Solar POWAH!

See that? That's the Sun. The sun is big stuff. It could kick my butt, well not kick, burn, but it's also gonna burn some other butts. I'll get to that in a minute. Ya see, ever since I saw An Inconvenient Truth I've been reading more and more about renewable energy, and finding ways I can become a little more effecient instead of wasteful. I like the world. It's one big beautiful place.


And I'm a little worried about how we treat it as a whole. There's a ton of things we can do to make a small bit of difference. If more and more people do something small, the culmination will become big. For instance, if every American home replaced just one light bulb with an ENERGY STAR light bulb, we would save enough energy to light more than 2.5 million homes for a year and prevent greenhouse gases equivalent to the emissions of nearly 800,000 cars.

There's absolutely no reason not to change some of our habits. Our energy needs are shifting, we've got our dependance on oil, and it's a commodity that we're, I suspect, in Iraq for. There's a plethora of money involved. Corporations making billions on oil. But we're learning more and more about the changes our planet is undergoing and nations, corporations and people are beginning to change to meet the responsibility to reverse some of the effects we've started.

I've had many talks now with friends and coworkers, read a ton of articles about what we can do. Cars are a big factor. Hybrid cars are becoming more prominent. But right now, they their effeciency is offset by their larger price tag. It negates their appeal for me. We ALL need to be buying more effecient light bulbs. Like these Another upcoming energy source is one I've heard about becoming more and more prominent. Solar Energy. Check out this article. Cheap Solar energy is poised to undercut oil and gas by half in about 10 years. By five, (when I plan to finally build a house) solar power will be fully able to compete with gas directly. It's expensive right now, it'll cost about $15,000 to install panels to power a home. But states are offering homeowners grants now who want to shift to solar, so there's a change to cut costs. Wired has a good article on solar power if you're interested, HERE.

I plan to be a good little earth citizen and be smart about the energy I consume. It's not much, but I hope more and more people educate themselves on what they can do about the emerging rising stakes in the place we all call home.

More info:

EPA's page on basic info about global warming
Wired: The Next Green Revolution

Munch on all that folks. It's good for ya!