Mercury, CFLs, Global Warming, Migraines, & Breast Cancer

Mercury, CFLs, Global Warming, Migraines, & Breast Cancer

What else can I drag into this seemingly implausible combination? I mentioned a couple of days ago in an posting about the connection between overillumination and breast cancer that some experts are concerned because compact fluorescent light bulbs are likely to actually aggravate the breast cancer issue relative to incandescents.

One of my readers told me that he had to remove the compact fluorescent bulbs from his home because they gave his wife migraine headaches--and when I searched scholar.google.com for articles, I was surprised to find quite a bit of discussion of how the non-visible flicker associated with fluorescent bulbs seems to be related to migraine headaches.

Of course, compact fluorescents have mercury in them--and this article over at FoxNews points out that many of the environmentalists who are now pushing CFLs, just a few years ago, were warning how dangerous they were because of mercury--and now that the environmentalists have persuaded Congress and President Bush to sign a mandatory CFL law (phasing out incandescent bulbs by 2012)--they are asking the lawyers to start suing:

But the partnership is about to implode. As predictable as Lucy pulling away the football from a determinedly charging Charlie Brown, the environmentalists are preparing to turn the tables on the CFL businesses and consumers.

The signal came in a Feb. 17 New York Times editorial entitled "That Newfangled Light Bulb."

The editorial read, in part, "Across the world, consumers are being urged to … switch to [CFLs]. ... Now the question is how to dispose of [CFLs] once they break or quit working … each [CFL] has a tiny bit of a dangerous toxin … almost 300 million CFLs were sold in the U.S. last year. That is already a lot of mercury to throw in the trash and the amounts will grow ever larger in coming years … the dangers are real and growing."

The Times piece continued, "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."

Aside from the editorial’s implicit targeting instructions for eco-agitators and trial lawyers, I could only chuckle at the editorial’s nod to, and partial disclosure about, Silbergeld. For many years, she was a "senior scientist" with Environmental Defense who, before moving on to left-wing academia, excelled at fomenting dubious scares about "toxic" substances in the environment.

During Silbergeld’s days with Environmental Defense in the 1990s, the group’s pitch to the media was "when fluorescent bulbs are crushed, traces of mercury vaporize and enter the atmosphere. If the lamps are buried, the toxic element seeps into the soil."

Until the Times editorial, the activists and the media had been holding back their customary attacks against mercury-containing fluorescent light bulbs.

In lamenting the bulbs, Clean Water Action told the media in 1997, for example, that the mercury level in tuna is so high that a 35-pound child eating more than 2 ounces a week would exceed the EPA’s "safe" level.

But while CFL-mandating legislation was pending in Congress, the enviros did a temporary flip-flop: Environmental Defense began pooh-poohing mercury concerns stating, "In short, the exposure from breaking a CFL is in about the same range as the exposure from eating a can or two of tuna fish."

Two ounces of tuna used to be a horror, but in the name of CFLs, two cans became no problem.

Of course, the environmentalist about-face is because they decided that anthropogenic global warming (which may or may not be happening, and is likely not anthropogenic) is more important than mercury poisoning (which is very real).

One of these days, the environmentalist/ambulance chaser scam is going to become visible to the average American. I just hope that they haven't completely bankrupted the country paying for CFLs, the reduced productivity because of migraine headaches, treating hundreds of thousands of extra cases of breast cancer and caused massive mercury poisoning before that point is reached.