Archive for December, 2006

What do alternative energy and Christmas have in common?

LED Christmas lights. LED stands for light-emitting diode and this technology can be found everywhere from flashlights to traffic signs. For some interesting reading on LED technology, check out the Wikipedia article on the subject.

If you haven’t already put up your holiday lights yet, you should consider getting some LED lights. (I realize this article comes a bit late for many of you….I already set a reminder on my computer to post this article next year around Thanksgiving when people begin to string the lights up for the holiday season.)

Yes, they are more expensive upfront, but they will save you money in the long run. They are much more durable than the incandescent lights since there are no filaments to burn out or break. Plus, color incandescent bulbs fade because the colored plastic lens degrade in the elements. Since the color of LED lights is based on the actual chip rather than a colored lens, you can maintain vibrant colors year after year.

Most of important of all, they save energy and every bit of energy matters at a time when a growing and modernizing world requires more and more energy. LED lights use a jaw-dropping 1/100th of the energy a old-fashioned incandescent light.

According to a Department of Energy study in 2003, holiday lighting costs 2.2 billion kWh (kilowatt-hours) of electricity a year. If everybody in the country switched to LED lights, we could save an estimated 2 billion kWh every year!!

Think about all the holiday lights across the world and how much energy could be saved. That’s electricity that could be used to power electric cars and replace the heating oil needed by many to keep warm this winter. That’s a lot of oil that could be saved, folks.

I don’t about you, but I’m dreaming of a “Green” Christmas!

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Posted by Tim Roth, author of the political blog Think Anew and Act Anew

In his book An Inconvenient Truth, former Vice-President Al Gore talked about a well-respected study by Princeton researchers Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala that describes how “humanity already possesses the fundamental scientific, technical, and industrial know-how to solve the carbon and climate problems for the next half-century.”

Currently, the United States is emitting about 1.8 Gigatons of carbon every year. Mr. Socolow and Mr. Pacala concluded that a “business as usual” approach to policies such as car mileage standards and alternative energy would result in 2.6 Gigatons of annual U.S. carbon emissions by 2050.

Through six different categories of policy changes, the researchers predicted that we could lower annual carbon emissions to roughly 1.0 Gigatons by 2050. This is would be back down to the carbon levels of 1970.

What are these six different categories? They all are affordable and already-existing technologies that in combination would make a gigantic difference.

1. Reduction from more efficient use of electricity in heating and cooling systems, lighting, appliances, and electronic equipment.

2. Reduction from end-use efficiency, meaning that we design buildings and businesses to use far less energy than they currently do.

3. Reduction from increased vehicle efficiency by manufacturing cars that run on less gas and putting more hybrid and fuel-cell on the roads.

4. Reduction from making other changes in transport efficiency, such as designing cities and towns to have better mass transit systems and building heavy trucks that have greater fuel efficiency.

5. Reduction from increased reliance on renewable energy technologies that already exist, such as wind and biofuels.

6. Reduction from the capture and storage of excess carbon from power plants and industrial activities.

Conclusion: We can do this….we have to do this.

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Posted by Tim Roth, author of the political blog Think Anew and Act Anew