Death to the Incandescent

How many of us have even done the first thing on the list, change our light bulbs?

According to the Rocky Mountain Institute, lighting is responsible for about a fourth of the electricity consumed in the United States, of which 20 percent goes to extra air conditioning to remove unwanted heat given off by light bulbs. More than 90 percent of the energy consumed by a standard incandescent bulb is given off as heat, while only 10 percent is converted into light. That's a 10 percent efficiency of converting electricity to light.

By contrast, a compact fluorescent (CF) light bulb is from 35 percent to 66 percent efficient, depending on the design. The new LED lights are even more efficient. By one estimate, if every American household changed just three incandescent light bulbs to CF bulbs, we could eliminate 11 fossil-fuel-fired power plants.

If we can stop even a fraction of those new coal plants being built just by changing our light bulbs, shouldn't we do it already? And why haven't we banned the incandescent bulb yet? When we learned that leaded gas was poisoning kids' brains, we phased it out. Those bulbs are poisoning our kids' future.

But as long as the old-fashioned filament bulb sits there on the store shelves, clear or frosted, white or colored, cheap and abundant, there will always be some of us who will take them home and screw them in.

Read the full article