Mercury! Yummy!

Recently this video was recommended to me via email because it contained important revelations about CFLs. But I instead gained some important revelations about how ignorant our own politicians can be.



I wrote back:

This guy doesn't actually have a lot to stand on so he made his speech distractingly flamboyant. But it doesn't work very well.

CFLs are actually quite hardy & not that easy to break. The levels of mercury, furthermore, in a CFL bulb are not actually as high as this guy is ignorantly implying. Precautions are necessary in the unlikely event of breakage, but the broken glass of any kind of light bulb is probably more of a threat than the mercury.

What he's really protesting is the inconvenience of using CFLs. But even then he hasn't done his homework.

Americans are quite pretentious in thinking that we can abuse the environment & its resources as much as we do & not bother with recycling or conservation. Our nation really just produces a lot of garbage, because we can afford to. One day when our money runs out we'll find that we have been behind the times.

It should not be a huge problem to visit a recycling center. On top of that, CFLs last so long there would really not be many trips needed. They do not burn out like incandescent bulbs. They last for multiple years. The average life of a CFL is 10,000 hours whereas that of an incandescent is 750. How long would it take you to use up 10,000 hours?

As far as production in China, I would expect the US private sector will eventually take an interest in CFL production since it is obviously going to be a reliable market. And if it's not cost effective, then it is still in the US's best interests to acquire CFLs from another country. Perhaps when we run out of landfills we can rent land from China as well. I don't think that China has some secret plot to kill the US through commercial products. I think they are doing what they do best: mass produce things. They are a country of industry. On top of that, they have no reason to try to destroy us. If the US was gone, who would buy all their stuff?

While I don't support a full ban of incandescents, I do think that we need to start having more awareness of our resource usage, & I do think that widespread conversion to CFL would be a good thing. He's right that we should be searching for alternatives outside of CFL use. We should be switching to CFLs as well as seeking as many energy solutions as we can find. We should be doing all of that.