My folks have been using these things for years. When I told my dad - this was about a year ago - that they contained mercury and had to be properly disposed of, he had no idea. He's just been throwing them out with the rest of the rubbish. God knows how many thousands (tens? hundreds?) have ended up on landfills here in the UK.

If the motive behind these things is enviromentalism then why haven't the disposal methods been made clear to everybody for day one? Replacing one form of pollution with another doesn't seem like the way forward to me.

Wow, if you want to talk about the constitutionality of laws passed by Congress then light bulbs are the least of your worries.

you're kidding, right? If no, then the answer is Yes, I'm still for removing what you call a life-giving gas now that I'm "partially educated" reading your post.

1st, carbon isn't a gas. Carbon dioxide, aka CO2, is. I refer to carbon itself because it's the origin of the carbon that's significant to my argument, more than the obvious fact that CO2 is the chief green-house warming gas we're concerned with when we talk about carbon.

If the carbon we're talking about is in the form of cellulose in a tree, that's then chopped down and into logs, that we then burn in a fireplace for heat; that's much different than carbon that's in oil or coal that built up from tens of thousands of years of decaying organic matter. I'm not sure I can do the explanation justice in this quick reply, but here's the gist:

CO2 that's emitted from living creatures and natural processes, along with that emanating from the burning of current plants that store it doesn't change the balance much as far as global warming, b/c the capacity of current biota to respirate these gasses tends to balance with the rest of the ecosystem it supports. For example, if we over-utilized a current carbon source, we'd have insufficient food to eat. (We do over-utilize current carbon sources too--by feeding so much of our crops to animals we then eat for appox = qty of protein with none of the fiber and less of the nutrients--but that's another story.) So CO2 and atmospheric temperature affects tend to stay more in check with one-another.

But when we burn ancient carbon, pulled from deep under ground--at least in the large qties as we do now--the amount of CO2 emitted quickly (in geologic terms) supersedes the biosphere/geosphere's capacity to clear it.

The answer is to change our relationship with the stuff in our lives that waste lots of energy. No, not going back to living in caves. But a more decentralized energy grid mostly oriented around photovoltaics (solar) along with other "freebie" energy generation sources that don't muck up the air, diminish human health, nor shift the climate at a rate that kills off the majority of creatures “in the wild” we appreciate as American Frontiersmen.

You are right about something though--the constitution written before the light-bulb existed, doesn’t say congress can decide what kind we ought buy.

So that's what fundamentalist homeschooling does to you.

Water is a life-giving chemical too, Chawx. Try explaining that to the flood victims along the Missisippi River.

We can try to "WEAKEN THE PLANET" by keeping the Earth's chemistry from becoming inhospitable to human life. Or we can pretend we don't notice the strange new weather patterns and convert more fossil fuels into atmospheric gasses.

And the U.S. Constitution does allow restriction of personal freedom. That's what the Legislative Branch exists for. You can't do whatever you want in America.