Like many scientists and electrical engineers, I eagerly installed CFL's and then found out I was facing a vast array of of lies and greed motivated ugly half truths! Today, a call or e-mail to your Congressman or Senator is now needed to partially even this playing field and prevent catastrophy as incandescent lights are about to be made illegal. Here are some of the problems with CFL's and some of the benefits of incandescent lighting. 1. Mercury! Oh pshaw says the govt. Oh pshaw says the council on light bulbs. When I recently opened a hot bulb enclosure I was greeted by a nifty cloud of the stuff. Once is about sixty times too many, once is usually fatal! I can't let it happen twice...especially around my granddaughters. If I live thru it... I am now changing all my bulbs back to incandescent even if I have to build them myself! 2. UV. Government studies reveal a 98% chance of the UV shield on each bulb being compromised. That would be fine if the UV wavelengths were the same as sunlight. They aren't, The rays are more damaging, precisely the wavelengths needed to cause cataracts, cause skin cancer, damage tissue, art work, and precious other materials. When my wife complained she thought the lighting was damaging her vision I didn't listen. $18,000 worth of cataract surgery later, I'm listening. And you should too! 3. These things are chuck full of other long term poisons. copper-(especially monovalent copper as in landfills) is more toxic than lead! or even the mercury in these things. fiberglass-short of a nuclear war, is indestructible, never eco-friendly. ceramics-more ceramics than incandescents, and barely recyclable. europium, selenium, cadmium, silver, phosphors-ugh! You can get a rash just thinking about it and a real rash by contact. tantalum capacitors-more of the same 4. Total carbon footprint for production and recycling is huge. Because the mass and complexity is so large, while the lifetime is longer for CFL's, the number and the types of waste are enormous compared to similar lifetimes for incandescents where the cost of materials is small. This simply means the cost for CFL's is always greater, both for creation and recycle. 5. Simplicity and cost. The simplicity and small effort needed to produce filament lights is thousands of times less than the CFL, that also means that the cost can never be competitive even with the full force of a nanny state thrown behind it! 6. There is a false claim of efficiency. THIS IS THE ONLY REASON FOR HAVING THESE THINGS. And this is not a fake claim in a scientific sense, like claiming that increasing CO2 levels are due to increased energy production. Instead the so-called inefficiency is heat production!! But the Heat, we need it!! Last thing we need is a fake sun without it's most endearing quality, heat. It's not free, but it comes straight off your heating bill for over nine months out of the year and we only actually pay for it for a few brief hours in the summer where solar lighting dominates. So, some advice, allow incandescents, leave incandescents do what they do best, cheaply illuminate homes. We've already seen how CFL's are a bad choice in interior rooms for reading, so why poison the environment, drain resources, and increase balance of payment problems.. 7. Health care costs. My wife has already succumbed to cataracts ostensibly because of CFL's and the outgassing from the darn things is super toxic. The copper and released mercury causes untold damage. Why should we foist all that off on others as a health care cost. Skin damage, tumors, poisons released, mfg. ills, irritations, yuch!! 8. Wasted resources. Sand and tungsten are cheap. Copper, sliver, mercury, europium, are not. Why make every landfill a bigger nightmare wasting even more of our future? This also becomes a balance of payments problem as many of these are made in China! 9. Electrical noise. Each CFL tube and LED array is equipped with a power supply, often a very noisy power supply. As a result, many appliances, cell phones, WIFI signals, and radio sources are corrupted. This is irritating, much like the old dimmer controls. If you want a rational change, up the line frequency from 60Hz to 500 or 1000Hz. This would be no less disrupting and would shrink transformer and motor size by a factor of 10 while improving transmission efficiencies and decreasing toxic footprint. 10. Consistency, CFL's don't have any. They change intensity with on-time, temperature, age, sun bleaching. And they often blink like an old B movie neon sign, a night scene from Bladerunner, showing a stuttering gas tube sign appearance (because that is what they basically are!), even to blinking on and off as a power supply heats and cools, or as the line conditions and weather varies. In short, all of the promises made by CFL engineers have sadly become an immoral cacaphony of lies, from poisoning the environment, to wasting power. If these kinds of arguments had been presented against any other technical device, it would never have been even allowed on the market! CFL's are an expensive device in terms of raw materials, energy, labor, recycling, balance of payments, and poisoned environment. In addition, they are complex, dirty, dangerous, malfunctioning, noise emissive devices that have been substituted for a simple, low cost, low waste, sun-like, noise free emitter. Only our government could be so callous and so ingloriously ingeniously negligent so as to maintain this bogeyman filled hoax. Sincerely, Edward A. Kimble, PhD Biology, Purdue '77