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Like many of you, I am very concerned about climate change. I am proactively doing whatever I can to make changes to lesson my impact on my carbon footprint in my life, my home and my means of transportation. Since I live in California, where we have a constant level of possible rolling blackouts, I visited the Flex Your Power website for tips on how to save energy. According to the State of California, lighting is 37% of the total power consumption in the home—which is by far the largest single power draw in your house.

Flex Your Power has lots of great tips on how to save energy, including upgrading your windows, appliances and installing insulation, but the number one tip is to upgrade your light bulbs to compact florescent bulbs (CFLs). They use over 50% less energy and last up to 10 times longer than traditional incandescent light bulbs. There is an obvious and immediate trade off; CFLs are quite a bit more expensive and the quality of the lighting has only recently come up to the level of the standard incandescent bulbs. On the surface, it seems that the trade off on energy savings and reduction of CO2 emissions is worth it. So, I made the jump…

I live in a new home that has an impressive collection of recessed lighting. In fact, my home has a total of 38 recessed lights throughout the house. On top of that, we have several lamps and outdoor lights as well. My house can eat up quite a bit of energy, especially if the house full of kids I have manage to forget to turn off their lights when they leave a room.

About a year ago, I made the switch to CFLs throughout the house. I spent the money to buy good ones and felt proud that I was doing my part to save the environment and to save a lot of money over the next couple years. I am not alone. According to MSNBC.com, in 2007, 9 million CFLs were purchased in California alone, reducing CO2 emissions in California by about 1.5 billion pounds. Sounds like a win/win. What is the problem?

Like everything else, there is a trade off and CFLs have a big one and surprisingly not a lot of people know about it. CFLs contain at least 5 milligrams of mercury powder in each bulb, enough to contaminate over 6,000 gallons of drinking water (according to MSNBC.com). Moreover, You cannot throw away spent CFLs in the trash. They are toxic waste that needs to be handled by a special facility, designed to deal with mercury. And guess what? Not all towns have an approved facility to handle CFLs.

Essentially, environmentalist bandwagon jumping has cause the potential for up to 54 billion gallons of water to be contaminated beyond save drinking levels just by the number of CFLs purchased in California in 2007 alone. Imagine the cumulative impact over many years, decades…

I also asked myself, what happens if I break one of these CFLs accidentally in my house.? After all, CFLs practically explode when they break, spewing mercury powder everywhere. According to the EPA, there is an 11 step process you should follow, including airing out the room, using gloves, double bagging (plastic bags I assume) and carefully using tape to pick up the remaining powder. Don’t use a vaccuum. That is a very bad idea, according to the EPA site.

Great! Now I have 38 points of hazardous waste in my home that I have no convienienct mode of which to dispose. What did I do?

Just like the plastic bags Jared mentioned on the Words Cause Radio Show on BlogTalkRadio and just like the Myth of the Electric Car, there are always tradeoffs with everything. There is no way not to have an impact on the environment, so we need to be much more thoughtful before we run to the store for the latest fix to our energy or climate change issues. There is no one silver bullet to solve all our problems. Maybe solar power is part of the equation. Then using harmless incandescent bulbs is not an issue for us and we can go back to not poisoning our water and our families to save energy.

A topic for another blog I suppose.

~DK