Earth Day 2009

Earth Day is tomorrow, April 22nd. Earth Day as an awareness day has become a much more recognized "holiday", as environmental issues have come more and more into the foreground and global warming and greenhouse gases have become more of a recognized issue. Recycling is no longer a strange idea, alternative energies are much more seriously looked at, and people are taking the idea of helping to protect the Earth and environment as real goals now.

All too often, people start to feel like the global problems we are facing are way too big to be able to affect. People have that "one person can't make a difference" mentality, but it's totally not the reality of our situation. Every little thing you can do to make a difference helps and when every person does one tiny thing, the compounded effects can be overwhelming! For example, right now the population of the U.S. is approximately 306,263,646 people (population count is not a static thing, so it will be different at any other time after this and is only an estimate). Now, if each of the people in the U.S. gave one penny (assume a parent can give $0.01 for children, haha) to any cause, that would amount to $3,062,636.46! Over three million dollars and people seem to often throw pennies "away" and many will not stop to pick up one on the ground. Now, if each person picked up just one piece of litter off the ground to clean up, think about how overwhelming the difference would be. It'd be like filling a landfill!

That all being said, there are many many things that we can each do to help make a difference on Earth Day and everyday! Many things are just common-sensical things that you hear and are aware of. Others might be some things people haven't given a try to.

Compact fluorescent lights (CFL's) have been one of the biggest innovations in power saving! CFL's use just a fraction of the energy of standard incandescent bulbs, cutting energy costs for households (and seriously, who can't use a break on the bills right now?) and greenhouse gases that would have been produced to feed the hungrier incandescents. The color spectrums have vastly improved as well, which used to be an issue for some people with fluorescent lighting. The small amount of mercury that is in each bulb is also an issue, but there are many places to recycle these bulbs so that this can be safely managed. LED lighting is another development and could be the answer to this issue, though LED lighting tends to be more directed light, which is good for floods and spotlighting over lighting up an entire room and more reflective devices would be necessary for such applications. LED's last considerably longer than both incandescent and CFL bulbs, but the costs are higher due to much smaller productions at this time. Hopefully, a greater demand will soon lower initial costs.

If you can just change out one bulb in your house from incandescent to CFL, you will be saving yourself money AND reducing the production of greenhouse gases with just this one simple step. With government subsidies on the costs of CFL's, you can also get them for pretty decent prices and not feel like you're breaking the bank to save a over the long run. Costco has packs of various bulbs for excellent prices and thanks to their deals, I finally accomplished my goal of replacing all lighting in my house away from incandescent bulbs. If every household replaced 3 60-watt light bulbs with CFL's, the effect would be the same as taking 3.5 million cars off the road! If we all make a change, the difference will be astounding!

This is one simple money-saving, energy-saving, and quick-to-accomplish idea, but everybody knows of little things that they can do to make a difference. There are now many ideas such as this that will not only help the environment, but the wallet, and especially with a lot of government tax breaks on environmentally friendly ideas as well!