Years ago, when I was young, I spent most of my time working on energy efficiency technology policy. Now I spend most of my time working of renewables, but from time to time, my colleagues forget and ask me questions that are way over my head. And so it was that I was recently pressed to provide our board with simple answers to all the questions they might possible get asked at a cocktail party.

One of the issues that everyone asks about is mercury in compact fluorescent. I wrote one of my early blogs about it, and spent a good chunk of my talk for the board focusing on it. My main message on CFLs and mercury is that if you care about mercury pollution, one of the best things you can do is use more CFLs. But if after using a CFL, we can recycle it, that's even better. So I was happy to see this story that Home Depot is going to start to take CFLs back for recycling.

NRDC's real expert on bulbs and all energy efficient appliances is Noah Horowitz and I encourage you to read more about him and his great work here and here. Now Noah is one of those incredibly smart people that have the ability to make very complicated topics comprehensible. And he helped me do that with bulbs for the board. So without further ado,  here's the presentation I gave at NRDC's most recent board meeting.