Carbon sucker

[Alan V]

I agree with your assessment that the short video was more of an advertisement than anything really informative.

However, I don't think anyone ever promised that we would solve global warming by changing our lightbulbs.  It was just one small step we could all take immediately.  Some people have done the math to make sure it made sense.

Well, I did the math -- wrote a paper on it, in fact -- and it didn't make sense.  Quite the opposite:  as incandescents were phased out, most of the light "bulb" supply in the US shifted from domestic production to China.  The Chinese were more than happy to supply our sudden demand for CFLs, by opening more factories and increasing production -- at one point they were building an average a one new coal-fired power plant per week to support the manufacturing boom.  
Too bad we share the same atmosphere as China.

Speaking of China, just came across this:

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/18/1...arch-shows

That said, I agree that no one sane actually claimed that changing our lightbulbs would solve global warming.  But the plan was aggressively marketed; and manufacturers hugely over-hyped the amount of energy savings CFLs would bring.  I personally know people who smugly patted themselves on the back after converting all their lighting, as having done their part for stopping climate change.  Then they continued to drive their monster trucks, turn the heat up to 78, and the air conditioning down to 60.

You make several excellent points.  We have to do a lot of different things as quickly as possible to make our transition away from fossil fuels meaningful, and we will no doubt burn a lot of our remaining carbon budget to get there.

A global carbon tax would go a long way to sort such issues out. That would provide incentives for companies to build up manufacturing in the U.S. again.