Find your bulb

The environmental kick has been great. No, really it has but..... Have you noticed that there are some really DUMB things people with every good intention are doing? For instance the big thing right now is the light bulb. We are being told to replace our old fashioned incandescent bulbs with CFL (compact fluorescent light) ones. The Jan/Feb 2008 issue of Cooking Light has an article "Bright ideas for green living" on this topic. The article begins by showing a pretty woman in the middle of changing her light bulbs, and the lamp is lit, bulb shining. I was infuriated. How foolish was this? The unintended consequence of environmental groups promoting this change is this: People are throwing away perfectly good, perfectly working incandescent bulbs from their lights, to replace them with CFLs. Does anyone see the stupidity here? Can you see that by doing one "good" thing, the "environmental" thing you are only doing something worse: creating more waste. More energy waste. The thing you were trying to reduce.

Has your light bulb gone on yet? Do you see the nonsense this craze has caused? Right now there are millions of perfectly good incandescent bulbs in a landfill. Bulbs whose resources are being wasted only so that people can do the "right thing" by saving energy. I have some really bad news. All those bulbs you just replaced, the ones that were still working and had many more hours to give, have just caused a negative energy saving. You have added bulk to your refuse, which will need to be hauled away in a huge truck and driven far away to the landfill your city pays to use. So what's the point? The point is THINK. Replace your incandescent bulbs with CFLs when they burn out. Wait for the current bulbs to do their job and then bring in the replacements. Doing the right thing without being wasteful is the environmental way.