Of course, the sustainable news of the day (well, yesterday - I was away from work sick) is that the new Environment Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, has announced that incandescent light bulbs will be phased out by 2012.

This is a good step forward that will not only benefit the environment, but will also reduce the cost of the compact fluro and other energy efficient bulbs as sales volume increases. (How brilliant that it’s front page news? And the top news item on Google News yesterday!)

The Sydney Morning Herald has a great chart that compares the two types of bulbs. What’s great about the picture is that it compares the cost of 6 incandescent bulbs with one CFL - which is a much fairer cost comparison as the life of a CFL is much longer.

At a total cost of more than 6 times, and CO₂ emissions of roughly the same proportion, the incandescents simply don’t stack up.

Of course, there’s no need to wait for government intervention - you can buy efficient light bulbs off the shelf today

According to WWF’s A prosperous low carbon future report, lighting accounts for 5% of household emissions. Given that compact fluros use about 75% less energy, that means an emissions reduction per household of just under 4%. (Of course some houses will save more than others).

While a 4% gain is valuable - as every reduction is - remaining electricity use, for fridges and hot water systems in particular, still amounts to more than 95% of a household emissions.

For example, hot water, which Minister Turnbull is reportedly also targeting for efficiency measures, accounts for around 25-30%. Reductions there will have an even bigger impact.