Changing the World - One Light Bulb at a Time

Great googly moogly! It's been a loooong time since I've blogged. Even then, it was a repost. Shame on me! Anyway, I'm back in school this quarter and taking a couple of online classes (God forbid I have to speak to anyone in person, right? Ask me later about the communications class I'm taking online next quarter. hahahahaha). Because they are online classes, though, there's more writing. Bliss! A current assignment in my health class (taught by Ms. Myklebust, who I find to be pretty cool - Hi! if you're reading this!) has us exploring our relationship to the environment. The last question was:

Do you think it's important to reduce your personal use of resources to reduce the impact on global resources? Explain why or why not.

 Well, I got a little carried away with my answer. If you know my blogs, you know what I mean. I start out almost every one with something like "This is going to be a little long...but worth it!" So, yeah, I got a little long-winded for a community college discussion board, so I'm posting my full answer here, putting a pared down version with a link to it in my actual discussion board, and inviting the huddled masses to experience the random places my mind goes. If you're one of those community college huddled masses, welcome! Check out the rest of my blog for more hilarity. I promise you won't be disappointed. OK, I don't promise but, if you ARE disappointed by what you read, we probably shouldn't be friends outside of our online class. Not that we are anyway but you never know. We could be sitting in a crowded coffee shop, Vivaldi playing in the background, and our eyes might meet and... then we would realize that we don't know what each other even really looks like (my profile pic for class is a waterlily for crap's sake) and we would keep drinking our coffee and ignoring each other and you would never know that you were sitting in my presence. Which might be for the best some days. I digress. What else is new.

So, my answer to the question follows. If you feel the need to go to IKEA afterward, let me know. I may even offer to drive. 

I know that many people have the attitude of “the little bit that I may do doesn’t have an impact” but I’m not one of those people. This portion of my answer is going to be a bit lengthy but come along for the ride because it will be fun!

Let’s do some basic math (it has to be basic; I’m a girl and I haven’t taken a math class since 1983!):  The estimated population for Clark County for 2012 was 438, 287. Just to make it easy, let’s just call it 438,000.  Now, the estimated household size was 2.66. I think that’s weird given the number of people I know with more than .66 kids, so let’s round that up to 3. So, if there are 438,000 people in the county, and we divide that by the average number of people in a home (3), that comes out to be 146,000 homes.

Now, let’s say those 146,000 homes each spent $6.99 on a single LED light bulb from IKEA and replaced ONE bulb in their home. If they all replaced a CFL with their LED, it would amount to 2,920,000 pounds of CO₂ emissions eliminated from the planet. If they all replaced an incandescent bulb with their single LED bulb, the savings would amount to 19,704,160 pounds of CO₂ emissions! Holy schnikeys, right? Of course, this doesn't take into account the emissions that the LED will produce but we'll get to that later.

It gets even more interesting when you remember that this is just comparing one bulb to one bulb. An LED has a life span of approximately 50,000 hours whereas an incandescent is approximately 1,200 hours and a CFL is approximately 8,000 hours. So, the emissions from one LED should actually be compared to that of about 41 incandescents or six CFLs!

So, if you’re still with me, that means that ONE LED bulb, which produces, on average, 15 pounds of CO₂ emissions during its lifetime (yes, only 15) will last you, ideally, as long as six CFLs, which will produce 210 pounds of CO₂ emissions, or 41 incandescents, which will produce 6,150 pounds of CO₂ emissions.  15 vs 210 vs 6,150. Even as a girl, I can look at that math and figure out that it’s a stunning difference.  Really, by installing one LED, you aren’t eliminating the emissions from one incandescent or CFL, you’re eliminating the emissions from 41 or six of them, respectively!

A smidge more math and then I’m done. Let’s say all these homes in the county that we’re talking about have at least got CFLs in their homes and that is what they plan on replacing. That’s an elimination of 210 pounds of CO₂ emissions per home. Multiply that by our 146,000 homes and that’s a whopping 30,660,000 pounds of CO₂  emissions!! Of course, you have to offset the emissions from the LED to get an accurate number, so let’s do that (subtract 2,190,000). That still leaves you with 28,470,000 pounds of CO₂  emissions that have been eliminated from the planet! And that’s just from our county!! From replacing just ONE lightbulb for $6.99!! AND, you got to go to IKEA!! IKEA!!!!

So, yeah, I’m not one of those people that thinks the little bit that I do doesn’t make a difference. Because, if we all do $6.99 worth, we can save emissions that are the equivalent of the annual emissions of roughly 196 entire households. And, let’s just say we eliminate 196 houses. In today’s building market, that’s just over 60 acres of land that could otherwise be left as forest or green space. You know, where trees grow.

Don’t even get me started on tree planting.