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Sarah Palin's bus tour is a potemkin bus tour, it turns out. The bus is a prop. In fact, she's jetting around the country on a $4,000/hour Gulfstream II 12-passenger jet. Her recent arrival in Roanoke in her bus? Nope—she flew there. Her only time spent on the bus is on the way to a bookstore. Authenticity is the most important thing about populism; once you can fake that, you're in good shape.
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A life cycle assessment has found that the newfangled bulbs are as energy-saving as CFLs, but not any better, apparently. There had been concern that the manufacturing process might offset their benefits, but those can be now be quieted.
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Last year, the New Yorker ran a brilliant exposé by Raffi Khatchadourian about illegal logging. When you buy a toilet seat for $5 at Walmart and wonder how in the world that's so cheap…well, now you know: Russian criminal gangs are illegally timbering wilderness along their southern border, smuggling the the virgin wood south into China, where it's bought cheaply and turned into the crap for sale at the *marts of the world. That's one more reason to buy American.
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In the current (Nov. 23) New Yorker, Raffi Khatchadourian has a deeply engaging, fascinating article about the people who develop industrial flavor additives. Companies like Nabisco or Conagra come to them and say "we've made a flavorless mash that we can shape to look like chicken and mashed potatoes—can you create those flavors in the lab?" They make the additives, which are mixed in, and fool you into thinking you're eating something good for you, what Michael Pollan describes as "a food-like substance." This link is not to the article, because the article is behind a paywall. This article is to the page on author Raffi Khatchadourian's website where the article will be available in late January. But it's just so great that I'm linking to it now to revisit and share in a couple of months.
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The big wins with LEDs are that they 1) don’t contain free mercury and 2) don’t get very hot.
Hey, Dan Snyder and a lot of other people practice illegal logging in this country as well. When I worked at the Bureau of Land Management, they were prosecuting lots of people for illegal logging on US Forest lands. And not little stands either.
Of course, nothing compares to the wholesale operation you are mentioning here, which is even more sickening.
Good points both, Tim. I’d looked into them for our house, but the prices are just so unbelievable right now (and the quality of the light so bad if you cheap out on it) that there’s just no way.
I despise the light quality from anything other than incandescent bulbs for most living spaces. I intend to get half a dozen or so cases of them at Lowes to stockpile before the ban goes into effect.
It’s appalling that the timber article in the New Yorker didn’t even mention Ikea. Check out Ellen Ruppel Shell’s book “Cheap”.
Here’s a review with some info on Ikea: http://www.salon.com/books/review/2009/07/12/cheap/
While I used to dislike the “color” of the light from florescent lighting, some of the new compact florescent bulbs have been color balanced and look much better… of course they still have mercury in them.
LED lights (the few I have seen) look fabulous, stay cool, and are very efficient; but they have remained pretty expensive. I look forward to falling prices and gradual replacement.
There have been some recent advances in LED technology, but they haven’t fully hit the consumer market yet. You *can* get 110V AC white LEDs for cheap, but that’s an extremely recent development.
I don’t think we’ll see (inexpensive) LED versions of 100W incandescents for about a year.
Its all about the Kelvin number Jack. Stay in the 3500 K range and you’ll find CFL’s to be as warm as your Edison relics.