Lights out in Australia
The conservative Australian government has joined Cuba and Venezuala in deciding to make the sale of incandescent light bulbs illegal from 2010 and force everyone to replace them with fluorescent bulbs. As seems typical of the climate-change-sceptical administration of John Howard, this action is all sound-and-fury, achieving little.
“The Government boasts that banning incandescents will cut Australia’s emissions by “as much as” 800,000 tonnes a year by 2012. That is a reduction of just 0.14 per cent.
. . .
But there are less painful ways to reduce household gas emissions, which account for about six tonnes per household per year.
According to the Australian Greenhouse Office, lighting accounts for just 5 per cent of household greenhouse-gas emissions, clothes washing and drying accounts for 2 per cent, cooking 3 per cent, fridge/freezer 9 per cent, home heating and cooling 11 per cent, electronic and other appliances 15 per cent, water heating 16 per cent and travel a whopping 34 per cent.
The AGO points out that each household could save more than two tonnes of greenhouse gas by buying a new efficient fridge, 1.5 tonnes by using gas to heat hot water. Using cold water to wash clothes saves almost half a tonne a year. But every litre of petrol saved cuts greenhouse-gas emissions by 2.8 kilograms.”