Martin A:

BB - you often tend to come across as a silly smart-arse. Yet now and then you actually have something pertinent to say. Why don't you try to refrain from posting stuff unless it passes the pertinence test?

Quite true, sorry to cause irritation. I'll try to filter my output :-(

On the points you raise, I honestly fail to understand the anger CFL bulbs raise. Are they slow? I don't notice it if they are. Are they dim or por light? Yes, some are, so buy more powerful ones or different colour. Do they contain mercury? Yes, but so do strip lights and I have never heard anyone moaning about them. Are they expensive? Not particularly given that they last much longer and save money on energy. Do they last longer? In my experience they do, much longer.

On bulbs in closets, I'm not joking. 60W bulbs get quite hot. Get something flammable touching that and ... I'd feel safer with a mini fluorescent. Maybe I'm paranoid.

On heating with electricity, by "liquid gas", do you mean Calor Gas and the like? Is that a good comparison? My uncle uses it (being off-grid) but I get the impression that it is not cheap. His fuel bill is twice that of my father's although in a smaller house. Note however that Mackay (DECC) favours electricity with ground/air source heat exchangers, where the efficiency is several hundred percent.

The CFL bulbs in my house (esp. night light on the landing for the kids) usually don't even last a year. As already stated, the start-up time between flicking the switch and adequate output to negotiate the stairs (household accident hotspot number 1) is also way too long. Regular incandesants are of course effective space heaters, but for internal use why is that a bad thing? Except for a short period during the height of summer, the extra heat from old-fashioned lamps is welcome. And it could be argued that replacing it with a CFL or LED would increase heating costs instead..

Toxicity of CFLs is also a growing problem given the increased domestic prevalence of these bulbs.

In Germany if one breaks, school buildings even have an evacuation procedure, which is not crazy given what ScientificAmerican / EPA says -

quote -
Jim Berlow, director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Hazardous Waste Minimization and Management Division, recommends starting by opening the windows and stepping outside. "Any problems at all frequently are handled for the most part by quickly ventilating the room," he says. "Get all the people and pets out of the room for 15 minutes and let the room air out. If you have a central heating system or an HVAC [heating, ventilating and air-conditioning] system, you don't want it sucking the fumes around, so shut that down."

The important thing is not to touch the heavy metal. After airing out the room, the larger pieces of the bulb should be scooped off hard surfaces with stiff paper or cardboard or picked up off carpeted surfaces with gloves to avoid contact. Use sticky tape or duct tape to pick up smaller fragments; then, on hard surfaces, wipe down the area with a damp paper towel or a wet wipe. All materials should be placed in a sealable plastic bag or, even better, in a glass jar with a metal lid.

"If it gets in the jar, that's pretty good containment," Berlow states. "We've found that the plastic bags actually don't contain any mercury fumes, so absolutely, if you've got the plastic bag, get it outside when you're done." Vacuums or brooms should generally be avoided, as they can spread mercury to other parts of the house.

- end quote

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=are-compact-fluorescent-lightbulbs-dangerous

all that will happen of course as the LED's get better (I've got a few that are very good) they will get cheaper, and as they are cheaper to run, and people will use loads of them, in new ways, walls of light,etc,etc

and more electricity will be used than before ;-)

Martin, yes I have read all those arguments before, but they always strike me as a population that dislikes the objective (reducing emissions) searching for any possible reason to reject CFLs. You've got a kitchen full of fluorescent lamps; how can you possibly object to CFLs on Hg grounds? Your suggestion of lobbying is a good conspiracy theory, but not worth taking seriously.

On "smart-arse responses", I guess you are referring to my "On heating your home, why not scrap the heating system and just use light bulbs? You might find that gas is cheaper...". Are you totally devoid of humour? Or have I irritated you enough in the past that you can't see anything I write an a sympathetic light?

On 60W bulbs and frilly shades, why do you think that many lamps come with little notes saying, "Max 40W"?

Oh great, a retired electronics engineer turned conspiracy theorist and amateur shrink. You really do belong here!

... And you don't. Sling your hook BB there are plenty of doomsday cult sites out there who would welcome your 'on message' style without a trace of sarcasm.

You are right that the population doesn't want to reduce emissions as they like the health and well-being benefits of economic development that mean they can live longer and healthier lives. Reducing consumption to 3rd world levels that would result from using solar and wind exclusively is indeed not on the cards. They also don't like being lied to by hysterical, partisan activist-scientists (James Hansen for example) and the cabal at the UEA and the rest of 'The TeM', who tried and failed to 'hide the decline'.

So there will be no reduction in emissions until technology enables it. Social engineering that the big government fans want to foist upon us is doomed to fail.

I don't remember getting a vote on this, that's the point isn't it, the people are being by-passed by the regulators, nowhere more so than in the USA, Land of the Free.

I don't like LED light, but recognise that it could be useful, and does save money in the long term. Same with CFLs I have some that when you switch the light on it's best to go to the kitchen and have a cup of tea before venturing back into the room you've switched the lights on in. Later versions come on faster and give out the same sort of light as the old incandescents. So, other than having to pay £10 for a light bulb that the manufacturers assure me will still be usable many years after my death, I'm reasonably postitive about the progress of the replacements for incandescent.

Having said all that the government has no right whatsoever to ban incandescents without the consent of the people.

...nowhere more so than in the USA, Land of the Free.

Or maybe Australia, the Lucky Country. Someone there asked me to send him some incandescents. He does colour matching and you get erroneous results under light from CFL's. I mailed off a pack of six 100 watters.

Instead of the lamp bulbs, he received a letter from the Oz Customs saying that his attempt to import forbidden items had been noted and, next time, action would be taken.

Actually, when one knows that whatever he writes he will receive the textual equivalent of bing spat on, it can tend engender a rather negative attitude towards correspondents. But I will try to moderate my feelings in future, especially after such a nice post by you :-)

BTW, who is the 'cockroach'?

Martin, as a keen opponent of fluorescent lighting etc, why are you such a user of CFLs and tubes?

Martin, short of abstaining from most of modern society, it is difficult to avoid products etc that derive from fossile fuels. Similarly. if you live in France, you have little choice but to accept that nuclear is going to be part of your life in some ways. Disconnecting from the network doesn't change that and would be pointless. But there are lighting solutions that don't use mercury tinged tubes.

"...short of abstaining from most of modern society, it is difficult to avoid products etc that derive from fossile fuels."

As astute a remark as you've made, perhaps unwittingly, but nontheless astute. Now try putting some realism into the proposed reductions in CO2 output. What are the realistic timescales for the world reducing it's emissions to a level which will stabilise/lower the CO2 in the atmosphere. If it helps I'll lay out some of the parameters you'd need to understand to come to a conclusion with anything like a level of certainty to base our energy policies and green taxes on:

1. We need to understand when the Chinese, Indians, Brazilians, Mexicans, South Africans, Russians, Indonesians etc. will get with the plan. For a reasonable assessment I'll give you the following options:

(a) Never
(b) By 2020
(c) By 2030
(d) By 2050
(e) Don't know
(f) Immediately

2. We need to understand what technologies will provide us with enough energy to reduce our ouputs of CO2 to a level sufficient for the CO2 in the atmosphere to reduce to 20% below the 1990 level of 350ppm by 2050. Again the parameters would be;

(a) Wind.
(b) Solar.
(c) Nuclear.
(d) Tide power.
(e) Carbon capture and storage.
(f) Some unknown miracle technology

For each case you'd have to do a cost/benefit analysis, a review of the technological progress with a timeline for it's progression to being deployed.

You would also have to look at safety aspects of the solutions, clearly nuclear looks dangerous, wind causes environmental and health damage, as well as cutting up bats and birds. Large scale solar is improbable for a whole variety of reasons. Little is known about tide power and CCS has the underlying problem of what happens to the stored CO2 in the event of an earth quake, of for our great, great grandchildren, movement of the techtonic plates. it seems to me that when the real engineers get into designing this technology they'll have to understand what would happen if a sudden pulse of 50gigatons of stored CO2 is let into the atmosphere.

(3) You then have to understand what increases inenergy prices will have to be made to provide the government funding for the robust development of the chosen technologies, and whether our economy can support these increase.

(4) What would be the social effects of dramatically increases energy prices on our society, and would the voters put up with it.

They are just a few of the considerations one would have to make to plan energy policy, there are probably many more, but the utter futility of banning incandescent bulbs leaps out at you just from these.

"...short of abstaining from most of modern society, it is difficult to avoid products etc that derive from fossile fuels."

That we abstain from most of modern society is a clear goal of environmentalists, who quite cheerfully watch while 2000 children a day die of malaria because of their successful lobbying of western governments to ban it and refuse to provide aid to African countries that don't.

Thanks for the link retired dave, it puts life in a new perspective. I'll definitely get rid of my CFLs. Thank goodness none of my other gear contains anything nasty or gives of electric smog.

You ask what appear to be questions but you often don't seem to take in the answers, and you'll then sometimes pose another question, at a tangent to the first. Other BH posters regard it as trolling. I interpret it as a difficulty in comprehending viewpoints different from your own.

Martin, if it pleases you I will explicitly accept or reject each and every thing that is said from now. It could get rather tedious and I feel it a bit unfair that this rule should apply to me only, but I'll give it a try.

1. yes I agree that abstaining from modern life to avoid fossil fuel use is pointless.

2, I can see that the same is true of nuclear, although I can't judge the cost-benefit ratio for your particular case/conscience.

3. On replacing tubes, again I can't judge the cost/benefit calculations you make. You seem quite exercised by the mercury content - you are content to accept that of a 100W tube but not that of four, 25W CFLs, which will probably be about the same (or maybe less). I find that rather odd, but its your cost/benefit analysis we are talking of, so you get to decide.

4. I also favour reducing emissions of polutants, heavy metals included. Is that contradictory, after all I am on the side of CFLs? Well, just like you, I have to weigh the costs and benefits of any choice. I consider the benefit of using both tubes and CFLs outweighs the disadvantages. You, and many others might disagree, just as many people disagree with spending large amounts of money cleaning up coal-fired power stations to reduce emissions. There are no perfect solutions that please everyone.

5. I agree that if 3/4 of your lamps are tungsten, you do not qualify as "such a user", just as "a user".

One thing I am sure of is that I'm more worried about falling off my bike than I am about electrical smog from my lights.

Geronimo, I've exhausted my BH time on Martin's post, so I'll have to come back to yours later :-)