On Sunday, a New York Times editorial surprisingly went after one of the darlings of the climate alarmism crowd, the compact fluorescent light bulb, for this very reason.
Hold on to your seats, ladies and gentlemen, for the Times offered some inconvenient truths about this supposed environmental panacea that folks like Nobel Laureate Al Gore and his sycophantic devotees work tirelessly to hide from you (emphasis added):
Unlike traditional light bulbs, each of these spiral bulbs has a tiny bit of a dangerous toxin — around five milligrams of mercury. And although one dot of mercury might not seem so bad, almost 300 million compact fluorescents were sold in the United States last year. That is already a lot of mercury to throw in the trash, and the amounts will grow ever larger in coming years.
Businesses and government recyclers need to start working on more efficient ways to deal with that added mercury. Ellen Silbergeld, a professor of environmental health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, is raising the cry about the moment when millions of these light bulbs start landing in landfills or incinerators all at once. The pig in the waste pipeline, she calls it.
[...]
For all that good, the dangers are real and growing. It is time to find more efficient ways of recycling these fluorescents or, better yet, to invent light bulbs that don’t leave a toxic hangover.
How true. Yet, there's potentially a larger issue here that these bulbs, and the lack of foresight regarding them, is emblematic of: capriciously concocted and implemented solutions often cause more problems than they solve.
This is one of the cornerstones of anti-climate alarmism.
In fact, the voices around the world begging governments not to overreact to the hysterical prognostications of folks like Gore do so in an attempt to prevent their nations from enacting policies that not only won't cure this mythical malady, but also might result in potentially more devastating and costly problems down the road.
With that in mind, maybe the dangers associated with this highly-touted light bulb will remind media to not advocate folks diving into the deep end before they assess how far it is to the bottom.
