The Grassroots Are Getting Greener
Last week Richard Branson offered up $25 million to the scientist (or scientists) who could find a way to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. (I tried to find a definitive link to the story, but all my Googling did was bring up op-ed pieces and blogs.)
It seems only fair. Since the Industrial Revolution we have been finding increasingly more efficient ways of polluting the planet, why not turn some of that human ingenuity towards cleaning up the place?
Which is not to say that we shouldn’t, you know, maybe stop doing a lot of the things we do that got us into this mess.
I’m just happy that we’re finally talking seriously about this. For too long climate change has been facing a credibility problem that I find utterly baffling. Even if you don’t like Al Gore, how can you look around at the developed world and think that we’re not affecting the planet? Now, governments from Europe to Australia are realizing that their constituents want some attention on this subject.
So, assuming you aren’t going after Branson’s $25 mil, what to do?
Here’s an ideas - Light bulbs. The government of Canada provided me with this interesting factoid:
A 15–watt compact fluorescent bulb produces the same amount of light as a 60–watt incandescent bulb. If every Canadian home replaced just one 60–watt light bulb with a 15–watt compact fluorescent bulb in a heavy use area, we would collectively save $63 million annually in energy costs and reduce our GHG emissions – equivalent to taking 66,000 cars off the road!
If we extrapolate that to the U.S. population, that would be 660,000 cars off the road. For just one bulb.