Light bulb, thy doom is near!

[Pavel314]

I bought a case of 100 100-Watt bulbs this summer. Those should last several years.

[HeyBub]

You could drive over to Canada where gas is $109.80 (or thereabouts) per gallon or drive to Texas where it's $3.05.

The difference is taxes.

[gfretwell]

100 light bulbs would last me the rest of my life. Lighting is not a significant part of my energy usage. We have task lighting where we need it and motion detected lighting when we are walking around. Most of the time the house is pretty dark.

[Tomsic]

Lighting is about 12% of a home's energy use, so it doesn't stand out on the electric bill. But, as we've seen, energy prices are rising and that's not likely to change anytime soon. So, those stocks of 100 watt bulbs get increasingly expensive to operate every time one is put into a socket. Already, in most places, it's cheaper to toss them than to use them.

Tomsic

[BobR]

Taxes account for much of it but not all. A large contribution is the cost of transportation to those parts of the country who want the cheap gas but don't want anything to do with refining in their own back yards.

[BobR]

I would bet a years pay that what she says and what she does are two very different things.

[BobR]

Very true. Now consider how differently things might be if the government had just stayed the hell out of trying to manage the oil industry in the first place. Just wonder what might have developed differently if the government hadn't imposed a cap on oil prices until we were totally dependent on foreign oil. Every time the government gets involved with anything in an attempt to control it they either drive it out of the country or drive the prices through the roof.

[krw]

Since the ones thrown away use no electricity, you're right, even if tautological. For those of us who actually like to see, we'll just keep screwing them in, thanks. Reminder to self: Order another 100 100W bulbs from 1000bulbs.com.

[HeyBub]

Gas Taxes per gallon: Canada - $0.61 - $1.15 New York - $0.32 Texas - $0.20 (Georgia has the lowest tax of all the states, less than eight cents per gallon)

[gfretwell]

I might believe that 12% number for those house that you can see from space at night. It sounds awful high for my house. I don't really have any 100 watt bulbs here. I do have CFLs where they make sense but sometimes I just want an incandescent.

[HeyBub]

That's the most bizarre thing I've heard so far today. What process could economically recover five milligrams of mercury from a CFL?

Unless you're talking about small children in Sri Lanka scraping the broken glass with a scalpel...

Who else would you have them rip off?

[HeyBub]

But there's nothing preventing me from taking advantage of the free market, no matter how it is constructed.

[HeyBub]

What you WANT is rapidly becoming irrelevant.

[Ed Pawlowski]

Just as the average price for gas is set to hit $4 a gallon this week, the U.S. Energy Information Administration reports February was the third month out of four that the U.S. -- the world's most energy-hungry nation -- actually exported more oil that it imported. Despite the notion that the U.S. is currently hugely reliant on foreign oil, the country sold 34,000 more barrels of petroleum products a day than it imported in November 2010. And, in both December and February, the U.S. sold 54,000 more barrels a day. Net imports have not been negative for nearly two decades. Part of this has to do with weak U.S. demand in recent years due to the recession. The other part rests on the growing demand in our own backyard for not only crude oil, but refined oil as well. Mexico, Latin America and even OPEC member Ecuador are some of the U.S.'s top customers for fuel products, namely refined oil. Rising demand in these countries far outpaces their capacity to refine crude oil into petroleum products like gasoline or diesel fuel.

But, as Dan points out in the accompanying clip, this is not the only news item that hints at this country's ability to export energy to the rest of the world.

[BobR]

They have had a strangle hold on healthcare for many years now and the result has been nothing short of a disaster. The entire healthcare system revolves around Medicare and Medicaid now and will only get worse in the future if Obamacare is upheld. We are already spending

100's of millions (throughout the country) trying to get ready for the implementation of Obamacare and most of it hasn't even started yet. And that is on top of the already out of control costs of the current regulations. The actual cost of the delivery of the healthcare service hasn't risen nearly as much as the costs for compliance, oversight, billing, collections, and other non-healthcare related costs. It is all those associated costs that are going up even more with the Obamacare fiasco.

[BobR]

Texas gets some from the production as well. That way we are able to get back a little of what is sent to those states that don't want to deal with the dirty part of Oil and Gas.

[BobR]

oglegroups.com...

There is no "Free Market" and there never has been. The government has been screwing up the free market for decades and each time they have things have only gotten worse. You are not seeing the results of a free market, you are seeing the results of a government run by a bunch of burro-crap idiots that attempts to micromanage every aspect of the economy while not haveing enought common sense to balance their own damn checkbook.

[BobR]

Well, if the EPA says it is so then it is the gospel truth and you better believe it.

I think I am going to puke on that statement.

[Tomsic]

It would have been nice of you to consider the full statement. EPA's number was only one of several estimates that I saw -- all in the same 10-15% range, so the EPA is probably right. Yes, I get it that you don't like the EPA, but why turn every statement that refers to the EPA, even when correct, into a biased political rant?

Tomsic

[Tomsic]

That's right. Recycling of fluorescent lamps has been done for years. The mercury, metal, phosphor and glass is recovered and used again or disposed of according to local law. I saw one article where the crushed glass was used for asphalt pavement. Lamp disposal and recycling is now a good-sized industry. Google "Lamp Recyclers".

Tomsic