Texas wants to turn the lights off on a federal plan to phase out certain light bulbs

EU has forced us to use the energylow bulbs too.
They are very contraversial in different countries over here too.
The Swiss IT’IS has a recomandation that you should never sit closer than 30 cm to such a bulb. It can cause healthproblems. If you sit very close over a long time - month years - these bulbs can maybe cause skincancer. This is just one of many arguments against them.
But who wants to sit something like 5 cm close to a lamp for years?

You cannot change an old house into a passivhouse.

It is possible for houses to be retrofitted to attain that level of energy reduction, Saab.

How many years will such action take to pay off...assuming of course that the action does not make the humans sick due to lack of fresh air into the house?

20 years ago underground houses where all the rage, but they never took off due to maintenance cost and because of mold problems caused by living underground where all but one wall of the structure lined with dirt. Any energy savings over ownership can be eaten up by the costs of one person getting sick.

I tried to look into it and found the best infos over Denmark.
The houses are about 10% more expensive than a normal house.
If you want a basement it will be very expensive in comparasing with a normal house and you should not have one under a passiv house.
You save on heating and electricity, but your loans are higher as the house is more expensive, so your actual annual bills, taxes, loans, electricity will be a bit under - but not much - than a normal house.
After 10 years you will be able to see the difference.

However, the Germans might want to look into such things, as they are already paying 35 cents a kilowatt hour for electric, and thanks to there idiot decision to shut down the nuclear industry they are going way up from that.

We don't have surface power lines in hamlets, villages, towns and cities.

Nuclear energy supplies about one-quarter of the nation’s electricity. Natural gas from Russia is seen as the logical replacement, should Germany follow through on closing out its nuclear plants. The country already imports one-third of its natural gas from Russia.

If so the spectacle of new coal fired plants in Germany, burning relatively low quality, high sulfur European coal might have very surprising political consequences. Frankly I doubt that scenario.

I don't believe that Germany can replace the nuclear power generating capacity in the time period specified by any means, and that we have not yet seen the rest of this story.

In the long term, the power plants will replace older, dirtier plants. But that doesn't alter the fact that the plans are a direct contradiction of the climate goals formulated by Merkel. While emissions are practically zero in the case of nuclear energy, and while a natural gas-fired plant produces just 428 grams of CO2 emissions per kilowatt hour, a black coal power plant churns a solid 949 grams of CO2 into the atmosphere. The figure for lignite or brown coal -- 1,153 grams -- is even worse.



DER SPIEGEL
03/21/2007
Coal -- great for politicians, bad for the environment.
Estimates by climate protection experts such as Rainer Baake from German Environment Aid (DUH) suggest the new power plants will release at least 150 million tons of CO2 every year. Their output corresponds to only "about a fifth of the output of the power plants currently in place in Germany, but their carbon dioxide output is equal to more than half of the pollutant output allowance granted all power plants for the 2008-2012 period," says Baake, who was junior environment minister under Germany's previous coalition government between the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Green Party.
Experts at the Federal Environment Agency warn of the threat of future mega-emissions. Researchers there recently published a study entitled "Climate Protection and Investment Plans in the Power Plant Sector," in which they demonstrate that the replacement of old power plants by new coal-fired power plants may well result in a decrease in the output of greenhouse gases, but, realistically speaking, the decline will only be 14 percent. At that rate it will be difficult to reach Merkel's declared goal of lowering emissions in Germany by 40 percent compared to 1990 levels.

It all sounds good. But no one knows whether it will really be enough. Moreover, one of the greatest climate-related problems -- the current boom in the construction of new coal-fired power plants -- has only been addressed vaguely or in a half-hearted manner by the people involved. The Vattenfall project in Berlin is only one example of a larger trend. Utility companies want to set up a total of 26 new coal-fired power plants in Germany during the coming years.

Kurth pointed out that since the closure of the seven oldest nuclear power stations in mid-March in Germany, on balance, average of 2500 megawatts of electricity imported. The imports come mainly from France, the Czech Republic and Poland. This had aroused criticism, run as in the countries, particularly nuclear and coal power plants. As long as Germany remains a net importer could tell, no one said Kurth. The wind turbines produced in Germany in the spring and summer, however, relatively little power. Solar energy is also not wear continuously for performance. “The weather can not be changed, even by majority vote of the Bundestag.”

The United States faces a similar problem. The Obama EPA is out to shut down the 52% of our electrical power that is produced by coal fired plants (even though we enjoy ample supplies of lower sulfur higher heating value coal reserves.

...look at how fast we came off of organic food and "sustainable ag" once the Great Reccession hit for instruction...

BRATTLEBORO, VT. (April 21, 2011)—The organic industry grew at a rate of nearly eight percent in 2010, bucking the current trend whereby “flat is the new growth” for many other segments of the economy. Further, some sectors of the organic market enjoyed annual growth of well over 30 percent, the Organic Trade Association (OTA) revealed today in releasing findings from its 2011 Organic Industry Survey. In 2010, the organic industry grew to over $28.6 billion.

“While total U.S. food sales grew by less than one percent in 2010, the organic food industry grew by 7.7 percent,” said Christine Bushway, OTA’s CEO and Executive Director. “Consumers continue to vote with their dollars in favor of the organic choice. These results illustrate the positive contribution organic agriculture and trade make to our economy, and particularly to rural livelihoods,” Bushway said.

She added, “The good news is that even as the economic recovery crawls forward, the organic industry is thriving – and hiring.”