There is a big tah-do over swiching your old incandescent light bulbs to those new CFL ones. PG&E is giving them away, there are messages everywhere about how much energy they save, and Al Gore probably has one in his pocket at the ready. I too got caught up in the frenzy buying a three pak for only 99-cents a while back. Now though I am not so sure those CFL's are really a-okay.
Those new CFL's are toxic, containing mercury. You break one and you have a toxic clean-up situation on your hands. Sure it is a tiny amout of that nasty stuff but tiny amounts of the quicksilver can add up. You can not dispose of them in an easy way. You have to find a certified CFL disposal center. And dispose of these I will when LED lighting gets cheaper. LED is going to light up your world.
Here in San Francisco and elsewhere there was this big push to turn off your lights for an hour to save energy, showing all how much we can save. Forget turning off your lights for an hour, try stop driving your car less than a mile to do something. Or stop driving at all.
What will be next? A day without flushing the toilet? I am sure some Jimmy Carteresque ideas are already floating around to show us little ways to save energy when nobody addresses the big problem.
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