Your real environmental commitment is tested most when you have to give something up. How many of us don't actually prefer riding our bicycles and eating delicious organic food? Organic, vine-ripened tomatoes. What a sacrifice!

I struggle most with making the very obvious and logically airtight decision to convert my household lighting over to compact fluorescent bulbs. Compared to incandescent bulbs, they use anywhere from 50-80% less electricity and last somewhere around ten times as long. A no-brainer.

But here's the problem: The light they cast is just plain ugly. Standard fluorescent bulbs emit too much yellow and blue, and not enough green and red. This limited spectrum is responsible for the horrible, sickly appearance of food in high school cafeterias, and the purply, poxed look of your face in truck stop bathroom mirrors.

What's more, standard fluorescents can't be dimmed. Who wants to eat nasty-looking food across from a sickly roommate under un-dimmable glaring lights in their own home? By show of hands?

Fortunately, technology advances. You can now purchase, on Amazon.com, dimmable, spiral compact fluorescent bulbs, which are at least somewhat color compensated to reduce the ugliness. We haven't tried them ourselves yet, but this EcoGeek is ordering some right now.

What's the point of eating tasty organic food if you can't enjoy it at just the right lumen level and with accurate color rendition?

Via MetaEfficient

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