Ah, LEDs. That's a really great application, (It seems my suggestion was a tad behind the times. It's been some time since I was looking at any such thing. :) )
As responsibility goes, yeah, I think that's really the problem, at times. People tend to feel entitled to, well, a tremendous lot of 'convenience,' even if it means working a lot longer and spending a lot more resources on the privilege of wasting.
A lot of people seem to feel like so much as recycling is something someone's doing to put them out: meanwhile all along private industry has been for decades doing everything it can to have no standards on wasteful packaging that we all have to deal with one way or another, whether it's in paying for its transportation, storage, and display, or just getting the darn things open... People even throw trash around down here like it's some kind of act of defiance against... what, I dunno, it's like standing there 'defiantly' peeing on yourself.
Folks don't want to 'lower' themselves to take public transport or a train, so they extend their working day by hours sitting in traffic in off-road machines they only have to work more hours to fuel and pay for.
No wonder they don't feel like they have the energy to sort their trash. Maybe blaming the liberals or even insisting God wants them to exhaust the Earth and it's a liberal conspiracy to control them to ask people to be more responsible.
There's no one solution to all the problems we've got going forward to the future. (And a lot of helpful things have been opposed by people who benefit from the ever-worsening status quo on the very basis this or that wasn't the one magic bullet) There's so many people in the country and the world that the 'smaller' stuff adds up, though. To more than most people really seem to understand.
A problem in this country is how much of even the possibility of getting together and working on solutions is shut down, shouted down, or ignored by a tendency to absolutist, all or nothing, black or white, for-me-or-against-me thinking:
'If it's not a particular kind of political Christianity, it must be Stalin.'
'If I'm not absolutely right, I must be absolutely wrong. That's an unacceptable thought, so I must be absolutely right.'
(Appropriately enough, that 'In God We Trust' is kind of like when they stuck 'Under God' into the Pledge of Allegiance during the Red Scare: 'In God We Trust *not* the national motto claiming 'America was founded as a Christian Nation from the founding: the national motto is "E Pluribus Unum" "From many, one." It means we're a pluralist nation. We have separation of church and state for a good reason: versions of state Christianity had long been *tearing apart* the Europe Colonial America had left. There was no revising history *about* it, it was still going on. If we'd had to struggle through the Enlightenment in the same way Europe did (having had a fresh start, we kind of got a lot of the benefit 'easily' ) we might have the same attitudes toward religion that Europe's developed.
Over here, I think what we've built has one really big drawback: not much of our pretty-cool way of life was ever actually planned or organized: how could it be. We've had a new revolutionary technology probably about every decade for a few generations now: as a result we have a lot of astounding capability: we command colossal and not-too-long-ago unimaginable energies... Mostly to go around in circles.
Who could plan for it? When they opened up the Web, were they thinking, 'You know, there's been a gigantic drag-out argument simmering in America since at least Reconstruction, it's gonna polarize the heck out of everyone based on increasingly-radicalized opinions?'
We're overstimulated, overtoxified, underexercised, and basically, whether we think 'freedom' is calling it 'rugged individualism' to amass wealth and go to a church that tells you you want 'small government' that'll 'legislate morality' (only about how others don't obey their version of their religion, not of course, about anything to do with the general welfare or what we leave the future. )
...Or if we think 'freedom' is getting off that treadmill as much as possible.
Personally, I've been both pretty darn well-off by world standards, and I've had basically nothing but the clothes on my back. There's a lot of freedom when you've got nothing, but you find your capabilities to do anything with it pretty limited. You can have a lot of capabilities if you're well off, but not much freedom to do anything with em. Cause you have to do this and that and this and that just to keep it. No one seems to say 'No, We can't,' more than the ultra-rich executives.
We have this *unbelievable* global communications network we're talking on right now, and mostly use it engaging in absolutist hyperbole. People in this country seem to think the only way to *talk* is to push for one absolute or another and treat everything like a game of Australian football. However, in this we do have a tool we can use to get together, start talking about what we want out of life.
Some of these things are really freebies: CF bulbs. Great example, really. All we need to do is be ready to scale up the disposal of them. Not stand around and complain about conditions which don't exist to say they're 'bad.' Yes, there's some mercury in em, but it's mercury that gives benefits that greatly outweigh the risks and the alternatives. As opposed, again, to just deregulating industry to dump mercury directly into the water in the name of the people theoretically being more financially able to waste more electricity.
If every conservative who wanted to say 'Take that, Stalin!' and throw their CF bulb into a lake did *that* instead of allowing industry to poison us directly with the stuff, that'd be a *bargain* for our mercury exposure. Call it *freedom.* You can expose yourself to as much or as little mercury as you want, that way.
Stalin was a paranoid, anti-intellectual, utterly un-compassionate ...land-raper and cultural imperialist (Ask any Siberian peoples about that) If you want to be afraid of his ghost, it's those qualities to watch out for.
