Bottom line, we humans have created a dilemma for ourselves. There's also the mercury in CFLs, which can contaminate huge amounts of groundwater if one breaks in an inopportune place.

LEDs might be better, they draw a fraction of what CFLs draw and last for multiple years. Time will tell - I'm sure something awful lurks in them as well.

If there were about 1/3 as many of us, this would all be much simpler.

The article cited seems almost transcendental in its sheer knuckle-headed lack of thought.

(1) Incandescent bulbs are inefficient sources of heat, since they are usually mounted in a high position -- the heat never circulates through the room (heat rises, so you start it out low).

(2) We're talking about people who have the resources to buy CFL's, but can't toss a few bucks at an electric space heater? (Which, by the bye, stays low to the ground and thus provides a vastly more efficient means of heating a room than an IB.)

(3) IB's are heating the room year-round; an electric space heater is only used during the winter.

These are just the points that spring to mind w/o even trying to think about the matter. The people writing this article actually had some time to take such thought. Is there any evident reason why they did not? (I mean, seriously, if *I* can see the holes ...!)

>The 21st century could turn out to be hard for absolutists.

One semi-paraphrase from the creators of "The Eleventh Hour", an otherwise not terribly well done movie, was that the biggest problem we'll face this century is that there is *no* one greatest problem. Tackle one and ignore the rest, and then at least another one will suddenly blossom into a huge mess. Interdependencies and changing situations will likely be the rule... and even that could change.

I've also heard this mentality referred to as "the silver bullet mistake", the belief that there is just one thing you can do to make things good.

I suppose some hippy-trippy types might call this a problem that needs a holistic solution. It still boils down to needing more than one answer for a given problem, and the need to address many of them at once.

First the information that there is mercury in the CFLs slows my "go earth" bulb changing frenzy to a slow crawl of flummoxed regret, and now this.

What a silly article. What if you need the heat? Duh, turn on the heater--an appliance that is better designed to heat your house anyways--and generally uses the most efficient power source readily available in a given area. Relying on waste heat from light bulbs for home heating makes no sense, and as you stated, often compounds the problem by causing your air conditioner to work harder.

BOTTOM LINE: USE CFLs wherever you can. Push for development and subsidize inexpensive LED bulbs, which are 10x as efficient as CFLs and contain no mercury.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and estimate it at 100 watts. Truth is, if you're heating your house in the winter, you're not wasting so much energy with incandescent. But look at the summer equation.

A 100 watt bulb generates requires 100 watts of electricity, and if air conditioning is being used, will probably require another 200 watts to cool. On the other hand, a CFL will use about 25 watts with another 50 watts used to cool it down. [The 2:1 ratio is a gross estimate, but is based on the fact that cooling is not a very efficient process.] Take a single 100 watt bulb on for 4 hours a night, 6 months a year. That's 720 hours x 100 watts = 72 Kilowatt Hours. OTOH, the CFL will lead to electricity consumption of about 18 KWH. That's an extra 54KWH hours for one bulb in one year, close to $10 in extra costs each year! No imagine 10 bulbs instead.

So while there is some logic in the article, the benefit of using incandescent bulbs instead of CFLs in winter is going to be marginal at best-- and still probably a net negative. This effect is dwarfed by the "wastings" you'd realize in summer by using incandescents.

Kills itself. That's really the sense I get from many of you, that human life is an infection on the earth, a plague that must be exterminated. Now I'm probably a few years older than most of you so I don't really care what you do to exterminate the world after I'm gone, but just wait until I'm dead before you kick off that revolution, thanks.

I think we need to start labeling climate change information with the sigma level it applies to. 1 sigma means the heart of the bell curve. 5 sigma is something like 1 in 10,000.

The instances of needing heat from a lightbulb are something like one in 10,000. It includes things like that popcorn popper and a desk lamp used in a home with the heat turned down in winter.

Where it does not apply is in cases where there is excess energy being burned on both sides of the equation. For example, incandescents in air-conditioned homes. (Or refrigerators kept in the warmest part of the house, or computers and lights left on in offices with the AC running.)

So, 1 sigma and 2 sigma lightbulbs -- some 70% of them -- should absolutely be changed to CFLs. And if we're going to talk about the 5 sigma bulbs, let's make sure it's in context!

I don't favor killing anybody.

I do think we should do something to control our numbers, particularly since it looks like the cheap easy energy sources that allow us to sustain them seem to be running out. Many of us will perish if we run out of oil before we find practical replacements.

The fuss about how we must switch all our lightbulbs to CFLs seems somewhat overblown.

– Yes, CFLs are an order of magnitude more efficient than incandescents. But what proportion of urban electricity consumption is devoted to domestic lighting? office lighting? industrial lighting? If it's small, 90% of small is still small.

– What about reducing unnecessary lighting in general? Decades after the idea of not leaving entire floors of office buildings lit up all night was first promoted, we still see... entire floors of office buildings lit up all night. Industrial ones too.

– Air conditioning is a huge energy drain. Moreover, it tends to be abused (there is no reason why most interiors should be cooler than 78˚F in the summer).

– The quality of CFL light is still distinctly inferior, even with recent bulbs that are supposed to simulate the appearance of incandescent light. Lights in places like stairwells and hallways should definitely be switched over (even better, installed on timers with motion detectors so they shut off when no one's around). But lights in living spaces? Best to wait for LEDs, on the hope they'll produce liveable light.

– CFL bulbs are produced in China and shipped from afar. Incandescent bulbs used to be produced in North America, in factories that are now being shut down.

– Others have mentioned the problem of toxic heavy metals in fluorescent bulbs.

– Broadening the question to energy consumption and greenhouse gas production in general, one of the biggest contributors to both (in some areas, the biggest) is the transport sector. Reducing the need for transportation (both passengers and freight) and running efficient transportation systems (yes, that means trains instead of short-haul flights, a generalization of road tolls, and substantial improvement to urban transit systems) would make such an impact on the energy & GHG problem that the issue of domestic light bulbs would hardly be noticeable.

But a big noise over something easy is so much more palatable than tacking a real, hard problem.