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window treatments—another low-cost alternative worth considering is window films. These films can be applied to any window to block a portion of the UV rays entering a room. They reduce heat gain dramatically in the summer, and they also help keep your carpet, furniture, and other possessions from fading, while you still enjoy lots of daylight.

    Compact Fluorescent Lightbulbs
    I
love
compact fluorescent lightbulbs. I
love
them! When I talk about pursuing the energy-saving low-hanging fruit, CFLs represent an entire orchard.
    The SS
Begley
is lit completely by CFLs
—all
I have throughout the entire house are CFLs. Some of the bulbs in my house, particularly the ones in my home office, I bought in the early 1990s . . . and they’re still burning. They save an incredible amount of energy
and
money.

    I’m such a big fan of CFLs that I would actually lobby to outlaw incandescent bulbs.

    The State of California and several European countries are considering passing legislation to outlaw incandescent bulbs and make the use of CFLs mandatory. People have asked me if I would support that legislation. Not only would I support it, I would lobby for it.
    Here’s the bottom line on compact fluorescent lightbulbs:

    • CFLs use two-thirds less energy than standard incandescent lightbulbs, yet they provide the same amount of light. A CFL may draw just 18 watts of power, but it puts out 60 watts’ worth of light.
    • The average CFL lasts nine times longer than a normal bulb—most people say they’re going to last ten years, and I’ve got some that have lasted as long as sixteen or seventeen years.
    • Each CFL saves at least $30 in energy costs over its lifetime vs. a regular lightbulb.
    • CFLs generate 70 percent less heat than regular bulbs, making them safer to operate and keeping your home cooler in the summer months.
    • If every American home replaced just
one
standard lightbulb with a CFL, it would reduce greenhouse gases equivalent to the emissions of nearly 800,000 cars.

    And here’s great news: Even if money is really tight, you can still switch to compact fluorescent bulbs. You can get them for free from a utility like the Department of Water and Power, like Pacific Gas and Electric, like Southern California Edison, like Con Ed. A lot of these utilities will give you compact fluorescent bulbs because they’ve discovered that it’s cheaper for them. The cheapest kilowatts they can produce these days are kilowatts saved. It’s very, very difficult to site and build a new power plant—all the expense, all the red tape involved, the environmental review. And the fuel sources are natural gas and coal. What’s the future of that? So utility companies are really on board with saving power, not creating more and more demand from their customers.

    The CFL Naysayers
    Granted, there are people who look at CFLs and see problems. The mercury content, the quality of light—I’ve heard them all, even from my wife. These people are more comfortable with the old technology that they’re used to, and they don’t want to give it up. I understand that, but it’s shortsighted thinking. So let me address a couple of the issues people raise surrounding compact fluorescent lightbulbs.

    1.          Toxic elements in CFLs. There’s an environmental cost to everything. Look at my mountain bike. The plating processes used to create it are toxic. It has rubber tires. Energy was used both to fabricate the mountain bike and to ship it to me. But if you look at the life cycle of that bike, the amount of energy that I’m using by riding that bike around fueled by an ear of corn or a bowl of rice (human fuel, rather than fossil fuel), as opposed to what I’d use getting around in an automobile, there’s no contest. I hope that everybody would agree with that.

It’s the same with a compact fluorescent lightbulb. CFLs do contain toxic elements. There’s a bit of mercury in some of them, although manufacturers have