Obama met with the Energy Department on Thursday and ordered that appliances and light bulbs soon become more energy efficient. Obama claims that “This will save consumers money, this will spur innovation and this will conserve tremendous amounts of energy.” He also adds that “We’ll save through these simple steps over the next 30 years the amount of energy produced over a two-year period by all the coal-fired power plants in America.” The new products to be improved will include ovens, vending machines, microwave ovens, dishwashers and light bulbs. These new appliances will cut energy use and decrease the amount of heat that gets trapped in the ozone and cause global warming. And by 2014, congress has already ordered the “phasing out of the traditional incandescent light bulb.”
I think that these new improvements are a really good start for the energy efficiency plan. I believe that we will really benefit from it. Not only will it save households and businesses a lot of money, it will also help our environment.
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Few people realize how big and effect energy inefficiency has on our "energy crisis." So much energy is needlessly wasted that if we were to concentrate all our efforts into being energy efficient as opposed to creating alternative energy sources, we would solve a large part of our energy problems.
This is not to say I believe we should focus all our efforts into energy efficiency (new renewable, clean options are vital, too), but it should get a lot more attention in the media as well as from local, state, and national governments. Yes, insulation is not as sexy as solar panels, nor tire gauges than fuel cells, but they're cheap, they're easy, they work, and they're already available en masse. If we want to redefine how we consume energy in this country, we cannot ignore our wasting of it.
I wish this kind of action could have been taken earlier, but I'm definitely glad to see more attention put towards our energy crisis now. Making home appliances and light bulbs energy efficient is a great start; I hope President Obama will soon expand to larger changes and look into solar, wind, and tidal energy.
Also, America needs to join an international environmental conference and/or treaty asap. Global warming=global problem. America should take some leadership and demonstrate more effort for environmental action than what we've been doing this past decade. I'm also saying this because a while ago (before Obama was nominated), I watched a show that aired in Japan with some "scientists" as guests on it and they were encouraging people to basically trash the environment (okay, well, that sounds dramatic..they meant something like not recycling). They said that the Japanese are too caught up in the idea of "greenness=good" that they don't realize that they're the only ones who care so much. One guy then said, "Take America, for instance. Do you see them doing as much as us?" I wanted to be mad at the guy for telling people to throw away their green efforts on national TV, but then again, his second statement was kind of accurate.. Basically, I hope President Obama will be able to change this image of America.
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