"it is hard to understand how voltage could be too high to some fixtures. The voltage coming into the house is set by the power company, and distributed throughout the residence. I can see it going down, but not up?"

The supply voltage is not individually regulated for each house or service, or even for each neighborhood. In most cases the closest point of adjustment is at the substation, which sets the voltage for a whole area. And it's not an instant-response, fine-adjustment thing, either. Your service voltage probably goes up and down several percent in the course of a day.

Nearly all residential electric services in the USA are three-wire 120/240 volt grounded-neutral, from by a local transformer that feeds several homes.

This means you can get 120 volts for most uses by connecting between one of the "hot" wires and the neutral, or 240 volts for special purposes like the stove or clothes dryer by connecting between the two "hot" wires. This system goes back to Edison and has lots of advantages.

BUT, if the 120 volt loads are not somewhat-evenly balanced, or the neutral connection has significant resistance, the voltage on one "hot" wire can be higher than on the other.

"Clearly some fixtures get switched on and off more than others. But if CFL's cannot handle this as well as incandescants, then that should be a factor in their description of "suitability for use", and in predicted lifespan vs continual use."

All flourescents' life is reduced by frequent on-off cycling. The same is true to a lesser extent for incandescents (how many times has an incandescent failed with a flash when you turned it on?).

CFLs are *not* suitable for all applications. Frequent on-off cycling is one; extreme low and/or high temperature is another. That doesn't mean they are worthless, just that they're not a cure-all.

"light fixtures, usually ceiling fixtures, that are a pair of bulbs covered by a globe or hemisphere of glass. If this means that there is too much contained heat for CFL's to last, compared to incandescents in these same fixture, then that also should be a factor in designating suitability for use as not much can be done other than replacing the entire fixture."

Most fixtures have a warning label about maximum wattage. That label is about heat. Ignoring it can be the source of many problems.

Replacing a fixture is not a big deal. Too often, lighting fixtures are designed for how they look rather than for their effectiveness and efficiency.

"My impression is that CFL's, compared to incandescants, are just not as reliable overall."

The problem is that the technology is still new and there are enormous variations in quality and suitability for various applications. Incandescents went through the same thing, over 100 years ago.

One thing I do, whenever replacing a bulb of any type, is to write the installation date on the base (not the glass). That gives me real-life information.

Another test is to mix an incandescent and a CFL in a multilamp fixture or multiple fixtures on the same switch, and see which really lasts longer.

What we *really* need here in the USA is more-rigorous testing, quality control, and information-labeling of CFLs. We shouldn't have to be running our own private experiments as to how well a particular brand works in the cold, how many on-off cycles to expect, what the real-world MTBF is, etc.

What if some of the farmed fish decide to spawn anyway? And suppose some of their modified genes get into the next generation of "wild" fish.

Those modified-wild fish may decide it's just too much trouble to swim upstream. Sure, *they* won't spawn, but if enough of them get into (or out of) the act, things could get really ugly.

A couple of factors to consider:

How much energy was expended to manufacture the panels?

What is their real-world useful life?

Are there more cost- and energy-effective solar energy technologies, such as wind (in various forms from big turbines to wind towers), tracking mirrors on a solar boiler, etc.?

Hopefully the answers are all good. But what keeps the price of PV panels high is the cost of ultrapure refined silicon, which is mostly energy cost because silicon is not rare at all.

..has always been about no-limits growth. Which equals more and more consumption.

And that's the big problem.

There *used to be* more resources here in the USA than the population could consume. (One of the main reasons Japan attacked Pearl Harbor was FDR's cut off of oil *exports* from the USA.)

But much of that has changed as the US population has increased, and consumption that would have been considered extravagant 50-60 years ago has become commonplace.

There are limits to growth, and we will eventually have to transform to a sustainablility economy and technology rather than a growth one. We can do it voluntarily, or it will be done for us rather unpleasantly, by forces we cannot control.

Conservatives don't like that plain, simple truth, because it means their world-view isn't absolutely correct.

There are all sorts of ironies involved, too.

Conservatives like us to imagine a USA of the past, with "small-town values", strong communities, etc. Yet they forget that such towns were not automobile-based.

The post-WW2 American "development" model is the auto-based suburb and mall, in which cars and trucks are absolutely essential. Yet it was railroads who invented the suburb as we know it.

Almost 30 years ago, President Carter gave his "malaise" speech, in which he described what was wrong and how to fix it. Change a few terms here and there and it could have been written today.

"Growth for the sake of growth is the philosophy of a cancer cell" - Edward Abbey