Everyone stop exhaling, Please.
Yes, if we all stopped exhaling, it would reduce the level of CO2 emissions in the atmosphere. Fortunately, putting the brakes on the global climate crisis won't require that level of self-sacrifice. In fact, helping to save the planet has never been so painless.
Newsweek offers a special series on the environment, in the lead-up to Earth Day, and buried in there are some good, common sense nuggets that we can apply in Illinois:
Switch all stop lights from incandescent to LED. "One of the easiest measures is one of the most effective. That's converting stoplights from incandescent bulbs to LEDs...the conversion demands a major investment upfront...But since LEDs use 80 percent less energy than standard lights - and last six to ten times longer - they pay for themselves in several years...The Big Apple - which has replaced 80,000 incandescent bulbs in 12,000 intersections - will realize savings of $6.3 million a year once the initial investment of $28 million is paid off." (Did you hear that, Mayor Daley?)
Switch your household from incandescent bulbs to compact fluorescents. "If every household in America switched out one compact fluorescent bulb, it would reduce energy consumption as much as taking a million cars off the road." There are only 4.7 million households in Illinois, but luckily for us, compact fluorescents are sold in five-packs. If everyone in Illinois buys a pack, it will be the equivalent of taking 200,000 cars off the road. You can join global efforts and pledge to switch your bulbs through Project Switch here.
Bonus! Last time I checked, the Citizen's Utility Board was distributing compact fluorescent bulbs for free.
Unplug your chargers. I know this sounds crazy, but when your cell phone charger, I-Pod charger, laptop charger, or whatever-charger are plugged in, they continue to draw electricity and just bleed it out into the ozone, even when not charging anything. The average household draws 10 watts an hour through their chargers, which adds 87.6 Kilowatt hours per year to your electric bill. Illinoisans are spending a combined $70 million a year and burning an unnecessary 412 million Kilowatt hours of electricity just to leave their chargers plugged in all of the time.
3 comments:
The most fascinating claim by the Global Warming denial gang is that it will cost so many billions of dollars to do this or that, but much of what needs to be done are simple increases in efficiency that pay for themselves as you smartly point out.
It's as if they don't think conserving energy is even a personal virtue...
If it isn't bad enough that chargers are using electricity, but dang near everything in a modern home is an "energy vampire".
Remember years ago when it took a TV a minute or two to start up? These days your TV starts right up because power is flowing into it all the time. Same thing with all of your computer gear, printers, etc.
It is truly amazing how much electricity is consumed by appliances that are turned "off".
A good place to start would be to ban these instant on devices, but lazy Americans would surely whine and cry if they had to wait 30 seconds for their big screen TV to turn on.
YDD - I got a kick out of your headline.
A few weeks ago, I did a mental exercise to figure out how much carbon dioxide the human race was exhaling every year.
According to a Wikipedia site, the average human exhales 900 grams of CO2 per day (say 2 pounds).
According to the US Census Bureau, there are an estimated 6,588,961,749 people in the world right now. For the sake of making the calculation easy, say 6,600,000,000 people.
So 6.6 billion people exhale 2 pounds of CO2 per day - That’s 13.2 billion pounds of CO2 every day. Or 2,409,000,000 tons of CO2 every year. (Talk about an inconvenient truth.)
So if human activity is causing global warming, hadn't we better do as you suggested - hold our breath?
Also I was wondering how the human carbon emmision compares to a coal fired power plant carbon emmision.
A side note on the compact fluorescent bulb. I read that the CF bulbs have about 5 mg of mercury, a hazardous material that causes all sorts of medical ills. Mercury can't be put into regular landfills for fear of comtaminating ground water. It can't be burned for fear of air pollution.
So what we have here is a case of political correctness running up against political correctness.
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