Posted on 03/22/2006 5:14:34 AM PST by Born Conservative
Pupils launch bid to save Americans $2.3B in electric costs; seek Oprah's help in plan to dole out lightbulbs
Qiana Marks and 200 other North Babylon students hope to save the Earth - and also save the American public $2.3 billion in electric costs.
It's all part of a campaign begun yesterday in the Robert Moses Middle School to "fight global warming one lightbulb at a time," said Kenny Luna, eighth-grade science teacher.
Luna and his students want to give an energy-saving compact fluorescent lightbulb to every school child in America, "all 50 million between pre-kindergarten and 12th grade."
They're asking TV star Oprah Winfrey to help spread the word.
CFL bulbs use an average 75 percent less energy than normal lightbulbs. If every student changed one bulb, the saving at $46 per bulb would add up to $2.3 billion, Luna calculated.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsday.com ...
So you are an authority on how other people feel?
WOW! You're good!
There was a recall on one brand about a year ago. They did burn out, but they weren't actually burning out, they were melting a seal- a fire hazzard. The ones that came 2-or 3 to a pack skrink wrapped onto a green cardboard.
I think they were made by a company called "globe" Batch# Bh342. I'm not sure. I know I had to check every bulb in the house and take out the ones from that batch, and this one I'm looking at I never did send back MAY be the one. Check their website.
Well said......
I sure hope that you're not referring to global warming. There is no *near total agreement* or there wouldn't be all the controversy surrounding it. Most meteorologists I've talked to at the NWS don't buy global warming at all. If you want to see how much controversy there is, you can check out DaveLoneRanger's Global Warming ping list articles. There's plenty here on FR to look at.
He shoots! He SCORES!!!
It seems a little odd to have faith in a model that "predicts" the performance of a system under extraordinary conditions, when the same model can't predict the system's performance under normal conditions with a century of hard data to feed into it.
It's been below normal all month here as well, and when I went up to churchill a month ago the bears had lots of ice to play on. Everyone was shivering up there too, wondering where all this global warming was. ( I do work for the hydro electric companies)
No more than I am supposed to believe that human activity bears the majority of responsibility for the current upward trend in average global temeperature.
Well DUH! No civilized country will make them. They contain mercury!
The power of ONE hurricane is more than all the power all of mankind could generate, more than all the nukes set off at once and every bit of known oil burned at once.
And the UN thinks we can control the weather- sheesh!
The issue, of course, is whether the man-made enhancements to natural atmospheric greenhouse gases have had an identifiable climate effect so far:http://www.sepp.org/glwarm/noscicons.html* Nearly all of the IPCC group agreed with the key IPCC conclusion, buried on page 254 of the report, that "it is not possible to attribute all, or even a large part, of the observed global-mean warming [of 0.5 degree Celsius since 1890] to the enhanced greenhouse effect on the basis of observational data currently available."
* On the question of future warming, virtually all of the IPCC participants agreed with the Phoenix group that the various theoretical models currently used for climate prediction—similar in many respects to the models used for long-range weather forecasting—have not been adequately validated by the existing climate record. (This means that if we go back to say, the year 1890 and apply the theory, it fails to predict the observed climate pattern that actually occurred.)
* Furthermore, 60% of the IPCC group, and all of the Phoenix group, believed that the current global circulation models do not accurately portray the real atmosphere-ocean system. Yet these models form the only basis for predicting a catastrophic warming in the next century.
There is no mercury in florescent bulbs. You are thinking of those mercury vapor lamps- like the use for street lights and warehouses.
We don't use much in the way of "foreign sources of energy" for electricity generation. Coal, nuclear, natural gas and hydro make up about 95% of our yearly generation. Use all the florescent bulbs you like, but it won't make a damn bit of difference in our energy imports.
I use them in spots for general illumination where the light tends to be on many hours a day and I was replacing bulbs frequently. I have other fixtures with 50-cent incandescent bulbs that haven't been changed in 15 years or more because they don't get many hours of use. It makes no sense to spend 10 times more for a bulb in those areas.
The standard fluorescent bulbs do suck for reading lamps or where good color is important. They give a yellow/green cast and are harder on the eyes for those doing close work unless you spend even more on color balanced bulbs.
FLUORESCENT LIGHTS AND MERCURY
Mercury is an essential ingredient for most energy-efficient lamps. Fluorescent lamps and high intensity discharge (HID) lamps are the two most common types of lamps that utilize mercury. Fluorescent lamps provide lighting for most schools, office buildings and stores. HID lamps, which include mercury-vapor, metal halide and high-pressure sodium lamps, are used for street lights, floodlights and industrial lighting. A typical fluorescent lamp is composed of a phosphor-coated glass tube with electrodes located at either end. The tube contains mercury, of which only a very small amount is in vapor form. When a voltage is applied, the electrodes energize the mercury vapor, causing it to emit ultraviolet (UV) energy. The phosphor coating absorbs the UV energy, causing the phosphor to fluoresce and emit visible light. Without the mercury vapor to produce UV energy, there would be no light. A four-foot fluorescent lamp has an average rated life of at least 20,000 hours. To achieve this long life, lamps must contain a specific quantity of mercury. The amount of mercury required is very small, typically measured in milligrams, and varies by lamp type, date of manufacture, manufacturing plant and manufacturer.
http://www.p2pays.org/mercury/lights.asp
Exactly. I was using the hurricane analogy only to compare the area affected to the area of the whole globe; there's no way that we could even START to control a hurricane. Hell, in some cases we can't even hold water back to prevent floods or mudslides.
Yes your right. The starter or balast contains an element and a tiny bit of mercury. The gas in the tube is argon, which excites the phosphous power that lines the tube. without that powder, you'd have a typical 'black light'.
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