THE GREEN LEADING THE BLIND
It's not easy loving compact fluorescent lightbulbs.
I write this from a dream-future, bathed in pure fluorescent light. It’s not half-bad here. I’m kicked back in a dentist’s chair just down the street from Santa’s workshop. It’s achingly bright here on the permafrost, but my headache is lulled by the slow dripping of ice-caps and the faint symphony of drills. Ah, dentistry! Lovely! When I look up, squinting, rainbow-visions crowd the horizon like the Northern Lights, all awash in the same cold glow: the waiting room at the DMV! Interrogation cells! Endless shining aisles of big-box stores! And, oh, look: A sad little office cubicle of my very own!
Welcome to the future, my pretties: it’s fluorescent, and it’s awful. For months now old-style, incandescent light bulbs’ hegemony has been flickering, and it’s clear the race is on to supplant them entirely. Both Senate and the House are legislating a more efficient light bulb into predominance, while Australia, Canada, and much of the EU are banning future sales of incandescent light bulbs altogether. Wal-Mart and Home Depot have joined the charge, driving distribution up and prices down on the only currently viable alternative: compact fluorescent light bulbs. Ready-to-fit in conventional sockets, CFLs consume up to 75% less energy than incandescents, last up to 12 times longer, and save about $35 in energy costs over each bulb’s lifetime – not to mention billions of tons of coal and natural gas.
I want to hop on the CFL bandwagon, I really do. Releasing my tree from its perpetual bear-hug, I bought scads of CFLs and replaced every bulb in our house in a flood of Good Works. Then the misery set in. Regretfully, I screwed out curly bulbs one by one, my spirits rising and my virtue dimming with every correction. Now I stomach the cold CFL glare only in closets; usually I save even more energy by rummaging for stuff in the dark. I’m sour about this for a gallingly simple reason: that CFL light – after all, the light bulb’s chief reason for being – is just teeth-grittingly awful. They’re an easily hate-able solution that even committed greenies like myself cannot wholeheartedly back.
Now cue the boosters: things are improving fast! CFLs now come in a wider range of whites, better approximating daylight. (Never mind the dead-end nature of this innovation: adding extra phosphors to the coating inside a CFL fills out the color spectrum and gives whites more nuance - but every additional phosphor drives the bulb’s efficiency down and the cost up.) They light up immediately now; they don’t buzz or waver oddly anymore. But CFLs still use mercury to emit light, requiring careful recycling and professional cleanup if a bulb should break, say, on the wall-to-wall carpeting in your toddler’s bedroom. And my land: that sickening, alien light. Tell me you’re ready to look like Dick Cheney in bronzer.
So, what’s the defense cooking up? VC money is gushing into alternate technologies, like light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and silicon-based solutions for the retail market. LEDs power everything from TV screens to traffic lights by efficiently moving electrons on a semiconductor to emit a particular color of light. If we could finagle a precipitous price drop in semiconductors, silicon or both, CFLs could get their rightful spanking soon with an affordable alternative.
But greenies! “Soon” is just not soon enough. The opportunity to switch gears is now, but we’re futzing it up royally. Changing to energy-efficient light bulbs is the ideal first step towards environmentally responsible living – but we are kidding ourselves that people will willingly dwell in a pallid-blue glow, like droopy goldfish in a Chinese restaurant. It’s inarguably a big plus to improve energy efficiency ten-plus times the current standard - but after 125 years of same-old, same-old, with pent-up consumer demand and an unparallel opportunity to go green in a big way, couldn’t we design something not just bright, but brilliant?
—Jude Stewart for I.D. Magazine, November / December 2007
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