Last year, Australia became the first country to announce it would ban the use of incandescent bulbs by 2010. California is planning a phase-out by 2018. And on Tuesday, New Zealand said it would join the fray, ending the use of traditional lightbulbs starting in October 2009. Now Europe is talking about doing the same.

In a recent article, Der Spiegel asks why people have seemed so resistant to changing to compact fluorescent bulbs, which are much more energy efficient and longer lasting. Here's why my house still has lots of incandescent bulbs:

1. Fluorescent light is uniformly ugly.
2. Fluorescent light flickers in an eye-irritating way, especially when using a computer or watching television.
3. My house has lots of light dimmers. Compact fluorescent bulbs are incompatible with dimmer switches.
4. My house has lots of reflective directional incandescent bulbs. I've not yet seen a compact fluorescent bulb which does this.
5. Incandescent bulbs come in a much wider variety of sizes and shapes. I have many lamps which cannot accept a standard compact fluorescent bulb of the same brightness. They're too large.
6. Fluorescent bulbs are hazardous waste and require special handling for disposal. Most contain mercury, a toxic heavy metal. Incandescents don't require such special handling and don't pollute when improperly disposed of.

Solve those problems, and I'll swap out all my incandescent bulbs. I'm actually hoping for LED-based bulbs or something better. I'm all for saving energy. Fluorescents just don't cut it for most purposes. I do use them everywhere I can and the light quality isn't critical.

I suspect the general populace has many of the same reasons.