I can save you money.

On Wednesday, I attended a sustainability conference put on by the North Texas Association of Environmental Professionals, and it was fascinating. This whole post is a little nerdy so hold onto your pocket protectors. The topic of sustainability is like nerd crack for me. But I did want to share one thing that I learned at the conference.

I'm sure the last time one of your bulbs burned out, you went to the store and saw all of the incandescent light bulbs right next to the compact fluorescent light (CFL) bulbs. They're the ones that look like cork screws. And maybe you even thought "hey - I'll do something great for the environment and buy one of the CFL bulbs", but then you looked at the price and saw that the incandescent light bulb cost $0.50 and the CFL bulb cost $4.00. What you may not know is that over the lifetime of the incandescent bulb, it will cost about $80 for the electricity to light the bulb and cool the room because of the additional heat it puts out. The CFL bulb? About $16 over the life of the bulb. Now multiply that by every bulb in your house. And the CFL bulbs last twice as long.

So if I told you that if you gave me $4 today, I'd give you $60 in two years, you'd do it right? This is the same thing. AND as an added bonus, you're doing something good for the environment. I'm not saying that you need to go out and replace all of your bulbs, but next time one of your incandescent bulbs burns out, consider buying a CFL bulb. Make sure it says Energy Star on it or else the same savings may not apply. They're sold at Wal-Mart, Target, and Home Depot. If everyone in the Dallas-Fort Worth area switched out just one of their light bulbs for a CFL bulb, that would reduce the need to build one additional coal-fired power plant. And trust me - we don't need more of those.

The rest of the conference was pretty good. This one architect talked about building green homes, which was really cool. The second presentation I went to was about future energy sources and this guy from the EPA spoke. I'm not kidding - he had Tourette's Syndrome. Added to this problem was the fact that he could not pronounce the letter "r". I was actually quite impressed that he was publicly speaking. Then at lunch we had the former Dallas Mayor Laura Miller speak to the group. At the end of her presentation, she asked if anyone had any questions and I wanted to raise my hand and scream "I have a question!! WHY DID YOU LET TO COWBOYS GO TO ARLINGTON?!!!". But I didn't want to be drug out of the luncheon screaming "Dude, don't taze me", so I kept it shut.

Going on the the background of all of this was me trying to figure out if the person sitting next to me was a man or a woman. You're going to think I'm making this up, but their name was Pat. I swear on a Bible. Actually, the name tag said "Patricia", but I think it was a man who added a "ricia" on the last part of his name. Pat was also carrying a purse, but that doesn't really mean anything these days since there's a man in Oregon having a baby.

That is the summary from my nerd conference. Have a good weekend.

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Update: I had a comment/question from Andy on mercury and CFL bulbs. Answer can be found here.