Audi has been on my Ideological Bad List since Super Bowl XLIV, thanks to their Green Police commercial. If you haven't seen it, or are disinclined to watch it, it shows various people getting busted by a special police force for not performing fashionable environmental gestures. For example, a homeowner is ordered by a team in a helicopter to compost a fruit rind rather than throw it away, but we never see them ordering anyone to compost their own feces, which would be quite unfashionable but would probably accomplish far more. The crux of the commercial is that, at a Green Police traffic checkpoint, a man driving a 2010 Audi A3 TDI Clean Diesel (30 mpg city/42 mpg highway) is allowed to pass, while all of the other drivers are harassed, fined, or worse. Thus, the bad list: if Audi honestly cared that much about the environment, they'd stop building over-engineered luxury cars that feed conspicuous consumption, and resurrect the Geo Metro XFi (53 mpg city/58 mpg highway, or more). Of course it would never sell, since which of these do you think is more appealing to the yuppie-hipster trying to save the planet while still keeping up with appearances? |  |
This is especially not funny because in some parts of the world, and for one unfashionable "offense," the Green Police really will be coming after you in the near future. The U.S., the E.U. and Canada have all passed legislation aimed a forcing their subjects, either de facto or de jure, to adopt compact fluorescent lights (CFLs). Yes, they do require less power than incandescent bulbs, which translates into less carbon pumped into the atmosphere by the end-user's power plant, assuming that the power source behind them is something that produces carbon dioxide and not solar, wind, hydroelectric, or the dreaded fast-breeder nuclear reactor.
The well-documented problem with CFLs, however, is that like all fluorescent lights, they contain mercury, which can be quite hazardous if allowed to leech into groundwater from people breaking bulbs or not disposing of them correctly. In response to this, the EPA has quite correctly pointed out that the amount of mercury released from a coal-fired power plant powering a CFL for a given length of time, added to that CFL's own mercury content, is about a 1/3 the mercury output of a coal-fired power plant powering an incandescent bulb for that same length of time. This logic holds up for the half of the U.S. which gets its electricity from coal, but for the other half, not so much (source: U.S. Department of Energy):
The other trouble with CFLs, of which I have seen very little coverage, is that all of them are made in China. This poses three problems.
First, China has significantly lower standards for worker safety than the U.S. and Europe.
Second, China also has much looser standards for environmental protection, which makes one wonder if the products of a CFL plant in China would really be better for the Earth than the products of an incandescent plant in Virginia. However, it is indisputable that manufacturing in China makes it cheaper for GE to meet the efficiency standards it basically wrote for the U.S. government, i.e., the de facto mandate for CFLs that I mentioned above.
Third, is it really better for the environment to buy one item (with a much more complex control mechanism) built in China and then shipped overseas, in plastic packaging, by a diesel-powered cargo ship, than to buy 8 simpler items built a few hours' drive away and trucked that relatively short distance in recycled cardboard packaging? End-to-end resource analyses such as this are notoriously difficult, but when you consider the other problems with CFLs, my instinct tells me "no." This is quite similar to a point that Michael Pollan makes in either In Defense of Food or The Omnivore's Dilemma (I can't remember which, since they kind of run together). He argues that if you're trying to make your food choices less environmentally harmful, you should consider the possibility that locally grown food that lacks the USDA's organic stamp may be better than officially "organic" food grown far away, due to the higher overhead of shipping and packaging that big organic entails.
I remain a true CFL skeptic; I don't buy it, but I could be convinced otherwise given a good argument. However, I'm never buying a factory-new Audi.
Addendum: Other alumni of Tony's Ideological Bad List include:
- Border's Books and Music, for deciding not to sell the issue of Free Inquiry that ran the Jyllards-Postden Muhammad cartoons
- my senator, George Voinovich, for voting against the bill that would have recognized full faith and credit for concealed carry permits
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