I'm calling BS on compact florescent light bulbs

For a few years now, power companies (through their marketing and PR representatives) have been telling us to use those twisty twirly compact florescent light bulbs instead of regular light bulbs. The campaign has always felt a little disingenuous to me -- it was basically a way for power companies to say global warming is really our fault (not theirs) even when, if you ask the experts, they will tell you that completely changing over to compact florescent bulbs would only make a small dent in a much larger problem.

Well now, after years of telling us compact florescent bulbs were practically a moral obligation, they tell us that SURPRISE! the compact florescent bulbs contain toxic mercury and they really don't have a plan for how to dispose of them. From today's NY Times:

Now, the question is how to dispose of these compact fluorescent bulbs once they break or quit working.

Unlike traditional light bulbs, each of these spiral bulbs has a tiny bit of a dangerous toxin — around five milligrams of mercury. And although one dot of mercury might not seem so bad, almost 300 million compact fluorescents were sold in the United States last year. That is already a lot of mercury to throw in the trash, and the amounts will grow ever larger in coming years...

If you break a fluorescent bulb, there is no need to call in the hazmat team, the agency says. Just clean it up quickly with paper (no vacuuming or brooms), keep the kids away and open the window for a 15-minute douse of fresh air.

Are you f'ing kidding me!? This is a light bulb we're talking about! "No need to call a hazmat team" they tell you -- just don't breathe for fifteen minutes and don't let the kids near it and open a window and don't use a vacuum cleaner or a broom (because that would disperse it into the air and into your lungs). Regular bulbs can be disposed of in the trash without a problem. How many families are really going to follow these steps? How many people even know that CFL bulbs contain mercury and that mercury is a potent neurotoxin?

It's just like when the big oil companies told Congress that they wanted to add MTBE to gasoline because it was supposed to reduce gasoline emissions. It was an attempt to head off regulation or increased taxation of gasoline and it was presented as a win win solution. Then MTBE ended up leaking from gas station storage tanks and contaminating water supplies throughout the country. In the end, the solution was far worse than the original problem (and the original approach to addressing the problem -- regulation to reduce emissions or taxation to reduce consumption -- would have produced dramatically better benefits for society).

I'm done with compact florescent light bulbs. They didn't give off good light anyway. I'm just gonna keep on using regular light bulbs until they come up with a non-toxic alternative. In the meantime, I'm gonna plant a tree, reduce overall energy consumption, and vote for politicians who favor aggressive regulation of power plant emissions and global treaties to reduce greenhouse gases.

Update #1: Power companies (through their PR representatives and allies in government) will tell you that compact florescent light bulbs produce a NET DECREASE in mercury pollution. They acknowledge that each compact florescent bulb contains 5 milligrams of mercury. But they counter by claiming that the energy saved by these bulbs will reduce energy use and in the process, save 9 milligrams of mercury pollution which would have come from the power plant (to produce the energy for the less efficient regular bulb).

I think there are 3 problems with this argument:
1.) There is an big difference between mercury being released miles away (and thousands of feet into the atmosphere) at a power plant and mercury being released in your living room. I'd rather not have mercury released in my living room.
2.) It assumes that their estimates are correct (and these are power companies we're talking about here so there is at least some reason for skepticism).
3.) Perhaps this is the most important point -- THIS ESTIMATE ASSUMES THAT THE ENERGY IS BEING GENERATED BY A COAL-FIRED POWER PLANT. Coal-fired power plants emit tons (literally) of mercury into the air, which then gets into the soil and water, and ultimately into our bodies. Solar power, geothermal plants, and wind farms produce no mercury pollution as far as I know. Rather than forcing us to use toxic light bulbs (and continuing to license new mercury spewing coal-fired power plants) it seems that a better way to go would be to shut down coal-fired power plants and invest in solar, geothermal, and wind energy.

Update #2: Both the MTBE environmental disaster and the dangers of compact florescent light bulbs illustrate the problem I have with Barack Obama's post-partisan approach to politics. MTBE was promoted as a win-win bipartisan way to clean up the environment (in the same way that CFLs are being promoted today). Republicans and their corporate allies got a low cost way to act like they cared. Democrats got to claim a business-friendly environmental victory. Except, by not making the hard choices, society is actually much worse off in the long run (and in each case, people literally lose their lives because of these bad decisions). In each case, the partisan solution of regulating and taxing polluters would have produced dramatically better results for society than the so-called bipartisan approach.

Update #3: For those who want to know more about MTBE, here's a great link which details the whole history of the problem (complete with links to original source documents from the big oil companies showing what they knew and when the knew it):

http://www.ewg.org/reports/withknowledge/

What Would RFK Do? (About 9/11)

It seems to me that there is only one question any Democratic presidential hopeful needs to answer and it is: If Robert Kennedy had been President, what would he have done after the attacks of September 11? (You can also substitute Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, the Buddha, or Jesus Christ into this scenario if you prefer). It seems to me that if you can’t answer this question, you have no business running for office. Heck I’ll go a step further—it might be a good idea to answer this question before stepping into the voting booth.

So here’s my answer:

What Would Robert Kennedy Do (in response to 9/11)?

1. Bring charges against Osama Bin Laden (if he actually did it) and all co-conspirators in the International Criminal Court in the Hague. This was a crime against humanity and it should properly be tried in the International Criminal Court. Bringing charges in the Hague creates a dynamic of the entire world verses the conspirators. (Wesley Clark urged just such an action when he was an analyst at CNN—before he ran for President.)

2. Find out who did it, get them, and bring them to trial. This would require international diplomacy (if dude is hiding in Pakistan for example), first rate intelligence gathering and investigative work, and if necessary, targeted military action to capture the suspects (all of which the current administration is completely incapable of doing). Pursuing criminal investigation rather than engaging in an eye for an eye, sends the world the message that “we are a world of laws not of men.”

3. Say to the oil barons—“That’s it, we’ve had enough and we’re done with Middle East oil!” Double fuel economy standards immediately. Require all cars to be hybrid within 5 years and all cars to be fueled with renewable energy sources (hydrogen, electric, biodiesel) within 10 years. Remember in the days after September 11 when people would have done anything to prevent this from happening again? People would have gone for this plan on September 12 without any hesitation.

4. Then, invest $100 billion dollars a year (the current cost of the Iraq war) in renewable energy research. Essentially it would be setting up an equivalent of the National Institutes of Health but in this case it would be a National Institutes of Renewable Energy. It would fund pure research, applied research, and improved distribution networks. It would fund scientists and management consultants to go into Ford, GM, and Chrysler to help them adapt. It would fund scientists to work with cities and home builders to redesign how energy is generated, transported, and stored. It would fund scholarships to get high school and college students into the sciences to prepare the next generation of renewable energy scientists.

Following recommendations 3 and 4 would ignite a tremendous economic boom in the United States. Fuel costs would fall (benefiting everyone) and the United States would be poised as the world leader in renewable energy. The rest of the world would then have to purchase the technology from us which would create millions of American jobs.

5. Have a Middle East Summit at the White House. Sit down with the heads of every single country in the Middle East and ask, “Why’d this shit happen?” and listen to what they have to say. If they have legitimate gripes, great, we’ll fix them.

In any case we would explain that, “This shit is never gonna happen again. You’re gonna have democratic elections (internationally monitored). You’re gonna close the fundamentalist schools. You’re going to give equal rights to women, people of color and people who are homosexual. Israel and Palestine are going to stop their war immediately.

If you don’t do these things, the entire world is going to stop trading with you and you will slowly wither and die. Any nation that fails to follow these rules will be kicked out of the U.N., the W.T.O., the Olympics, your ambassadors will be sent home, your embassies closed, your bank accounts will be frozen, and no one from your country will ever be allowed into our country (or Europe).

But if you do everything that we ask, we’ll come in and help you build roads, bridges, ports, airports, and schools. We’ll trade with you. We’ll enable you to become first world countries and join in the international community.

It’s your choice.”

6. Make the case that the problem with terrorism is fundamentalism not Islam. The enemy of terrorism is pluralism, not the United States. And then crack down on fundamentalist groups in both the United States and abroad (including violent anti-abortion groups, the KKK, the Taliban, Islamic Jihad, etc…)

7. Reduce global warming (which will actually be covered by 3 and 4). Rising global temperatures cause crop failures in the Middle East which causes hunger, unemployment, and shame (which then makes young men ripe for recruitment as terrorists.)

Terrorism is not a country, it’s an idea—that one person can impose their will upon another through violence. We win the battle against terrorism when we show that we have better ideas.

The current Bush strategy of fighting an eye for an eye, resorting to torture and secret detentions, holding people indefinitely without trial, and using terrorism as a subtext to advance our oil interests in the region shows that he doesn’t have better ideas.

Following the What Would Robert Kennedy Do? plan would unite the world and demonstrate through our actions that we have better ideas than they do—ones that will convert poor people in the Middle East to our way of thinking and prevent this from ever happening again.

But the truth of the matter is—if Robert Kennedy had been President, the attacks of September 11 never would have happened in the first place.