That''s No Ordinary Lightbulb! It's a Killer!

While continuing my self-education in all things fluorescent, I ran across a little something from the Energy Star website run by the EPA:

CHANGE A LIGHT, CHANGE THE WORLD

Changing the world starts with simple actions. When you replace light bulbs or entire light fixtures in your home with ones that have earned the ENERGY STAR, you contribute to a cleaner environment while saving yourself energy, money and time buying and changing lights in your home. Every American is encouraged to change out their 5 most frequently used light fixtures or the bulbs in them to ENERGY STAR qualified lighting. If every American home made this "5 light change" not only would each family save more than $60 every year in energy costs, but together we'd also keep more than one trillion pounds of greenhouse gases out of our air. That's a $6 billion energy savings for Americans equivalent to the annual output of more than 21 power plants.

OK, let's be generous and say that there is one home for every two people (give or take). We'll give them 140,000,000 homes.

Divide 1,000,000,000,000 pounds of gases by 140,000,000 and you get roughly 7143 pounds for 5 light bulbs. Divide 7143 by 5 and you get 1428 pounds of gases for every lightbulb!

Does anyone care to do the math on how many cubic feet 1428 pounds of CO2 would take up? Or how about a trillion pounds of the stuff?

I would love to see the figures that they used to come up with this. I'm sure that there are some truly hilarious assumptions made. My guess is that they took every person on earth (including the dead ones who voted in the last election) gave them a home of their own, and rated the light bulbs at 5,000 watts. Or something like that.

And they have no qualms about putting this stuff out there. Why? Because so many people in this country have been conditioned to believe whatever the government tells them, that they won't think twice about that ridiculous figure.

And it's all about money. They've learned that if they put these ridiculously large numbers out there, eventually the usual unthinking "Our Mother the Earth" suspects will pick it up and start protesting while they should be looking for work. And if they can panic enough people, they get more money. Nice game they have there.

(On that subject, I saw a great protest sign from the Right side. The rally must have been held on a Saturday. "Ted Kennedy's car has killed more people than my guns!")