Remember the compact fluorescent lightbulb — the CFL?
It was going to be the eco-answer to all those emissions given off generating power to illuminate incandescent bulbs.
Never mind that the curlicue bulbs gave off unpleasant, glaring light. Environmentalists and “green” politicians told us we had to accept their downside because CFLs represented “thrifty thinking that will help save the planet and your pocketbook.”
“Start making the change in your house to compact fluorescent lightbulbs,” the federal government exhorted at the beginning of 2008. The change would “ensure that our children … have a functioning and healthy environment.”
Well, like so many environmental fads, the CFL turned out to be as bad or worse than the problem we were enthusiastically reassured it would solve.
The bulbs were full of mercury and hard to dispose of. Canadians were urged to collect burned out CFL in a “secure box” and hold onto them until their municipality held a disposal day for them.
Few cities or towns held collection events and those that did found few residents willing to wait in line to dump something they could easily toss in their kitchen trash.
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Few ordinary people are as committed to environmental fanaticism as the activists who come up with Ottawa’s “green” crusades. In this case, ordinary Canadians certainly weren’t committed enough to queue up to dump bulbs they never liked in the first place. So, it should have come as no surprise that soon landfills and nearby streams were registering unhealthy levels of mercury contamination.
Ottawa now plans to ban CFLs completely by this time next year. I guess government planners, environmentalists and “green” politicians aren’t that good at picking the next great save-the-planet technology. (It was the private sector that came up with the LED bulb, which really, truly has largely replaced the incandescent bulb with consumer-pleasing, lower-energy light — and no mercury poisoning.)
Reading about the impending CFL ban, one thought resonated: Will we be reading 20 years from now about how electric vehicles (EVs) — the current eco-fad — turned out to be the CFL of the 2020s?
A ministerial briefing for federal Environment Minister Stephen Guilbeault pegs the cost to taxpayers and consumers of transitioning to a full EV fleet by 2035 at almost $100 billion. And that’s a calculation from a government that has entirely bought into the EV euphoria.
A hundred billion doesn’t include the costs of home charging stations, which will be borne by EV buyers. Nor does it include the cost of retraining mechanics, which will be borne by dealers, nor maintenance, battery replacement nor the super-high cost of disposal, which will be borne by municipalities.
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And what if manufacturers can’t solve the performance issues — short range, long recharges, lousy in winter?
The ministerial briefing also predicts far fewer models to chose from as manufacturers’ development costs for EVs are three to five times greater, per model, than for internal-combustion (ICE) vehicles.
Also, remember that currently most of the components for EVs are made in China from minerals mined in China using processes (including coal-fired electricity) that are among the most emissions-intensive in the world.
An EV sold in North America might look like an eco-friendly choice, here. However, when total emissions for manufacturing are included, it can take five years or longer for an EV to produce fewer emissions than an ICE. Hardly enough of an environmental game-changer to justify the $6,000 to $20,000 greater cost for an EV, even after lucrative government subsidies on the purchase price.
Electric vehicles are another example of the cultish, evangelical thinking of the environmental movement. Our governing elites have been seized by the hysteria over EVs — in Canada so much so that sales of ICEs will be banned within 12 years, even if that is not technologically possible.
Have blind faith in the EV or be banished from polite society.
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