Motto for the Year: Screw the Polar Bears

I have never liked being manipulated and I feel that the environmental movement is using the lovable polar bear to make us do their bidding. My reading of the situation is that a) there will always be more northern cold refuges where the polar bear populations will be able to survive they just won't be down by the tree line rummaging through our dumps and b) polar bears have survived in warm climates before (Link to warm climate polar bears).

So if we are not talking about the extinction of anything other than local populations of polar bears why are they the poster children of the environmental movement? Affection and shame are causing us to do what the environmentalists say. And that is exactly what the environmentalists want. Sort of like a young woman messing with the head of her fiance so that when they get married he will be so confused that all he can do is anything she says.

As a for instance, a hundred or so years ago some guy (twasn't Edison) discovered that if you put a whacking amount of electricity through metal it got hot. Thus was born the electric toaster. Later work indicated that if you pushed even more electron through the metal that it would get so hot that it would melt. But, there were some metals that when outrageously pure would have such high melting points that the metal would become incandescent if protected from oxygen in the air. One such metal was wolfram, or as we call it, tungsten. Suddenly a metal with no earthly good was crucial to modern society. What was nice about tungsten was that it was pretty much benign in the environment.

Then again, there was the issue of efficiency, as any girl with an Easy Bake oven knows light bulbs throw off a huge amount of heat and that heat is wasted energy. So the environmentalists, remember the environmentalists? This is a posting about environmentalists so don't forget them. The environmentalists used the polar bears to convince us that we should not use our old incandescent bulbs but should switch to more energy efficient compact fluorescent bulbs. They are more efficient because they generate light by electrically exciting metal atoms dispersed in a vacuum tube. Oh yeah, the metal atoms are Mercury.

You know what? There is a fascinating math concerning compact fluorescent bulbs. Each bulb contains 30 mg of Mercury so the one billion compact fluorescent bulbs out there now mean that we have inserted 30 billion milligrams of mercury or 30 million grams of mercury or 30 thousand kilograms of mercury. The metric system rocks.

Now, in the good old Victorian days you could wander down to the local pharmacy and purchase 5 pounds of liquid mercury and swallow it. The liquid slug of metal would rocket through your system until it reached the "back door" where it would politely knock and ask to be let out. As if. That five pound slug of mercury would hit the "back door" like the famous stop motion shot of the bullet and the apple.

This was one of the Victorian remedies for constipation and was advertised as a way to "untwist the gut". You know what is most disturbing about this story? They captured the mercury and used it for the next customer. Eewww. They must have been seriously afraid of constipation in those days to slam down "recycled" mercury.

Anyhoo, we have discovered over the years that mercury is a very dangerous metal. In water systems where there are minerals and organic materials a complex chemistry occurs that gives organo-mercury species that in even trace amounts can cause serious neurological damage. This is also true for mercury that gets into the lungs and gets trapped. So the two things that we should avoid are: 1) mercury in our water and 2) mercury in our air.

Back to the compact fluorescent bulbs. How do they work? They have gaseous mercury atoms excited in an electric field. Where do you suppose those mercury atoms go when you break the tube? Hmmm? And now we have 30 million grams of mercury in small lots spread all over this great land. Man, I am glad I am not walking around with the next generation of mankind in my pelvis.

You know how you are not supposed to throw away rechargeable batteries because they contain nickle and cadmium (or at least they used to) on the idea that we should keep heavy metals out of the environment? And What do you suppose was the rate of return for batteries? Yeah, I would be surprised if more that 10% escaped the garbage. Now think about the compact fluorescent bulbs. Well, we knew all this before the polar bears got involved and the environmentalists knew it too.

So now that we all feel virtuous about changing to compact fluorescent bulbs a new study comes out exposing the environmental danger of the stupid things. I guess we just need to wait to find out what the environmentalists and the polar bears will make us do next. I'm thinking candles.

LINK TO ARTICLE ON HAZARDS OF COMPACT FLUORESCENT BULBS