In which I kvetch about fluorescents

[zdashamber]

Homer: Come on, Flanders, there's gotta be something you hate. What about mosquito bites?
Ned: Mmm mmm! Sure are fun to scratch! Mmm! Satisfying!
Homer: What about, uhhhhh, fluorescent lights?
Ned: Oooh, they hum like angels! You're never lonely if you've got a fluorescent light!

I want to like fluorescent lights. Really, I mean, there's the living-lightly thing, and there's the not-burning-out-suddenly thing, and there's the freeging-politicians-jamming-'em-in-our-face thing. But they just suck. They create crappy light.

I've mentioned this to my friends some, and they're like "Oh, but those are bulbs you got from Ikea years ago! Things are advancing really fast!" But I've been doing a lot of research about light sources lately for an idea I have on backlit mouldings, and I can tell you that the trouble is: every single way to make light today that doesn't involve "heating something up" (ie, incandescents or fire) involves quantized light. We excite this thing electrically, and then it drops back down an energy level, releasing a packet of photons at a certain wavelength. Fluorescents have a vapor in them that glows at high UV energy, and coatings on the glass that are excited by that energy and then put out visible light droppings. EL, neon, LEDs, directly drop photon packets.

Here's a typical "cool white" modern fluorescent bulb's spectrum, from wikipedia. Then, a typical "soft white" incandescent bulb's spectrum from this page of many spectra. Then, sunlight. (I tried to find a directly comparable chart of sunlight with "counts" on the y-axis, but no love. However, the sunlight spectum image I have comes from a really neat page about researching (at Berkeley!) roofing tiles that reflect more light to reduce heat and energy use.)




It's just obvious that the incandescent has the fluorescent beat all to hell. At every wavelength the incandescent has more light. Fluorescents put on several coatings of different stuff to try to get a wider variety of light spikes, but after about three the coatings get too thick to be efficient anymore.

Light doesn't just matter to how an organism sees. Just a week ago at the work retreat someone mentioned that 70% of the light that a human brain concerns itself with doesn't go to the visual centers. There have been studies that found mutations in clock genes in people who get up at ridiculously early hours: normally, the first bright light you see in the morning re-sets your brain and that ticks down over the course of the day, counting out when you should sleep and wake again.

To me, it makes a lot of sense that the brain expects to get light on all the sun's wavelengths, and gets all screwed up if it's only getting 10 of them. Studies have found that people are more depressed and prone to act out under fluorescent lights. LCD screens are filters over fluorescent lights, and screw a lot of people up. Mice die faster. In looking through spectrum/lighting webpages, you'll find tons that talk about bird breeding, or snake thriving. Few seem to discuss that lighting bad for a mouse or a bird or a snake is bad for a human, too. Fluorescents are cheap.

So, going back a couple months, I thought I'd give compact fluorescents another try, just to see if they really had gotten better like my friends claimed. I stopped by Home Depot and got some brand-spanking-new compact fluorescents, in three different light flavors (based on "warmth", the degree-Kelvin measure of how blue the light is). I started with the lowest, "warm." Took those out after a day of use... Don't think you can slip sodium by me, assholes. If I wanted that "living under a bridge" look I could graffiti all the walls and pee in the corners, and it'd still be comfier. Orange! Grah!

Tried "cool white" next, and I've been there for a couple months. I can run 180 watt-equivalents of light instead of the pitiful 120 watts I could run before, and it's diffuse so that I have a better chance of reading stuff without shadows everywhere blocking, and it only costs 45 watts of energy so I can run the electric kettle at the same time without worrying about overloading circuits. And truly, the fluorescents have gotten better at not humming and not flickering. And yet...

The light is ashy.

I can feel my brain arguing with itself. "It's dark," say 95% of my light receptors. "No, seriously, there's light," says my visual cortex. "WTF pitch fucking black" say everything set up for light colors I'm just not getting... It's hard to tell whether my mood and pattern of living are affected, but I suspect they are.

I dunno. 120 watts really is pathetic.

Maybe if I try all three types of compact fluorescents at once, one in each bracket of the central fixture... Maybe I can finally get around to hanging the white Christmas lights all along the wall by my bed, and that would make up the difference in spectrum...

Upshot: politicians trying to ban incandescent bulbs are fucking smoking crack and oughtta be booted the fuck out of office. This is a health choice people need to be free to make for themselves.

Comments

[jimboboz.livejournal.com]

My experience is that you get used to the fluro lights after some time, just a couple of weeks. It's irritating at first - but to be honest, I found computer screens irritating when I first saw them, and wouldn't get a PC for years as a result. I was also irritated by the ubiquity and nagging possibilities of mobile phones, and resisted them, too.

It's true that incandescents are closer to natural sunlight than fluros, but surely that should make you prefer natural light to incandescents, rather than incandescents to fluros? By adjusting your work hours and other living habits, it's quite possible in middle and low latitudes to spend most of your day under natural sunlight.

I think that we ought to judge our politicians on a wider range of issues than their support for or opposition to incadescent light globes. Like everyone else with power to make decisions, they must judge things on balance of risks. So, fluro globes may harm people's health in a small but significant way; but allowing incadescents may make a small contribution to global warming, which will be infinitely worse for people's health.

Which carries the greater risk is a matter for insurance actuaries. Their entire professional lives are spent in the study of relative risks. Those actuaries tell us that if we want to insure against tornadoes, droughts and floods, we need to pay higher premiums than in the past; this tells us that the risk of extreme weather events has increased. On the other hand, those who have fluro lighting in their homes do not need to pay higher health insurance premiums than those with incandescent; this tells us that the risk of health effects due to fluros is not teribly significant.

[elf]

this tells us that the risk of health effects due to fluros is not teribly significant.

Only because the damages done by fluorescent lights hasn't been directly linked to the lights.

SAD is fairly well-documented... but "guy at office gets all depressed and stressed out, tips over a filing cabinet and walks into traffic" does not wind up in the medical books as a "fluorescent lighting injury."

Environmental details that affect mood & productivity are slow to be recorded, because our health industry doesn't want to acknowledge them. (How long did it take to decide "smoking is unhealthy?" How much longer to do anything about it?)

Some people get used to fluoros, just like some people get used to working in a tobacco smoke fog. And some people just don't work as well. And some people get chronic health problems because of them. I don't think it should be a litmus test issue for politicians, but it *is* a health issue, even if it's fairly minor. (And many of us don't have the option of working with natural lighting; we don't have the job status to get a window office. We could, of course, change jobs entirely--just like your average asthma-ridden waitress could quit her job in the smoke-filled bar.)

[zdashamber.livejournal.com]

A handful of entries back I proclaim my love of sunlight (http://zdashamber.livejournal.com/106750.html#cutid1) above all else. It's blatantly clear, though, that incandescents are a better light source than fluorescents. As a side note, it may not be as trivial to readjust your sleeping and waking patterns as you suggest: it's been proven that being an early bird or a night owl has a genetic component and runs in familes.

As for politics, you have your hands on a false dilemna. For the same amount of political capital, a politician could do many things that would serve the environment equally well. They could subsidize insulation so every house could have an insulated ceiling; change building codes to require insulated foundations; force cars to get better gas mileage; require the sale of only reflective roofing; ban air conditioners... Endless possibilities, many of which are immediately health-positive instead of health-negative.

I'm pleased fluorescents don't bother you, but surely you recognize that people are variably sensible. Some don't mind peanuts or dogs or hippity-hop music. As for actuaries, they only attend to the grossest of possible risk factors: they don't even ask about obvious sources of health danger like "do you travel to poorer countries". elfwreck has some good points about the lack of studies or will to study, also.

[jamused.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Mad, you should be grateful that they let you buy frivolous luxuries like lights at all. You're just an infinitesimal blip on an actuarial chart, not an autonomous being with any right or capacity to make your own decisions after all...don't you know the entire planet's at stake?

I mean, they could impose a carbon emissions tax and leave it to you to decide how best to deal with it, whether it's by fluorescent lights, insulation, a car with better gas mileage, more efficient appliances, or whatever in whatever combination makes the most sense for your individual circumstances (even rearranging your job and social schedule as if the vampires had taken over Sunnydale), but how would we ever achieve the Utopia of having everything not compulsory be forbidden and vice versa with that approach? Seriously, I think this makes a perfectly good litmus-test issue because people who believe that this sort of thing is the proper approach to using the power with which they've been entrusted are clearly incapable of exercising that power rationally.

[zdashamber.livejournal.com]

Aw pesh. I'm perfectly good with banning some bad-for-the-environment stuff... I'm just not happy about requiring bad-for-some-health stuff. It's like abortion. (Aaa I went all nuclear in my own thread!! ;) )

Anyway, I think you're being unfair to JimBob. He's Australian; he's got to make the best of things... His people are a whole country of guinea pigs now.

[jamused.livejournal.com]

Banning might make sense if they were actually hazardous (like, oh, if they contained mercury or something...), but it's irrational when the "damage" done is just that they consume X amount of power. It's the total power from carbon-emitting sources that you consume that's an issue if anything is. It simply makes no sense to prevent someone from using incandescent bulbs to light their house if it were completely powered by solar and wind power on the one hand, while beaming approvingly over the guy who puts compact fluorescents in a pool house that sucks down more in electricity than the average family pays in rent on the other. Carbon taxes would do everything those bozos who passed the law claim to want in terms of encouraging people to reduce consumption, use green sources of power (and encourage investment and research in them), etc--including, quite likely, getting people to switch to compact fluorescents unless they have a good reason not to--but instead they go for ham-fisted measures like this one, It honestly baffles me.

[amberite.livejournal.com]

Zees is me linking.

[zdashamber.livejournal.com]

Groovy. Your commentors are saying interesting things already.

[amberdiceless.livejournal.com]

All excellent points, but unfortunately I'm afraid for me, the energy savings issue trumps all. Hopefully they'llf ind ways to continue to improve them...

[zdashamber.livejournal.com]

Lots of people don't mind fluorescents at all... So with any luck you guys are in that group and can reap the benefits. I mean, they are so much more efficient.

[amberdiceless.livejournal.com]

Nah, they don't seem to bother us, though it's true we haven't made any scientific attempt to compare our moods or sleep cycles or anything like that with different types of bulbs.

Have you thought about using a combination of flourescents and incandescents? We still have a few of the latter around, mostly in places where not having light the moment you flip the switch is a problem, since the CFB's take a second to power up and then a minute or two to reach full brightness, but we've switched something like 12 out of 15 bulbs in the house now. Maybe the light would bother you less if it was a mix of both...

[a2macgeek.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I have the same problems with fluorescents - I just don't like the wavelength they operate on. It doesn't seem bright enough/feels too cold. Plus for some there's either a delay before they come on (the spiral "daylight" bulbs), or they come on dim and take a couple of minutes to brighten up (the ones that actually look like normal light bulbs). And they can't be used with light sensors, so they're useless for outside lights. For some areas it's not a problem, like in the hallway lights, or the light in the area by the front door. But for the kitchen/living room bedroom, I've found I have to mix the fluorescents with incandescents to get a light wavelength that doesn't drive me nuts.

[zdashamber.livejournal.com]

The delay/dimness coming on is also pretty much gone in these new bulbs I'm using. So I can't fault 'em there. But I agree about the outdoor light uselessness... One of the old Ikea bulbs I put out there, and it died in a month. Bah.

[jon-leonard.livejournal.com]

The problem isn't that the spectrum is spiky; It's more that there aren't enough spikes, or that they're in the wrong places.

The human body doesn't have that many mechanisms for responding to light, and the significant color sensitive ones (the cones in the eye) smash all that spectrum down to three channels. If you can watch TV without the colors seeming intensely wrong, that's not the problem. (The rods have yet another spectrum; 4 spikes might be necessary...)

It's sort of odd how far incandescents are from sunlight without that bothering you: They're both pretty close to blackbody radiation, with sunlight being at about 6000 degrees, and incandescents being quite a bit cooler than that.

But yeah, outlawing incandescent bulbs is insane. An energy-cost offset tax, maybe, but they should go after the wasteful power supplies first.

(Portions of the above may need modification if you are colorblind, nonhuman (e.g., a honeybee) or tetrachromat for reasons I am currently too lazy to type.)

[zdashamber.livejournal.com]

Recent advances in science have shown that the human body may respond to light with much more than just with the cones and rods of the retina. I tracked down a good review (http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/317/7174/1704) which towards the bottom mentions a 1998 paper in Cell, "However, when mammalian cell lines were first deprived of serum and then exposed to a high concentration of serum with all of its rich soup of signalling factors, the cells in culture very quickly turned on a large number of genes, among them mammalian per. ... This landmark study opens up an enormous range of opportunities and questions, not the least of which is whether every cell in our body has the potential to be a circadian clock."

A Science paper in 1997 noted that Per is active all over the fly, not just in the eyes (from a NIMH article (http://www.nimh.nih.gov/publicat/bioclock.cfm)). The Tim protein (http://cal.man.ac.uk/student_projects/1999/sanders/mech.htm) that links to Per and takes it into the nucleus to create more Per is destroyed by light. All wavelengths of light? How about after the light penetrates the skin, what wavelengths exist then?

[jon-leonard.livejournal.com]

There are a number of ways that the body is sensitive to light: You can feel it as heat, skin produces melanin in response to light, the pineal gland is light-sensitive, etc. But I'm not aware of any reason to suspect that these are particularly frequency-sensitive.

In other words, light-sensitive is interesting, but if the cells in question aren't known to distinguish between one spectrum and another, and there's no plausible physical mechanism why they would, then we shouldn't assume that the difference between incandescent and florescent would matter. It might be worth setting up the experiment, but I'd be shocked to find any spectrum sensitivity comparable in importance to what we see with the cones. (And that's pretty lossy.)

[zdashamber.livejournal.com]

Animals like rattlesnakes that track things thermally certainly have non-retinal cells that are sensitive to wavelength. Chlorophyll (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorophyll) has a distinct wavelength excitability. It is, in fact, implausible to suggest that cells receive just "light". Light exists as a group of wavelengths, and the mechanisms we're aware of for using light involve specific wavelengths inducing conformational changes in molecules within cells. Chlorophylls are from a group of similarly-shaped molecules called porphyrins (as are hemes) and both hemes and porphyrins have been found to regulate clock mechanisms (http://www-bmb.med.uth.tmc.edu/faculty/cheng-chi-lee.html) in humans.

[jon-leonard.livejournal.com]

Yes, it's different in other species. I said so in my original post...

I'm suggesting that for each of a fairly small (i.e. finite) number of significant interactions, the effect is that of an integral over frequency of the intensity times the response curve. Linear algebra then says that there's a spiky spectrum with the same effect. With a reasonably well chosen set of frequencies, they even all have positive amplitude.

A major problem with fluorescent lights is that they blatantly fail to be equivalent to a black-body when measured by the (standard) human color-vision response curves. [There are at least 8 different photoreceptor response curves in human eyes; Most are considered defective, thus the colorblind qualifier]

A significant property of the eye's color-receptors is that they have a comparatively narrow frequency response, which makes sense because they're evolved to discriminate color. The other mentioned effects (singly- and doubly- energizing chlorophyll interactions, rattlesnake thermal sense, human night vision, and for that matter all the other biological mechanisms I'm aware of) have wider response curves: They're less sensitive to the nature of the light spectrum than our vision.

My conjecture is that a spectrum with notable peaks in 4 or so places is sufficient to be indistinguishable by ordinary human mechanisms from an incandescent source. [Whether an infrared peak for warmth is useful is a separate question.]

[Non ordinary mechanisms include things like prisms, diffraction gratings, lab equipment, other species]

Do you have an experiment in mind to falsify that?

[zdashamber.livejournal.com]

Of course I have experiments in mind; they leap out at you when you consider the subject. A person could run a lab of PhDs based around tracking this stuff down... Cheng Chi Lee nearly is.

However, I'm content with having demonstrated reason to suspect that non-retinal human light responses are frequency-sensitive. I'd be interested to look at a paper or website about the frequency response of retinal cells, though, if you have one handy.

[jon-leonard.livejournal.com]

The best reference I have at hand is The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Volume 1, chapter 35 (it's about the physics of color vision). The spectral sensitivity curves are on page 35-9.

For an on-line reference, Wikipedia's article on the CIE color space (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931_color_space) looks (currently) pretty accurate, and describes the 1920 and 1931 experiments on indistinguishable color spectra.

Note the difference between sensitivity at a specific frequency and total response to different spectra; It's the latter that can be metameric. (And I still believe that non-black-body radiation can be equivalent in human response). At this point I think it's more that you don't believe me than that I'm being unclear...

[zdashamber.livejournal.com]

Dude, this is a discussion of science. Belief has no place in it. You're arguing that one spike for each of the known visual-pathway receptors should be enough to cover human response to light. I've been arguing from the original post you responded to onwards that the 70% of light information that doesn't go to the visual cortex is probably frequency-sensitive. This being scientific and all, I've provided a handful of links that back that hypothesis up.

We agree about just about everything, but I'm sad you're so stuck on the converting-light-into-vision stuff that you're blowing off the converting-light-into-timing-or-mood-or-other stuff. No doubt there is some number of spikes in the right frequencies and intensities to obviate all health effects from quantized light. The question is whether or not we consider systems of the body other than the visual system when guessing at these spikes.

Disclaimer: I am no expert

[stolen-tea.livejournal.com]

Don't just get compact fluorescents; make sure the bulbs are trying to achieve something more like daylight. I replaced many of the bulbs in my and wealhtheow's apartment with "full spectrum" CFs (from a local supplier, they're intended as plant growth), and I really like them. Can't speak as to wealhtheow's feelings, of course, but you could ask her for a contrasting opinion.

There are several different factors to take into account, which I'm going to talk about out of my ass.

Flicker and noise are bad; not only the stuff you're conscious of, but also the ones just under the edge of conscious perception that you still pick up. Make sure that you can live with your bulbs. If they haven't driven you crazy, my guess is that they're OK?

The temperature, measured in Kelvin, makes rooms feel sunnier to me. We're using 5000K bulbs, and sometimes when I'm walking by a lighted room, I'm fooled into thinking that there's daylight in there. At first, they seemed harsh and white, but now I greatly appreciate them. 6500K initially seemed a little too blue, but I think it'd grow on me, as even our 5000K now feel faintly yellowish. Normal incandescents now feel wan and jaundiced to me, and I can't imagine how I put up with them for so long.

CRI is an artificial measurement of how well the bulb renders color, given its temperature. I think all incandescents are by definition "perfect", but it takes a lot of work to make fluorescents anywhere near as good. A high CRI is important in a living environment, and especially important to artists, but I've not heard it associated with any particular ailment. I myself am slightly colorblind, so I may notice it less than most.

The amount of light radiated, in lumens (or lux, depending on what you measure), is part of the cause and solution to SAD. I think the generally accepted treatment is massive amounts of bright light, and the temperature and CRI are less important. (If you look at the curves, there's a heckuva lot more area under "incandescent" and "daylight" than under "fluorescent". SAD is not as simple as that, but I think it's a decent rule of thumb.) With fluorescents, bulb length directly affects brightness, and so the bigger the brighter. I got the biggest and brightest bulbs that would fit in our sockets, and they make me extraordinarily happy. Initially they seemed intense, but a) I got used to them, and b) fluorescents fade slightly after initial use, but stabilize at a very large percentage of their starting illumination.

"Cool White" is a tool of the devil.

So my general recommendation, not knowing anything about your personal preferences or needs, is to get the highest lumen CF bulbs possible, with decent CRI and either a 5000K or 6500K temperature. *shrug*

Re: Disclaimer: I am no expert

[stolen-tea.livejournal.com]

Oh, and all fluorescents contain mercury, which is of course Bad. So the fluorescent/incandescent debate is a lot thornier than most people make out, and involves a serious trade-off.

There are recycling programs out there, but I don't know how well they actually work. And gods help you if you break one...

Re: Disclaimer: I am no expert

[zdashamber.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's the path I'm leaning towards. Maybe the really high CRI fluorescents would be ok? The reason I haven't done that yet is that there we start to get into really expensive, and the incandescent "sunlight" bulb I tried some years back was annoying... The reading I've done suggests that for whatever reason dim blue (sunlight) light looks far worse than dim normal incandescent light. Bright sunlight light I haven't yet had the juice to try.

[georgedorn.livejournal.com]

What you are actually complaining about is not fluorescent lighting, but fluorescent lighting with a low CRI - color rendering index. Try finding CFLs with a CRI of 90+.

More details here (http://www.kruschwitz.com/cri.htm) and here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index).

I'm not an expert, but I'm surrounded by light bulbs and people selling light bulbs (http://bulbster.com) every day.

[zdashamber.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's one theory. I may check it out next time I have the cash for super-fancy fluorescents.

[georgedorn.livejournal.com]

Well, that's kinda the point of CRI - with most color temperatures, it's a measure of how close the light produced matches that from a black body, like an incandescent bulb or the sun.

[(Anonymous)]

This is Mike Sullivan.

I've been wondering about all this recent environmental furor about flourescents. Does it actually merit the attention? Just from first principles, I have a hard time believing that a terribly significant fraction of our energy budget goes towards lighting (as opposed to heating, cooling, transportation, running our TV's and computers, etc., etc.). If everyone nationwide went from incandescents to flourescents, would it reduce our national energy budget by 5%? 1%? .5%? I don't have any figures; my intuition says closer to .5% than anything else, but I can't support that, and maybe I'm way off.

Also, does it make sense cost-wise? I mean, if we're spending $X on high quality flourescents that don't make us want to kill, kill, kill, do we really get more of an environmental impact from that than if we were buying carbon offsets or whatever?

Anyone have any numbers?

[zdashamber.livejournal.com]

This post was touched off yesterday when I read an opinion (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/05/13/CMGA7PCMDH1.DTL) piece in the SF Chronicle asking questions quite similar to yours about green building. I've poked around a bit to try to find the residential lighting use compared to all electricity production, but no luck so far... Though the "Energy Information Administration" (http://www.eia.doe.gov/) (who knew that existed?) website looks like it's probably got that info somewhere. I found a neat breakdown of residential electricity use (http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/recs/recs4a.html) there: lights are 9.4%; various forms of heating and cooling are all bigger energy hogs.

Also, +5 for quoting Alice's Restaurant. :)

[(Anonymous)]

Mike S. again.

So, this bit from the same EIA website suggests 8.8% of all electricity consumption for households in 2001 was for lighting (indoor and outdoor): http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/recs/recs2001/enduse2001/enduse2001.html

I haven't found anything perfect for this statistic, but:

http://www.ju.edu.jo/offices/REB/Designing%20the%20Zero%20Energy%20House.pdf
http://www.swivel.com/data_sets/show/1001824

And other stuff I googled up makes me suspect that about 20% of all energy consumption is residential isn't a totally wrong ballpark number. That suggests that total energy use for domestic lighting might be as high as 2% of the US's total energy bill. So maybe we could knock down something between 1% and 1.5% by, countrywide, going to flourescents. (Most non-residential lighting is already flourescent, so there's not much to save there).

That's not insignificant. 1.5% of the country's energy bill is a big number, and, hey, I've got no quarrel with people who want to use flourescents and feel good about it. But I think that if those rough figures are right, then flourescents are receiving a disproportionate amount of lobbying.

To assuage Jimboboz's concerns, I'm not talking about individual people nitpicking. I'm talking about the degree to which people in the environmental movement push fluorescents, pick fights with people who don't care for them, and put public spotlight on policies or stores that encourage them. That seems like a waste of public mindspace. I'd be more impressed if comments about solar heating or good house insulation generated the kind of impassioned comment threads that fluorescents do -- I think that the same effort would likely create a much bigger impact on carbon footprints.

[jimboboz.livejournal.com]

In the following, I talk about Australian energy consumption figures, and make a distinction between energy consumption, and electricity consumption. This distinction is necessary because of talk of greenhouse gases and so on; for example, if I just want to be warm, it's better to burn gas at home to warm me, than to burn gas in a power generator, turn it into electricity, send it 100 miles to me, and then put that electricity through a radiator to warm me.

In Australia in 2000, 400.0 of 3,374.7 PJ of energy consumed from all sources (oil, coal, solar, etc) was consumed in households (Source: ABS (http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/94713ad445ff1425ca25682000192af2/bf60fce62cc84fceca256dea000539cf!OpenDocument), Table 17.18). So, 11.85% of energy use was residential.

Of this, about 60% - or 240 PJ goes to electrical appliances of all kinds. Of that, typically 1/3 - or 80 PJ - goes to lighting. CF bulbs use 1/5 the power of incandescent to produce the same lumens. If that were all incadescent, changing to CF would make the 80 PJ into 16 PJ. But about 25% of household lighting is already fluroescent (not usually compact fluroescent, but larger ones in kitchens, on porches and so on). So the imrovement would be more like from 80 PJ to 25 PJ, a saving of 65 PJ. It's hard to be exact because of patterns of use in the home.

This 65 PJ savings is not insignificant. The entire agriculture industry in Australia only used 71.2 PJ in 2000, and we managed to feed a few other countries. The entire construction industry used 51 PJ. The entire hydroelectric sector only produced 60.4 PJ in 2000, (Source: ABS (http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/94713ad445ff1425ca25682000192af2/41FFA4BC1C41736FCA256DEA00053A83?opendocument), Table 17.5, this compares to total electrical production of 721 PJ, or 8.3% (ibid, Table 17.8).

As touched on in the first paragraph, probably more important than CF vs incandescent is how we get the things we want.

Human beings do not really want electricity, gas and coal. We want hot showers, cold beers, hot dinners and entertainment. We also want to get these things in such a way that our children can get them, too - ie, not fuck up the planet too much. There are many ways to do it. For example, in Sweden they have a few towns where the local power company operates a wood-burning plant and a large forest. They burn the wood to produce steam to drive turbines and give the town electricity, but rather than sending them electricity for heating and cooking, they send them the steam in pipes; by the time it's circulated around the whole town, it's cool enough to go back through the reactor and the turbines again. So what is normally "waste" (the steam coming off cooling towers you see in all the adverts about the environment) now becomes a resource - heats their homes and helps them cook. Lest people think, "oh, but you couldn't do a whole country this way," well, Sweden has commited to becoming fossil-fuel-free by 2020; they're combining this sort of thing with solar, wind, hydro, etc.

But this sort of thing is a society-wide one. It's hard for you or I to get our whole town to do that kind of thing. But we can do little things, like use CF globes, use public transport more, turn off appliances at night, and so on. And our small changes contribute to the whole.

One of the ways that people resist changes to their lives is to pick something trivial - CF bulbs, how much they drive, how often they go to McDs - and quibble with it.
"I know things are going bad, but what can I do?"
"You can do X, Y and Z."
"I can't do X because..."
"So you can't do anything, then?"
"Well anyway if just I do it, what difference would it make?"

If you don't want to change, then don't, don't make quibbles for excuses. If you do wish to change, then change what you can and feel comfortable with. As Yoda said, do or no do, there is no whinge.

Our home uses 1/4 the water, gas and electricity of the average. We are not living like the Amish. If everyone were to live like this... well, everyone could live like this. Not everyone could live like the typical Australian. There's just not enough energy in the world for that - or food, or water, etc.

[zdashamber.livejournal.com]

Let's be clear here. No matter how shiningly awesome you are, you don't get to tell people that their valid, scientifically-backed observations are just quibbling and whinging.

[jimboboz.livejournal.com]

It's nothing to do with being shiningly-awesome. Your scientifically-backed observations about the dreadful effects of CF bulbs are opposed by a heap of scientifically-backed observations of the dreadful effects of doing nothing to reduce our levels of consumption.

It's just a very common pattern, as I said. If a person wants to avoid action, they first say that they don't know what actions to take; when some are suggested, they quibble with them individually and whinge about how hard it'd be; then they say well, I'm just one person, my changes would have no real effect anyway. Voila! No-one does anything!

There's always an excellent, scientifically-backed reason to do nothing at all. If you don't want to do anything, don't! You're in the USA, right? Like my own Australia, the world has given up on us and doesn't expect us to do anything. If we do anything at all useful and good in terms of consumption, the world will fall on their arses in surprise.

[(Anonymous)]

This is Mike Sullivan, again.

Madeline drives a hybrid -- I think that her cred for caring and making a change to her lifestyle is established by her spending an extra $5,000 or so to get a car that produces a lot less carbon per mile, in a way that is not justified by purely rational economic self-interest.

So, while there may be some people who use targeted complaints about specific policies to add up to a policy of doing nothing at all, you're way off-base in pointing fingers at Madeline in particular.