My Mini Fireplace

On cold nights like this, I appreciate the one incandescent light bulb left in my apartment that I use regularly. It's in the lamp next to my bed. It might as well be a mini-fireplace. You can feel the warmth even a few feet away.

The surface of an incandescent bulb can reach temperatures of 400 to 550 degrees, which is why they're used in situations where contained, local heating is needed, like chick incubators and Easy-Bake Ovens.

That's one reason compact fluorescent light bulbs are so much more efficient. They don't waste nearly as much energy by radiating heat, helping CFLs use less than a quarter of the electricity of an incandescent.

Yet here in the United States, incandescent bulbs still outnumber CFLs on store shelves. Even though CFLs will save many times their higher initial cost through electricity savings, people just grab the bulb that's the cheapest to purchase. There's also a great deal of inertia - people tend to stick with what they know and are reluctant to change.

It's remarkable that states or Congress haven't moved to follow Australia's example to ban incandescent bulbs altogether. It would save consumers money, reduce the burden on our energy grid, and cut our greenhouse gas emissions. What's the downside?

Green Living Challenge #7: Making the Move to CFLs

The Arlingtonians for a Clean Environment Green Living Challenge deadline is coming up tomorrow, but I can grab another 5 points for something that's already been saving me money:

Change the most frequently used light bulbs in your residence to compact fluorescent (up to 5 bulbs with one point per bulb).

Switching to CFLs is one of several things I did this spring that helped cut my power bill by 10%. While CFLs won't stop global warming by themselves, they can help reduce our national power usage, hence our greenhouse gas emissions.

CFLs do contain a small amount of mercury, so they need to be recycled. But CFLs actually involve less total mercury use than incandescent bulbs. Why? Because the majority of our national power comes from coal. The coal burned to provide the extra juice incandescents require will actually put more mercury into the atmosphere than is contained in a CFL. This graph explains it best.

Even though they'll save you up to $30 on your power bill over a 10-year lifespan, CFLs can still be shockingly hard to find. The Harris Teeter near me on Glebe Road doesn't stock even one CFL. Even when the return on investment is so immediate and enormous, old habits can be hard to break.

Should American ban incandescents like Australia recently did? I think so. Consumers save money, we slightly ease demand on our national power grid, and we slightly cut our national greenhouse gas emissions. What would be the downside?

Points for this action: 5
Total points to date: 90
Points needed to complete Green Living Challenge: 100

Raw Fisher's Half-Baked Attack

You know the world's gone topsy-turvy when The Green Miles is coming to the defense of Wal-Mart. Maybe I'm still in the Christmas spirit because I'm wearing the nice green shirt The Green Mom got me for Christmas?

Marc Fisher is one of my favorite columnists (next to fellow Fall River, MA native and fellow bleeding heart EJ Dionne), but his blog post today couldn't be more off-base:

Wal-Mart, the company that lefties, urbanites and greens love to hate, is repositioning itself as a friend of the environment: The retail behemoth has announced its intention to sell 100 million of those compact fluorescent light bulbs that cost an arm and a leg to buy, but save lots of energy (and therefore cut your electric bill.)

This will not work, for one simple reason: The bulbs provide only the illusion of light. We shelled out the big bucks--the things cost upwards of ten times the price of cheap but energy-hogging incandescent bulbs--for a bunch of different so-called swirl bulbs and actually lived with the things for a couple of months before, finally, we all realized that we were straining to read, straining to do anything that required what a good old 60-watt Sylvania provides with total reliability.

The propagandists behind the compact fluorescents claim that the new swirl bulbs are every bit as bright, warm and user-friendly as the cheap bulbs that have served Americans for the better part of a century. These folks are--how to put this--wrong.

I don't "love to hate" Wal-Mart. (For the record, I love to hate Paris Hilton.) I support their compact fluorescent effort, and I wish Wal-Mart would take more simple, low-cost steps to minimize its environmental impact. In an age when even the Pentagon is going green, Wal-Mart remains years behind.

I also love to hate critics who make six figures complaining about paying $3 for light bulbs.

And how can a light bulb not be user-friendly? How many Post columnists does it take to screw in a light bulb?

Fisher is already getting ripped in his comments section. Please join in!

UPDATE: Of the 37 comments filed right now, I only count three that support Fisher's position on this. Go, greens, go!

The Tipping Point for Compact Fluorescents

Fast Company magazine has an article on how Wal-Mart wants to sell at least one compact fluorescent light bulb to each of its 100 million customers ...

Last year, conversations started in Wal-Mart around the potential of swirls to save customers money on utility bills. "Somebody asked, 'What difference would it make if we changed the bulbs in the ceiling-fan display to CFLs?'" says Kerby. A typical Wal-Mart has 10 models of ceiling fans on display, each with four bulbs. Forty bulbs per store, 3,230 stores.

"Someone went off and did the math," says Kerby. "They told me we could save $6 million in electric bills by changing the incandescents to CFLs in more than 3,000 Wal-Marts. I couldn't believe it. I didn't know I was paying $6 million to light those fixtures. I said, that can't be right, go back and do the math again." The numbers came out the same the second time: savings of $6 million a year. "That, for me, was an 'I got it' moment."