You Can't Leave the Lights On

While listening to NPR on my drive in this morning, I heard a piece on "Lights Out L.A."--an environmental awareness campaign that's organizing a city and county-wide voluntary blackout on October 20. Here's the deal: They're challenging all businesses and homeowners to install one compact flourescent lightbulb and turn off all non-essential lighting from 8-9:00pm on the 20th. They estimate that doing so will save 10-15% of the energy consumed on an average Saturday night. At the original "Lights Out" event in Sydney, Australia, back in March, 2.2 million people participated, resulting in a 10% drop in electricity use. It also reduced 25 tons of carbon dioxide, equivalent to taking nearly 49,000 cars off the road for 60 minutes. L.A. is piggybacking their event along with San Francisco, which has been planning for 6 months (they'll be shutting off the lights on the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz, and other landmarks), but L.A. has to get the word out in just a matter of weeks. So start passing it on, friends! We've already replaced most of the bulbs in our house with CFLs and I'm fanatical about turning off lights, so it won't be much different from any other night at our house . . . .