green is universal

Green Is... Habit Forming

Posted at 10:34 AM on January 17, 2008 comments (1)

By Mario Garcia, NBC Nightly News

Sometimes going green seems like it has a bad rap. People don't like to be told that they 'can't do things' or that they should do less of something'. Going "green" can be just as much about what we can do. Do one environmentally helpful act and it becomes easier to do the next.

In my personal life with the help of my wife and 5 year old daughter, we do as much as we can at home and we are always looking to do more.

Some of what we have done at this point quite frankly seems cliche. Yes we have CFL's (compact fluorescent light bulbs) in all of our fixtures. Even the dimmables. My wife swears by that modern invention called the Internet, and on it she found dimmable fluorescent bulbs. (You cannot put standard CFL's in a dimmable outlet). That said, CFL's really do make a difference. If every American home swapped out just 5 incandescent bulbs for CFL's, 1 trillion (with a "t") pounds of green house gases would not go into the air. That's equal to the emissions of 8 million cars but it's also equal to 6 billion dollars in energy savings to the "swappers".

In my household and in many cities and towns across the country you can also "opt into" sustainable energy. In New York City our utility provides us the choice. We chose to pay a slight premium to get our electricity from only sustainable sources. That said, the oldest business model is supply and demand, and if more people ask for this it will ultimately become cheaper, and in some instances it already is. This at a time when fossil fuels, last time I checked, are getting more expensive. Another easy thing to do that saves energy and money is to unplug all your chargers when they are not charging BlackBerrys, cell phones, iPods etc. When a device is not in the charger the chargers are still sucking energy, known as the vampire effect. In our house we have "smart strips - they are surge suppressors that actually cut all the energy to the devices when they are not in use. Power strips also suck energy even if the TV is turned off. All of this saves money on your energy bill. The average American household leaks about 50 watts of energy. Also when looking for appliances and home electronics look for the energy star label. Any device with that label saves 10-15% of energy compared with non-energy star appliances.

We also conserve in our house. We recycle most everything. The frustrating thing is that while some manufacturers make recyclable packaging (even some Styrofoam) some municipalities don't recycle everything. Know what you hometown does and do what you can to recycle what they do. Then push for them to recycle even more.

Mario Garcia
NBC Nightly News, Environmental Producer
http://www.nightly.msnbc.com