreme environmental damage. These factors tend to be left out of the discussion.
There is no clean way to extract energy from coal or to deal with the vast amount of waste it creates.
"Clean coal" is at best a relative term, at worst it is just more of the same BS we are flooded with by the corporate tools that run our government.
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