Queen of Green - Start Small

Start your journey to the green side on your next trip to the grocery store. How? Simply purchase a compact fluorescent light bulb. The cost is less than $5, and the benefits are huge. Here’s a short explanation of why.

An incandescent bulb is the type invented by Thomas Edison. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and in truth it has served mankind well for over 120 years. By all measures, it has been a resounding success. However, it makes light as a byproduct of heat. In fact, only 10% of the energy used in an incandescent bulb makes it to light. The rest is heat. Seems rather wasteful, doesn’t it?

Enter the compact fluorescent bulb. It works by a rather complex process involving mercury being converted from liquid to gas and phosphors converting ultraviolet to visible light. We feel no particular royal need to go into more details. If you’d like to learn more, by all means go look it up on the internet.

Obviously, a household can save a great deal of money by replacing incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents. Have we even mentioned the electricity saved? And that the production of electricity in the US accounts for

42% of the crap… oh do pardon us, we meant CO2… put into the air every year. Lest anyone forget, CO2 is a gas that acts in the atmosphere like the glass on a greenhouse, keeping heat in. So in that respect, compact fluorescents are also far kinder to Mother Nature.

Think about this for a moment; how many bulbs do you have in your house? How many might you have running throughout the day? Maybe 15 or so? Here is a startling calculation. We will let it speak eloquently through pictures.

So to begin your journey to the green side, replace every light bulb in your house with compact fluorescents. You can dive in and do it all at once, or a little bit at a time. True enough, compact fluorescents are more expensive than incandescent bulbs to start with. But as the illustrations on previous pages show, they are by far the best choice. The Queen recommends them highly.

We have no doubt there will be some who poo poo the idea and wonder why they should bother to switch when incandescents are cheap to buy and seem to work just fine. Might we remind all dear readers that like persons who wander through a crowd in unwashed ghastliness, wafting BO everywhere with rude abandon, it is far more enjoyable to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem. Please don’t waft your BO on the rest of us… go green.