Buy an LED now, and join the fight against global warming!

Global warming is the most pressing environmental issue of this century. What does this have to do with how we choose to light our homes?

According to official US government statistics, powerplants in the US produced 2,459,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) in 2006. Almost 22% of the electricity they generated was used for lighting, 9% of it in our homes.

If we're going to get serious about fighting global warming, we need to make lifestyle choices that will reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. Luckily, one of the most significant things you can do is as simple as replacing regular incandescent light bulbs with LEDs. If every Americanhome replaced one of their most frequently used incandescent lights* with an LED light today, we could reduce our carbon dioxide emissions by 17.4 million metric tons of CO2 per year! That’s 3x more carbon dioxide than Costa Rica gives off in whole year.**

Other environmental benefits of using LEDs

• Unlike fluorescent lights, LEDs contain NO mercury.
  
• 49% of the electricity in the US is produced from coal fired power plants. Besides CO2, these power plants emit hazardous substances including mercury, nitrous oxides, sulphur oxides, and particulates. Using LEDs for lighting means using less electricity, and that means less of these substances contaminating our environment and less coming in contact with us.
• LEDs last at least 60x longer than incandescent lights and 10x longer than fluorescent lights, which makes for less waste… and 59 fewer trips to the store to buy replacement bulbs.
• Unlike incandescent lights, LEDs don’t waste energy as heat, so they won’t add to the amount of electricity you use for air conditioning.

*a 60W incandescent light on for 6 or more hours a day
** only includes carbon dioxide emissions from the use of fossil fuel

All data and statistics are derived from publicly available data from the Energy Information Agency, the source for official energy statistics from the US government.