As you say rightly, this is a piffling drop in an enormous ocean. But of course, it’s been enacted because it’s easy… allowing us all to pat each other on the backs and say how environmentally friendly we are, while we ignore the elephant in the room (ie how the electricity is generated in the first place). I loathe the EU and all its works, but the truth of this one is that it panders to everybody’s unwillingness to take any action that might truly impact on their lifestyle.

This kind of emblematic, no-do politics makes me very angry if I let it. But hey, that’s humanity. Perhaps we’re better off doomed.

Again the solution here seems to be that as consumers we are supposed to just keep buying new ones until we get it right!

Yes, light bulbs may not be the most efficient way to heat your home, but all the energy that goes into them has to come back out somewhere else. In the case of a light bulb, the energy comes out as both heat and light and little else.

It’s different for you of course if the weather is warm, but for me if I turn on a light bulb while I’m heating my house I will benefit from the light and everything else will go into my house. No energy will be ‘wasted’, it all has to go somewhere.

I heat my house with natural gas, and my electricity comes from wind power and a natural gas fired power plant. The wind power is of course carbon neutral, and the gas powered plant converts gas into electricity with about an 80% rate of efficiency. This means I’m losing a very small amount of energy, in the very small amount of electricity that my light bulbs turn into heat.

While I couldn’t stand by it, I think your figure of 25-35% is probably true. However this doesn’t tell the whole story.

Typically, lighting accounts for 10-15% of home electricity consumption, and this might be cut in half with CFLs or halogen lighting. So this EU law as it stands will save less than 8% of household electricity consumption, and for most of us who make an effort not to waste electricity anyway that’s not really a lot. The extra energy of manufacturing the bulbs and transporting them from China has to be taken into account too, and I suspect there’s really no significant energy savings in the end.

In addition, many of us have access to carbon neutral electricity, sometimes even paying extra for it, so in theory there should be no environmental impact anyway.

So if you say “25-35% of energy use in Western economies” and I say “10-15% of home electricity” where does this leave us with the difference?

Notice the wording here too, you say “energy” and I say “home electricity”. This is a very important and significant difference. I am talking about a much, much smaller amount of energy.

The difference comes from agriculture and public lighting. The Netherlands for example has such a huge problem with light pollution, it’s known to change the migration patters of birds and disturb the sleeping cycles of other wild animals. The countryside is covered with greenhouses growing peppers and tomatoes for export, and every corner of every city is illuminated at night. Hardly any of this lighting by the way come from incandescent bulbs, but mostly in comes from HID-type lighting systems, which are among the most efficient in the world. These are about four times as efficient as florescent bulbs.

I also think you missed my point about the mercury. The easiest mercury to dispose of or recycle is the mercury we don’t buy. If an accident happens and a bulb breaks in your house, or a bulb gets thrown into the trash instead of recycled, that’s just exposure to a poisonous chemical or pollution that serves no point. If you’re going to recycle the mercury, you also need to take the energy costs of this into the equation.