Where to save energy
This article about the savings from compact fluorescents is pretty good. It's really about the interaction between all your electrical appliances and the rest of your energy consumption.
The basic message is that electrical appliances heat your home; all the energy you "consume" running appliances and lighting is really converted into heat that gets dumped into your home. If you want to heat your home, this is a side benefit—so reducing your electricity consumption under those circumstances doesn't save as much in fossil fuel consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, energy costs, etc. as you might think, because you'll be running the furnace a little more. It does probably save some, because electric resistive heating is not the most efficient way to heat your house; but less than a naive calculation would imply.
On the other hand, if it's hot and you're running the air conditioner, the analysis turns upside down, and there's a large multiplier attached to any energy savings from more efficient (or less-used) appliances and lighting, because you'll have to work to pump that heat back out of your house. In that case, switching to fluorescents could save you a lot, and reduce your carbon footprint correspondingly.
And in either case, making your home more efficient at retaining the temperature you want is a big, big win.
The basic message is that electrical appliances heat your home; all the energy you "consume" running appliances and lighting is really converted into heat that gets dumped into your home. If you want to heat your home, this is a side benefit—so reducing your electricity consumption under those circumstances doesn't save as much in fossil fuel consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, energy costs, etc. as you might think, because you'll be running the furnace a little more. It does probably save some, because electric resistive heating is not the most efficient way to heat your house; but less than a naive calculation would imply.
On the other hand, if it's hot and you're running the air conditioner, the analysis turns upside down, and there's a large multiplier attached to any energy savings from more efficient (or less-used) appliances and lighting, because you'll have to work to pump that heat back out of your house. In that case, switching to fluorescents could save you a lot, and reduce your carbon footprint correspondingly.
And in either case, making your home more efficient at retaining the temperature you want is a big, big win.
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Our insulation sucks. We're getting a new roof next week and the guy roofing says it'll help keep the temp indoors more consistent, but we should also look at our attic crawlspace insulation.
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Aside -- I have wondered whether most per-capita energy use by country statistics typically cited take into account energy consumed by residents on international flights; I assume the answer is no. In fact, a quick glance suggests that many such statistics are merely calculations of total domestic energy consumption divided by population. In Denmark, annual or even more frequent international airplane holidays are routine among those who can afford it, indirectly buying hundreds of dollars in aviation fuel with no gas tax. (The cynical, and somewhat unfair, comment would be that if you give a person a spare dollar, then they'll probably use it to buy a few kilos of carbon dioxide one way or another, and that much of the world's energy virtue comes from being poor. The equally cynical rider would be that if you don't give someone a spare dollar, then they'll find a tree and convert it to pollutants for free, but that's pushing it; except in sparsely populated areas, there are unavoidable limits to that approach.)
There's also that whole thing about the family car (or SUV, in many cases) trip being more fuel efficient (on a miles per gallon per person basis) than virtually any motorized transportation mode except intercity vans and buses, but I'm getting pretty far afield now.
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It would probably be a significant win on the whole just to stop propping up unprofitable airlines (and most of them are unprofitable) with various subsidies. Of course the ability of ordinary people in First World countries to easily jet around the world is a wonderful thing, but it's costly in many ways. Though I wonder how much air travel is done by vacationers and how much is business travel (much of which, I know from personal experience, can be easily replaced by telecommunication of various sorts if the company paying the full-fare tickets starts feeling the pinch). It seems a shame to ruin people's fun if there are bigger savings to be had by limiting travel that people don't really want to do anyway.
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My parents heat their house by geothermic energy, which is getting more and more common as oil prices go up. Remote heating (often from burning household waste) is pretty much standard.
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Point being that with superior illumination I can better sort my recycling and avoid setting things on fire, so in this case, the incandescent bulb is pro-planet.