Incandescent bulbs are now officially banned in the United States. Global temperatures dropped five degrees upon hearing the announcement. That’s sarcasm, by the way. I propose a ten-year study on this issue to determine whether getting rid of incandescent bulbs and replacing them with LED bulbs — oh CFL bulbs, the savior of our world, where did you go? — makes any meaningful difference in US or global temperatures. My money is on no.
Yes, LED bulbs use less electricity, but they also are more expensive. One report says the average American family of three will save a trip through the drive-thru at McDonald’s on their annual electric bill by totally switching over to LED bulbs. The report failed to add the cost of the LED bulbs into their equation, so I suspect the savings is minimal.
Remember when CFL/LED bulb manufacturers said their products would last 5-7 years and proudly advertised this “fact” on their bulbs? Consumers quickly learned this claim was a lie. Most bulb manufacturers no longer make life expectancy claims/warranties for their products. Of course, Americans should be used to manufacturers lying to them. Lifetime warranty on my $8 can-opener, my ass. The federal government should do something about these lies, but it won’t. Campaign donations keep such inquiries and enforcement to a minimum.
Using only LED bulbs is much like recycling — feel-good things we can easily do, but make little difference in battling global warming. If we want to concretely do something meaningful about global warming, we must make hard, painful decisions about how we live and what we consume. First-world countries and rising Asian countries have no interest in doing what is necessary to save our planet (Or better put, save our habitation. Once the next great extinction kills us off, the planet will get on just fine without us.)
Are we willing to drive less, fly less, eat less, buy less, consume less — “less” being the key operative? Can we envision a world where we have less than previous generations? Hard choices are required, but I don’t see the necessary political will to effect such changes. Americans will simply not abide by politicians telling them to do with less. We want what we want, and we want it now. God dammit, we are AMERICANS!
Capitalism lies at the heart of the global warming crisis. As long as companies put profits and shareholder returns above moral and ethical responsibilities, there’s no hope for a better tomorrow. I am not sure that hoping for a better tomorrow is anything more than a fantasy. We glowingly talk about the American dream and American exceptionalism when reality tells a very different story. We can chant USA! USA! USA! WE’RE NUMBER ONE! WE’RE NUMBER ONE! WE’RE NUMBER ONE! at football games and political rallies, but virtually every metric suggests we are a declining empire, that is killing itself one arrogant, self-righteous choice at a time.
By all means, change all your lightbulbs — I have. But, don’t delude yourself into thinking that it will make much difference. I am a cynic, which is just another word for a realist. We have likely crossed the line of no return. Weather extremes are the norm. Our oceans are rising. We continue to kill off animal species at an alarming rate. We stupidly think that “science” will ride to the rescue and save us; that a technological “fix” for what ails us is just around the corner. No such savior is coming to deliver us. We made this mess and now we must bear the consequences of our “sins.”
I will soon be dead, so I don’t worry much about how these things will affect me. My plane is circling the runway, getting ready to land. I do, however, have six children who could live to the year 2060 and thirteen grandchildren who could still be alive in 2100. I have palpable worry and fear for them. What kind of world are Grandpa and Nana and fellow boomers leaving behind? Will 2100 be a technological wonder or a mash-up of Mad Max, Waterworld, and The Road? I want a better tomorrow for them, as all grandparents do, but everything I see and know tells me that difficult days lie ahead for those I love most.
Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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I don’t think longevity of light bulbs is a lie. Changing bulbs has become an extraordinary occurrence. Some early LEDs didn’t mitigate their heat properly resulting in a short life when the technology was new. I still have the vast majority of the CFLs in storage from the power company, they are like the energizer bunny and keep going and going. Modern LEDs have good longevity too.
Probably right about single stream recycling. And Yeeaas! I BELIEVE! that some day they’ll make it work. I saw a recent system that used a computerized system that could ID stuff on a conveyor and then grab it robotically.
What is the cause of global warming? Well people have way too many kids and with modern medicine they are all survivors. We are now in exponential population growth, sadly it can’t go on forever. I recall in an ecology class about an isolated population of a particular species of deer on an island. At some point when resources were plentiful the population spiked. Then a lean year and the population collapsed. The population did recover but was always a shadow of what it was before the spike. That’s probably be what happens. I don’t think people are going to stop reproducing.
No, LED bulbs won’t stop climate change.
We mostly have LED bulbs now. They really do last longer, and that’s good. As I age, it becomes harder to change a ceiling light bulb.
We tried some of the early LED bulbs, but they were too dim and had a short life. But the ones you can buy today seem to be pretty good. And I still have a few incandescents which I might need for the oven light.
Sadly, LED lightbulbs will not fix the problem. Even if we were to limit fossil fuel usage to the current rates, we would still be adding carbon dioxide, and the planet will get even warmer.
Ideally what we should have done was limit population and average prosperity in 1970 so that we leveled out at 1970s level. Then, it appears, the Earth could have continued in that state until all non-renewable sources of energy ran out. When non-renewable energy finally ran out, we would end up needing population to reduce to a sustainable limit, which I think might be somewhere around 2 billion people (from the current 8 billion). I don’t know if people would ever do that peacefully, but that is what would be needed. At least we would have had a chance if we had only maintained resource usage at 1970 levels.
Instead, since 1970 we doubled the population and increased the prosperity per person. The result is that the Earth is being damaged far faster than it can repair itself, with species loss, global warming, ocean acidification, and fossil fuel depletion overwhelming the planet.
I suspect that we have driven the planet far above sustainable limits, and could see population collapse below 2 billion in the next century. I know that sounds depressing, but that is how I see it.
I brought the subject up at Internet Infidels ) but that thread went completely off the rails. In spite of the nastiness there, I still learned a lot. Some day I hope to pull my thoughts together for a blog post on ecological overshoot.
The more I travel the world, the more I see that USA is NOT #1. While some places have greater percentages of people in poverty, others have fewer numbers of people in poverty. We are a nation of sick people, many in poverty or just barely out of poverty, living at the behest of the wealthy and being fed the lies of American Exceptionalism.
Unfortunately, campaign finance money guarantees many politicians will continue to do nothing about climate change.
LED bulbs reducing global warming? not likely. however, a comment my daughter mentioned from Chemical and Engineering News ( a publication of the American Chemical Society) about a large manufacturing company changing all their lighting to LEDs may be an indicator: the company expects to save a lot of money on replacing bulbs, on electric bills, and on the air conditioning because the older bulbs get hot. (Florescent bulbs use mercury, which has toxicity problems) An old tale about incandescent lights: we bought an old house in New Jersey in 1973: almost all the lights were incandescent. The kitchen lights were recessed. One day I was upstairs in my daughter’s room and noticed a warm place on the floor. The kitchen incandescent was heating through the ceiling, the upstairs carpet and wooden subfloor. Can you say fire hazard? Turns out the previous owner put a 300 watt bulb in a fixture designed for less power. we changed the bulb, then changed the fixture. We needed illumination, not conflagration!
What I like about the LEDs is that they are available in a wide array of color temperatures, and consume far less electricity. One drawback, however, is that I cannot use them in my ceiling fan, for which I have a light-dimming switch (they can be dimmable, but require a different switch).