Farewell to 60 watt bulbs – are you sad to see them go?

Although it is no doubt true about the mercury in CFLs, how come nobody worried about it when it was in conventional flourescent tubes, many millions of which must have been broken in the 80-odd years that they have been in use?

A while ago I was writing about Quarz Halogen bulbs as a dimmable and instantly-lighting substitute for CFLs. I have now had four of these installed for a few months and the first one has just failed. Apparently 2000 hours is the best you’ll get from a bulb and, as they use far more electricity than CFLs and cost £2.50 each to buy they are a very expensive alternative to either CFLs or conventional tungsten bulbs.

I will be replacing them again, this time with LEDs, once these are available with a high enough rating – which I understand won’t be all that long.

À propos some interesting former exchanges with Richard English, tytalus, and others regarding the finite/infinite nature of fossil fuels, it occurred to me that the following [Carpe Diem, 12 May 2012] might be of some interest:

“The Green River Formation—an assemblage of over 1,000 feet of sedimentary rocks that lie beneath parts of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming—contains the world’s largest deposits of oil shale. USGS estimates that the Green River Formation contains about 3 trillion barrels of oil. At the midpoint of this estimate, almost half of the 3 trillion barrels of oil would be recoverable. This is an amount about equal to the entire world’s proven oil reserves. The vast untapped energy resources of Green River, the largest oil shale deposit in the world, provide additional support for the idea that “peak oil” is “peak idiocy.” –Mark J. Perry.

This may, of course, be dismissed as unsound science, suspect advocacy, or unproven guesswork. But it is worth examining with a view to perhaps modifying one’s earlier convictions.

Not for the first time, tytalus, you have hit the nail on the head. Whilst obsessively contending about the meaning, application, and usefulness of terms like “infinite” the world keeps on turning. I don’t think you need worry about running out of land, incidentally. The African continent has vast land resources. There is no objective reason why there should be famine in any part of it. Bad management, poor stewardship, political upheavals, and war wreak untold and unnecessary damage on a continent blessed with enormous natural potential – yet cursed with a pitiful lack of things we in the First World take for granted.
Law and order characterise the systems that underpin our continuing prosperity and if that breaks down we may well experience some of the chaos that seems endemic in much of Africa. One looks at Greece with foreboding.
But Richard and wavechange do have a point; waste is indeed appalling and mindless profligacy unforgivable. Equally unforgivable, in my view, is the patronising and politically inspired actions of certain self-righteous groups who, with the unwholesome and incorruptible fanaticism of latter-day Saint-Justs, even now are planning to destroy and thereby hinder the production of GM crops that would ameliorate famine throughout large areas of the world. This is simply because they don’t like them and/or don’t approve of the large companies that have develop them.