And you are right, we used to leave our appliances on Stand By all the time, but that is minimized for some time.

Personally, I feel that even without altering your lifestyle drastically, you can conserve enough to make a collective difference.

Kinda agree with what you say about families as well (though I won’t put it that way). In India, the people who have a lot of children are usually on the poorer side (who actually can’t afford to feed and educate them, so the cycle is endless). What is needed is awareness - a LOT OF IT.

We will never reduce demand by simply creating more efficient machines, it is not in human nature to do so, especially in the US. We reduce demand by saying one day our resources will run out if we keep expanding the earths population. Rather than looking outside of box, we need to look for ways to stop cramming so many people into the box.

There was a time when every family across the world needed several kids in order to make it all work and assure that some of them made it to adulthood. Those days are long gone. There are joys from having a larger family, or so I am told I can’t stand my siblings and only have one child, but the fact is having more than one because you want more than one is simply a short sighted selfish acted that imparts a debt on all future generations and sets a bad example for them. There will come a day when either our grandchildren or theirs will be fighting wars over food and water, rather than oil and religion.

Regarding the emissions into the atmosphere from CFL breakage, you are right. It does emit Mercury into the atmosphere (as do tube lights)… However, the total amount of mercury emitted by a coal power plant to light a bulb is much more than the mercury emitted by the broken CFL. And in India, most of our power is still produced by coal plants, so it may still make sense…

And anyway, if the CFLs are disposed properly, then there will be no breakage (a distant dream as it may be in India).

Here’s a lot of detail around this topic:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_fluorescent_lamp

I wasn’t being critical of you in particular… I saw that you were presenting the lighter side of things…. but this is the same response I have got from others I have talked to this about…

Your post was just the trigger :D…

As for The Naive Indian taking a dig at the Earth Hour, I did it because there was plenty of literature out there on the internet which tackled the issue seriously. Therefore, I presented the lighter side of things