The American Conservative

On Thursday, March 20, “NBC Nightly News“ featured a reminder that for conservatives, there are no final victories.

The issue at hand isn’t the Nanny State, it’s the Carcinogen State. Specifically, CFL light bulbs containing ultra-toxic mercury, cheered on by the Greens, and now mandated by the federal government.  And so a race is going to begin.  Politicians eventually will move to undo this idiocy through legislation; but in the meantime, the pols will likely be lapped by the trial lawyers, rushing to make billions through litigation.

Mercury, of course, has been implicated as the toxic culprit in everything from birth defects to Alzheimer’s.  There’re reasons–good reasons–why environmentalists have spent the last century trying to clean up mercury; that’s why people are are shying away from tuna, for example, and other large sea fish.   And yet now the feds are mandating a switch over to CFL’s in the next eight years.NBC Anchorman Brian Williams is a dutifully p.c. MSM-er, so he sort of played the story for laughs—rueful laughs.  He began by describing the “small, squiggly” CFL bulbs, being careful to note that “some of US are using and that we’re all going to have to switch to by 2016”   But then, having made sure that he got credit with his Manhattan Green friends, he added, there’s a “cost to good intentions.”

Williams then tossed it over to reporter John Larson, who described mercury—contained inside each and every CFL bulb—as “One of the most poisonous substances on earth. Break one of these at home, and you’ve got a problem.”  And he introduced us to a woman in Maine who broke a CFG bulb, and was told that she would have to bring in a hazmat firm that would charge $2000 for the cleanup.  This particular case has been reported on before, but by now pretty obvious that stories of “Superfund in Your Living Room” are not an urban legend, but are as real as the phenomenon of heavy-metal toxicity. Read More…