Shrinking L.A.’s Carbon Footprint With Holiday Lights

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By DENNY FREIDENRICH

The news out of Indonesia earlier this month was both distressing and predictable: Delegates from nearly 190 countries, who had attended the United Nations’ international conference on the environment, ranked the United States as one of the world’s worst “climate sinners.”

The goal of the conference was to jump-start negotiations that will lead to an international accord to succeed the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.

The accord requires 36 industrial nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, a key source of global warming, an average 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. Without action, scientists warn of catastrophic droughts and floods, collapsing ice sheets and vanishing coastlines.

How can we, as individuals, translate these findings into day-to-day decisions that reduce our carbon footprint? You don’t know anyone who wants to increase his or her carbon footprint, do you?

The answer lies in a little holiday light. You know the one. It’s part of your Christmas tree or Hanukkah decoration, or what helps to illuminate your front yard. Unless you are like my neighbor, who lights up his house through Easter, you’ll start taking down your lights before the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses are over. So much for reducing Southern California’s carbon footprint this holiday season.

But what about next year? What can people do in 2008 that will help prevent an international environmental meltdown? Should they buy a $30,000 Prius or invest $18,000 in solar panels? One place to look for the answer is in Nevada City/Grass Valley. Here’s what these two Gold Rush communities have done for pennies on the dollar:


Trade-ins

Last year, Nevada City residents lined up to trade in old holiday lights for new, light-emitting diode lights that use a fraction of the energy of conventional bulbs.

These energy-savers, which are about the size of a fingernail, were provided by PG & E; through the Motherlode Energy Watch of Placerville. This year, all the outdoor lights on downtown Nevada City businesses were swapped out.

Small changes like this make a lot of difference to both the city’s carbon footprint and businesses’ bottom line. In 2006, Nevada City’s New York Hotel, decorated with 300 LED lights, reduced its holiday electricity costs from $67 to 94 cents.

Nevada City also helped neighboring Grass Valley change all its downtown Christmas lights. Astonishingly, Grass Valley’s electric bill dropped from $4,000 to $60 by using the new lights!

If two small Northern California communities can reduce their carbon footprints and electric bills, then what can we do in Southern California?

Plenty. Here’s my “1 Percent Plan” starting Dec. 1, 2008:

If 1 percent of the region’s 21 million residents volunteer to plug in their holiday lights at 5:30 p.m. instead of 5 p.m., and unplug their lights at 10:30 p.m. instead of 11 p.m., then Southern California will save 6.5 million kilowatt hours of electricity next December. (This assumes 210,000 people from Santa Barbara County south to the Mexican border participate for the entire month.)

A 6.5 million kilowatt hour reduction will save $1.3 million in real dollars.

That’s not enough to make the world spin in another direction, but it is quantifiable. It certainly will reduce the region’s overall carbon footprint. Best of all, by cutting back the time a person’s holiday lights are on by just one hour a day no one will feel like my 1 Percent Plan is the reincarnation of the Grinch who stole Christmas.

To be sure, there are other things people and cities can do next year. One is to make sure the vendors who are hired to wrap trees or light up the region’s 200-plus city halls use LED lights. This simple task will dramatically reduce Southern California’s collective carbon footprint.

When you include the reductions from the cities in the seven-county region with those in each county’s unincorporated areas, we should be able to save an additional 6.5 million kilowatt hours of electricity on top of what homeowners save.

Yes, the recent news out of Indonesia was depressing, but next year’s news from Southern California should be overwhelmingly encouraging. Let’s show the United Nations’ environmental delegates we have a plan to reduce our region’s carbon footprint one holiday light at a time.


Denny Freidenrich is the founder of First Strategies consulting in Laguna Beach.

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