Erica Rowell, today’s guest blogger, is a Web Editor and Producer at Environmental Defense, and our resident expert on light bulbs.

Ever stop to wonder why, since the mid-1990’s, traffic lights don’t seem to burn out? They can’t be using old-fashioned incandescent bulbs – those burn out all the time. Maybe they switched to longer-lasting compact fluorescent lights (CFLs)? Nope. Today’s stop lights use light-emitting diodes (LEDs).

LEDs last 35,000 to 50,000 hours – five times longer than the average CFL, and 50 times longer than an incandescent bulb. In fact, because the technology is so different, they don’t really ever burn out. They just get dimmer over time – a long time. Today’s LEDs produce more light per watt than conventional bulbs but they’re not quite as efficient as CFLs… yet. On the plus side, unlike CFLs they contain no mercury whatsoever.

You can find LEDs in all kinds of places – flashlights, television remotes, car headlights, flat screen displays, exit signs and even holiday lights, just to name a few. So, thinking of buying some LED light bulbs?

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Today’s Guest Blogger, Lisa Moore, is a scientist in the Climate and Air Program.

There’s a new site on Yahoo! that can calculate how much your carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions go down when you try their energy saving tips. It’s fun to use, and I especially appreciate the snazzy interactive features because I know how hard people worked to build it. My colleagues and I provided the Yahoo! design team with the data they use in their calculations.

I hope you’ll visit the site to see how simple changes in your house and car can save energy and lower emissions. But first, let me take you behind the scenes to the complicated world of carbon calculation.

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You hear a lot of talk these days about "carbon footprints". But what is a carbon footprint, anyway?

Carbon dioxide (CO₂), while not the only greenhouse gas, is the most abundant. CO₂ is emitted into the atmosphere when we burn fossil fuels, and most of the energy in this country comes from burning fossil fuels. Thus, anything that requires energy to manufacture, transport, or operate causes the emission of CO₂ (see my previous post, The Carbon Footprint of… Everything).

A "carbon footprint" is the amount of CO₂ released by an activity or entity. So what’s your carbon footprint?

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Erica Rowell, today’s guest blogger, is a Web Editor and Producer at Environmental Defense, and our resident expert on compact fluorescents.

Last year, in converting my apartment to energy-saving compact fluorescent lights (CFLs), I broke two. I opened the window, swept up the fragments, wiped the floor with a damp paper towel, put the towel and the broken CFLs in a plastic bag and tied it. My super disposed of the bag. I’m not worried about mercury exposure – they broke a couple of months ago, and my cats and I are fine. A similar incident in Maine was a different story.

When Brandy Bridges shattered a CFL spiral in her daughter’s bedroom, aware that it contained trace amounts of mercury, the concerned mother looked into proper disposal. After a mishmash of good and bad advice, she ended up with a $2,000 clean-up bill and a lot of fear (read full story).

What can we learn from Ms. Bridges? Know some basic facts.

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Andy Darrell, today’s guest, is director of Environmental Defense’s Living Cities program, and a member of the advisory board that helped the mayor develop the plan.

For the past eight months I’ve been honored to be a part of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s advisory council to develop a city plan for sustainability. The team has been meeting to hammer out ideas for making New York a world model of a “green” megacity.

Frankly, when I joined the Advisory Board, I didn’t know where it would end up. With my colleagues at Environmental Defense, I put forward big ideas for healthy air, less traffic, green buildings and energy efficiency, more trees and parks and cleaned-up waterways. In December 2006, the mayor announced 10 bold goals, including achieving the cleanest air of any big city in the country, cutting greenhouse gases 30 percent from today’s levels by 2030 and making sure that every New Yorker can walk to a park within ten minutes.

Great goals — but could they be made real?

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How do you know that concern about climate change has reached the mainstream? When a product’s carbon footprint is a factor in every buying decision.

And how do you know the carbon footprint of a product? Through eco-labeling – a label disclosing the amount of energy used to produce the product, or the amount of CO₂ that producing the product released into the atmosphere. The idea is similar to nutrition labeling – give consumers the knowledge they need to make informed choices.

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ignoratio elenchi n.
A logical fallacy of presenting an argument that may in itself be valid, but has nothing to do with the proposition it purports to prove. Also known as “irrelevant conclusion”. [Lat. ignorance of refutation.]

Al Gore’s response to charges of being an energy hog was that he buys carbon offsets to neutralize his carbon emissions. This sounded bogus to a lot of people, but in fact it’s not.

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In case you haven’t noticed, compact fluorescent bulbs (CFLs, for short) have been in the news lately. Environmental Defense, along with scores of other environmental organizations, have been encouraging folks to switch their old-fashioned incandescent lightbulbs for CFLs. Australia has mandated that incandescents be phased out completely [PDF], and California is considering similar legislation. Here’s why.

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