The Peak Oil Crisis: Conserving Light

This week the UN is to come up with a sanctions resolution that will keep Iran’s two million barrels a day of exports flowing and at the same time convince Tehran to give up on uninspected nuclear enrichment.

Crafting such a resolution is likely to take some doing as the Chinese, who are more concerned about losing oil imports than whether or not Tehran comes up with an atomic bomb, have to sign off on any sanctions plan.

Therefore, there is still time to explore some of the things we are going to have to do to keep functioning in the post-peak oil world. This week I would like to talk about our electric lights. Discussion of this topic is occasioned by the recent release by the International Energy Agency (IEA) of a 500-page report exhaustively exploring the world’s electric lighting and the energy it takes to keep it glowing.

The IEA contends that in the 100 years or so we have had electricity, we have let massive waste creep into the lighting of our buildings, streets and open spaces. The fundamental cause of this waste was the abundance of cheap electricity, cheap fixtures and cheap bulbs. The cost of over-lighting an individual room, structure or area was small. It is only when we realize there are billions of us on the earth consuming many times more electric light than we actually need, that it becomes apparent that collectively our lighting systems are wasting very large quantities of fossil and other electricity-generating fuels we will soon need desperately.

Falls Church News-Press