"The Anti-American Non-Energy Bill"

As for his initial statement that we should just be finding more energy instead of conserving, that is completely misguided and foolish. Probably self-serving for his constituency in the oil based Texas economy.
My concern is not that this is a congressional/EPA mandate, as the senator pleads, but that there is indeed an inherent toxicity to these 'green' lightbulbs. I have also read the instructions for cleaning up one of these light bulbs, and it is unlikely that anyone will follow that procedure. I have stated my concerns elsewhere, and one response indicated that the amount of mercury was some small fraction of allowable exposure, and/or is dwarfed by other common sources of emission. The number of bulbs in use must already be in the hundreds of millions. There will be very few people who dispose of them properly, and the cumulative effect may be significant to some degree. On balance, this may be comparably inconsequential, but there is just something about this that bothers me. It just seems that these products aren't in themselves 'green' and their value seems to be measure solely in reduced energy consumption.

Wow. The mercury thing again. I wrote up a Q&A for Fine Homebuilding about this a few issues back (http://www.taunton.com/finehomebuilding/how-to/qa/...). In it I pointed out that standatd fluorescent tubes contain roughly 10 times as much mercury as a cfl. That's one order of magnitude. A neon light has about 25 times as much. Forget about thermostats.

Does anyone recycle old fluorescent tubes or do they just throw them in the trash (and maybe break them in the dumpster if they don't fit)?
(they throw them away and break them for fun)

I wonder if TV sets have anything bad in them... Hey, aren't we all supposed to throw away our old tvs because the world is going digital soon and the old sets won't work?
I wonder if the old tvs have more mercury than the new ones...

I saw a tv on the side of the road the other day along with the rest of the household trash. I was sure it would bes encapsulated at the dump though, so I didn't worry about it.

I wonder if skin creme has mercury in it...
(yup)
I wonder if children's sneakers have mercury in them...
(yup)
I wonder why no one cares about mercury content unless it's in an energy saving lightbulb...