From the “bah humbug department”. I have nothing against energy efficiency, I have LED’s myself and I didn’t even put them up this year. But, timing is everything, and people already stress out during holidays. Adding a guilt trip over Christmas lights hardly seems necessary or productive. – Anthony
From Australia’s Courier Mail
By Graham Readfearn
December 24, 2008 08:06am
SCIENTISTS have warned that Christmas lights are bad for the planet due to huge electricity waste and urged people to get energy efficient festive bulbs.
CSIRO researchers said householders should know that each bulb turned on in the name of Christmas will increase emissions of greenhouse gases.
Dr Glenn Platt, who leads research on energy demand, said Australia got 80 per cent of its electricity by burning coal which pumps harmful emissions into the atmosphere.
He said: “Energy efficient bulbs, such as LEDs, and putting your Christmas lights on a timer are two very easy ways to minimise the amount of electricity you use to power your lights.”
He said the nation’s electricity came from “centralised carbon intensive, coal-based power stations” which were responsible for emitting over one third of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Dr Platt added: “For a zero-emission Christmas light show, you may consider using solar powered lights or sourcing your electricity from verified green power suppliers.”
Here in the UK, East Sussex council has banned fairy lights that haven’t been approved as a “Fire Risk”……guess who for?
The Fire Service!!
Slightly off topic: on top of this the council has banned comfy chairs in the recreation room and the snooker table the firemen use in their downtime “because if makes them look unprofessional”.
If even that isn’t enough for the poor firemen to cope with, the EUSSR is insisting that the UK complies with the 48 hour a week Working Time Directive (Law). This will hit the UK’s retained fire servce that is made up of paid volunteers that give up their time off from their usual full time jobs to support the full time Fire Service. By the time they’ve done their training they may only have 2 hours left per week as the backup team.
So if you have a fire this winter, don’t expect the Fire Service to come and put it out….guess that means more noxious gases from burning furniture, exploding gas appliances etc to add to GW. No doubt they’ll include that now in their AGW figures. Maybe that should be called the EU Global Warming scam caused by their mad Directives!
The Kingston incident just the “tip of an iceberg” – and there’s more to come?
From LPAC:
Dec 23, 2008 –Communities nationwide have repaired fewer than half of the 122 levees identified by the Federal government almost two years ago as too poorly maintained to be reliable in major floods, according to Army Corps of Engineers data.
State and local governments were given a year to fix levees cited by the Corps for “unacceptable” maintenance deficiencies in a February 2007 review that was part of a post-Hurricane Katrina review. Only 45 have had necessary repairs, according to data provided in response to a request by USA Today published today. The remaining unrepaired levees are spread across 18 states and Puerto Rico, most in California and Washington.
As if cued to underscore the problem, an earthen dam holding back a retention pond broke early today at a power plant run by the nation’s largest public utility, releasing a frigid mix of water, ash and mud that damaged 12 homes, buried a road and railroad tracks leading to the plant, and put hundreds of acres of rural land under water. The 40-acre pond was used by the Tennessee Valley Authority to hold a slurry of ash generated by the coal-burning Kingston Steam Plant in Harriman, about 50 miles west of Knoxville, said TVA spokesman Gil Francis.
http://www.larouchepac.com/news/2008/12/23/fewer-half-unacceptable-levees-repaired.html
Maybe Christmas lights should be powered only by Eco wind generated power?
Be pretty dim here in Farnham, Surrey, UK as there isn’t even a breeze.
Roger Carr says:
Hang on, I thought that only KRudd could make one feel ashamed of being Australian.
Perhaps each new generation of environmentalists need a fresh cause, and when the limits of what is achievable become apparent, they move onto a new one: pollution, nuclear radiation, the rainforests, ozone, and now, CO2.
CO2 is great because it affects everything. It is the meta-cause that can spawn any number of causes. Christmas lights? CO2. Air travel? CO2. Cars? CO2. Beef? CO2. Greed? CO2.
We’ll start to get into more sensitive subjects. Are you obsese? Feel guilty about your carbon footprint.
I’m waiting for a science study that shows people with higher testosterone levels have a higher carbon footprint lifestyle, and that it is more eco-friendly to be a woman. That should tie in nicely with feminism.
Looking at this map, the place we should all be emulating is North Korea. It’s that eco-friendly paradise of darkness west of Japan that makes South Korea look like an island. They need to do something about that little blip of light where Pyongyang is, though.
It appears that the Earth IS flat!!!
@Mongo (21:21:26) :
You wrote in part: “Sigh………I guess methane-spewing Reindeer wil be banned from pulling Santa’s sleigh next.”
Didn’t you hear the latest? Santa is going to go to a solar powered sleigh (the very minute they figure out how to get it to run all night on Christmas Eve).
grrrrrrrr… the greenies here in Australia are the worst. But for the first time since I’ve been living here, 8 years now, the are showing “It’s a Wonderful Life’ on Christmas day!!
And now it IS Christmas!!
And thank you so much, Anthony, for this wonderful and enLIGHTening blog!
A Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year to you, your family, and all!
It pre-supposes that the earth is getting warmer and we are the cause…questionable to say the least.
Latest data (unless your name is Hansen) show plenty of ice in Antartica and plenty in the Arctic…and snao all over Canada.
Skiing good at just about all resorts in Northern Hemisphere.
So put your light on and tell the scientists to “get stuffed”.
Meanwhile, citizens urged CSIRO to discountinue operation of their global warming supercomputers given the vast energy usage of these supercomputers which causes increases in harmful emissions of greenhouse gases leading to dangerous climate change.
The amount of power used in lighting all of the Christmas lights in the world is trivial compared to overall daily use. If the atmosphere were this sensisitive, we would have long since died. The journalistic offal referenced in this thread offers nothing but an AGW version of ‘bah-humbug’
Australia as a continent is on the edge of the map, blacked out compared to the northern hemisphere. Even if you believe in global warming, our country is still in the dark.
Turn off everything and the cities would lose money on natural gas sales and need to raise taxes, you can bet on that. It’s turning into madness now, turn off your Christmas lights. I guess they will want to replace Christmas with Green Day or something.
Do these so-called “scientists” have no shame? These peddlers in fear and guilt, particularly at this time of year, and during a time of a worldwide economic crisis rivaling the Great Depression are the lowest of the low. One does not have to be particularly “religious” to see that charity, kindness, and yes, love are eminently desirable, and even essential human qualities. In Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” and Seus’s “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas”, both Scrooge and the Grinch have revelations and redeem themselves. Will the the AGW zealots and pseudo-scientists such as these ever realize the great harm they have caused, apologize, and redeem themselves? It seems doubtful.
Dr Platt added: “For a zero-emission Christmas light show, you may consider using solar powered lights or sourcing your electricity from verified green power suppliers.”
I wonder if Dr Platt owns any stock in “verified green power suppliers”?
You are so evil. Don’t you know that Santa’s workshop is going to fall thru the thin ice at the North Pole if global warming continues unabated? (Not to mention that Santa is overweight because of his junk food diet filled with empty calories) Don’t you know that Arctic ice has been melting for the past two weeks – in mid-December – in the total darkness?
Arrrkkk!
Bleaghhkhh!!
Glyptzlpfft!!!
I wonder what puts out more CO2; printing, distributing and disposing of the Brisbane Courier Mail news paper or the Christmass lights in Brisbane Australia? If the former, the least they can do is stop printing. Everybody has to do their part right?
In the clean, green, PNW we use only renewable hydroelectric power for our Christmas lights.
Oops, forgot, it seems hydro is not clean, green, or renewable in Washington State. It got left off the list when the watermelons mandated what types of power were to be considered sustainable.
Of greater concern to me: What about the heated CO2 emissions of the “CSIRO researchers” ??
North Korea gets special UN kudos for its campaign against running dog capitalist Christmas lights. And all capatilist lights, for that matter.
Have a Merry Global Warming Christmas, everyone!
I think what we’re shooting for is a return to the early neolithic, before bronze.
Les Francis (01:21:15) :
As you know, CSIRO spearheaded ground breaking research wrt El Nino and
La Nina oscillations. Their work regarding fish migration and the precipitation outlook for the south eastern Asian region and South American was respected and held in high regard by primary producers of Australia many other countries.
They have now become a pathetic joke who’s agenda is to pander to the pseudo science of the IPCC and the ideologies of environmentalism.
They will earn and deserve nothing but contempt from our rural producers.
The NASA presentation of the whole world at night brings up two questions: (1) (facetious) Who turned off the sun for the photo? and (2) Were the originals that went into the presentation “photo-shopped” to enhance the effect? Off-topic: isn’t the term “denier” applicable to one who dismisses temperature data from satellites while clinging to the obviously flawed (and manipulated) surface temperature record?
Looking at LED Christmas lights in stores, I have not seen any lumen/watt figures on the boxes. Nasty incandescents aren’t all that good, but really efficient LED’s are very expensive.
I have some doubts as to the overall savings. Particularly counting the CO2 emitted during the untangling process.
Won’t matter, in a few years incandescents will be history.
I think the scientists warning us about such things harm the planet far more than the things they warn us about.
Let’s hope a small measure of sanity returns next year.
Merry & Happy to all.
REPLY: I bought the LED lights mostly because they have long life and had better connections…I get tired of playing “find the dead bulb”. – Anthony