Light Bulbs

There's a rather excellent article on Fast Company called How Many Lightbulbs Does it Take to Change the World, that looks at compact fluorescent bulbs. Its main focus is what would happen if every American household replaced one 60W incandescent bulb with one of the funky new 12W ice cream spiral bulbs. Swapping those 110 million bulbs will (by their calculations) save energy equivalent to a city of 1.5 million people. A tiny savings plus an enormous multiplication factor equals a very significant change. Wal-Mart is getting on board too, planning on selling 100 million CF bulbs in the next year in their stores, which will be enough to make a dent in US energy usage, and possibly alter the way the whole world beats back the grues.

It's still hard to buy those goddam CF bulbs, despite all the numbers and save-the-whales hokum. I grabbed one the other day to replace my blown bedroom bulb, and it was really difficult to turn down those incandescent bulbs that were sitting there for just a dollar. Of course I made things extra worse for myself by paying $15 for it at the little Edgecliff hardware store instead of $7 at the Double Bay Woolworths as I discovered later, but I'll put that down to experience. I'd really like to know how much energy and money that little bulb is going to save me, so I can feel better about paying seven (ok fifteen) times more than the old bulb. I'll certainly gather them up and take them with me when I shift house.