Posted on 03/14/2007 5:08:22 PM PDT by fanfan
They have to be left on all the time, they're made from banned toxins and they won't work in half your household fittings. Yet Europe (and Gordon Brown) says 'green' lightbulbs must replace all our old ones.
Every day now we are being deluged with news of the latest proposals from our politicians about how to save the planet from global warming. We must have 'a new world order' to combat climate change, Gordon Brown proclaimed yesterday. We must have strict 'green' limits on air travel, proposes David Cameron, so that no one can afford to take more than one flight a year.
A fifth of all our energy must be 'green' by 2020, says the EU, even though there is no chance of such an absurd target being met. We must have 'green' homes, 'green' cars, 'green' fuel, even microchips in our rubbish bins to enforce 'green' waste disposal.
Have these politicians any longer got the faintest idea what they are talking about? Do they actually look at the hard, practical facts before they rush to compete with each other in this mad musical-chairs of gesture politics?
Take just one instance of this hysteria now sweeping our political class off its feet: that which was bannered across the Daily Mail's front page on Saturday in the headline 'EU switches off our old lightbulbs'.
This was the news that, as part of its latest package of planet-saving measures, the EU plans, within two years, to ban the sale of those traditional incandescent lightbulbs we all take for granted in our homes. Gordon Brown followed suit yesterday, saying he wanted them phased out in Britain by 2011.
No doubt the heads of government who took this decision (following the lead of Fidel Castro's dictatorship in Cuba) purred with selfcongratulation at striking such a daring blow against global warming.
After all, these 'compact fluorescent bulbs' (or CFLs), to which they want us all to switch, use supposedly only a fifth of the energy needed by the familiar tungsten-filament bulbs now to be made illegal.
Among the first to congratulate the EU's leaders was UK Green MEP Caroline Lucas, who claimed that 'banning old-fashioned lightbulbs across the EU would cut carbon emissions by around 20 million tonnes per year and save between e5 million and e8million per year in domestic fuel bills'.
Who could argue? Certainly one lot of people far from impressed by the EU's decision are all those electrical engineers who have been clutching their heads in disbelief. Did those politicians, they wondered, actually take any expert advice before indulging in this latest planet- saving gesture?
In fact, the virtues of these 'low-energy' bulbs are nothing like so wonderful as naive enthusiasts like Ms Lucas imagine them to be. Indeed in many ways, the experts warn, by banning incandescent bulbs altogether, the EU may have committed itself to an appallingly costly blunder.
It is a decision that will have a far greater impact on all our lives than most people are yet aware, presenting the UK alone with a bill which, on our Government's own figures, could be £3 billion or more.
The result will provide a quality of lighting which in many ways will be markedly less efficient. Even Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor who put forward the proposal, admitted that, because the energy-saving bulbs she uses in her flat take some time to warm up, she often has 'a bit of a problem' when she is looking for something she has 'dropped on the carpet'.
But even more significantly, because they must be kept on so much longer to run efficiently, the actual amount of energy saved by these bulbs has been vastly exaggerated.
So what are the disadvantages of CFLs over the traditional bulbs we will no longer be allowed to buy? Quite apart from the fact that the CFLs are larger, much heavier and mostly much uglier than familiar bulbs - and up to 20 times more expensive - the vast majority of them give off a harsher, less pleasant light.
Because they do not produce light in a steady stream, like an incandescent bulb, but flicker 50 times a second, some who use them for reading eventually find their eyes beginning to swim - and they can make fast-moving machine parts look stationary, posing a serious safety problem.
Fluorescent CFLs cannot be used with dimmer switches or electronically-triggered security lights, so these will become a thing of the past. They cannot be used in microwaves, ovens or freezers, because these are either too hot or too cold for them to function (at any temperature above 60C degrees or lower than -20C they don't work),
More seriously, because CFLs need much more ventilation than a standard bulb, they cannot be used in any enclosed light fitting which is not open at both bottom and top - the implications of which for homeowners are horrendous.
Astonishingly, according to a report on 'energy scenarios in the domestic lighting sector', carried out last year for Defra by its Market Transformation Programme, 'less than 50 per cent of the fittings installed in UK homes can currently take CFLs'. In other words, on the Government's own figures, the owners of Britain's 24 million homes will have to replace hundreds of millions of light fittings, at a cost upwards of £3billion.
In addition to this, lowenergy bulbs are much more complex to make than standard bulbs, requiring up to ten times as much energy to manufacture. Unlike standard bulbs, they use toxic materials, including mercury vapour, which the EU itself last year banned from landfill sites - which means that recycling the bulbs will itself create an enormously expensive problem.
Perhaps most significantly of all, however, to run CFLs economically they must be kept on more or less continuously. The more they are turned on and off, the shorter becomes their life, creating a fundamental paradox, as is explained by an Australian electrical expert Rod Elliott (whose Elliott Sound Products website provides as good a technical analysis of the disadvantages of CFLs as any on the internet).
If people continue switching their lights on and off when needed, as Mr Elliott puts it, they will find that their 'green' bulbs have a much shorter life than promised, thus triggering a consumer backlash from those who think they have been fooled.
But if they keep their lights on all the time to maximise their life, CFLs can end up using almost as much electricity from power stations (creating CO2 emissions) as incandescent bulbs - thus cancelling out their one supposed advantage.
In other words, in every possible way this looks like a classic example of kneejerk politics, imposed on us not by our elected Parliament after full consultation and debate, but simply on the whim of 27 politicians sitting around that table in Brussels, not one of whom could have made an informed speech about the pluses and minuses of what they were proposing.
Even if it does have the effect of reducing CO2 emissions, those reductions will be utterly insignificant when compared with emissions from China, for example, which is growing so fast it is using half the world's cement, 30 per cent of the world's coal, one quarter of copper production and 35 per cent of steel.
There was not a hint of democracy in this crackpot decision, which will have a major impact on all our lives, costing many of us thousands of pounds and our economy billions - all to achieve little useful purpose, while making our homes considerably less pleasant to live in.
Such is the price we are now beginning to pay for the ' ecomadness' which is sweeping through our political class like a psychic epidemic. The great 'Euro-bulb blunder' is arguably the starkest symbol to date of the crazy new world into which this is leading us.
Wouldn't a geothermal tap create problems with sulfur emissions, or do those stay in the ground (where they belong)?
"But the choice to put them in or not was mine and not some Washington or Springfield bureaucrats."
Amen. The crux of the matter.
Because there is no global warming due to carbon dioxide.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
Their DDT Ban Killed Millions --
Their Global Warming Hoax Will Kill Millions More
CO2 doesn't precede temperature, it lags it and thus cannot cause global warming. Due to the much higher cost of green electricity such as solar and wind power, limiting countries that are trying to develop to green power means those countries can't develop. Those facts and much more is explained in the video.
GoogleVideo -- The Great Global Warming Swindle
YouTube -- The Great Global Warming Swindle
We switched to all LED Christmas lights for our tree last year. They're not very bright but the color doesn't flake off and they stay cool, keeping damage to any nearby ornaments down to a minimum. I also won't have to constantly replace them.
I hope LED standard bulbs to become a reality. I can't stand fluroscents -- they hum and their light gives me a headache.
It's none of the government's business what light bulbs we use.
It's none of the government's business how much energy we use. We pay for it!
It's none of the government's business how big our toilets are.
Or how high we set the heat in our houses.
Or how many doors we have.
Or windows.
Or smoke alarms.
Or how we decide to deal with our garbage.
Or how we raise our kids, for that matter.
Now, I'm wonderfully pleased that some people are wonderfully pleased with the twirly new light bulbs. Just keep your hands off of my old-style bulbs, and we'll be fine.
One question, though... have you ever broken a light bulb? Me, too. Do you really want to break one of the new ones, if they contain mercury vapor?
I'm betting we something much sooner. Look how fast LEDs have become mainstream in flashlight. They've moved into every segment with the exception of the brightest xenon bulbs.
LEDs will answer one of my big gripes with the CFL lights, a bulb that will work in a '3-way' fixture.
He is an idiot, I was going to compile a list of errors here, but I decided not to waste my time, it goes over so many heads here, and the desire to disbelieve what contradicts your beliefs is so strong anyways. Having said that, I DO agree with him that incandescent bulbs should not be banned. There is a use for all things...
"Look how fast LEDs have become mainstream in flashlight"
That's because they can fit into that application well and for a minimum amount of money. Combine it with their long life and low power consumption and flashights become a 'killer app' for LED lights.
But take a look at the current crop of LED 'edison base' bulbs:
http://www.superbrightleds.com/edison.html
There's a couple problems:
1. Rather expensive
2. Relatively low light output for 'standard bulb' clones.
They can do things like floodlights well - it's almost like a larger version of a flashlight with the throw pattern. The problem comes when they try to do something like a standard lightbulb throw - nobody has really come close to replicating a standard bulb throw and power yet.
So right now few people are going to pay $30 to get a 30 watt equivalent LED bulb unless they're really, really into LED lighting and it meets their needs. Something is going have to change drastically in order to get them into widespread usage for any sooner than around 2010.
You nailed it right there. You have also summed up Politics in a single sentence.
Could you list maybe 5 or 6 major ones?
I think the point was to expose that CFLs are not a solution to reducing energy usage. The author is not saying that the CFLs are evil but when it comes to energy savings, the case may be wildly overstated and maybe even wrong.
Testimonials of "i installed CFLs and it saved me over $1000" cannot be trusted because they are anecdotal and easily subject to placebo effect.
The only valid point in the entire screed that I can see is:
"There was not a hint of democracy in this crackpot decision..."
Not that that isn't enough...
I wouldn't sell the superiority of the CFL for its energy/cost savings as much as I'm interested in obtaining the best lighting possible for vision and performing related tasks.
As most people are aware, when people hit 40 or 50, they begin requiring reading glasses that are extremely cumbersome and annoying -- which is meliorated greatly by full-spectrum lighting, of which the compact flusorescents seem to be the best at producing.
Also, since lighting effectiveness is greatly affected by the distance away from the source, only a light that produces a low level of heat can be placed close to the user. So the light must have the proper fixture to be optimally useful -- which is the desk lamp.
As for ambient lighting, I think it is less useful and the LEDs are probably the better solution because of low power consumption -- while producing much less light, but the difference between a little and none can be huge -- when say, like camping, or foraging in a closet or basement.
So while I think there are appropriate uses for different types of lighting, that optimality, has never been recognized and addressed.
Even if a bulb costs 10 to 20 times more, if it does something the others can't -- that's the price it is, which is still only $10 or $20, for pretty much a longterm if not lifetime solution. Not only the full=spectrum lighting cure one's vision, it is used in light therapies to heal all kinds of afflictions -- many caused by artificial lighting! So if one can avail themselves of healthful lighting, the impact and benefit to one's life and everything else one does, may be immeasurable. That's the world we live in now.
It's like the difference between looking at a low-resolution cathode ray tube with its notable effect of destroying visual acuity and getting laser sharp LCD images -- and buying the former because it's cheaper as the only consideration.
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