Air pollution and global climate change threaten animals worldwide. Americans get the great majority of their power from fossil fuels—coal, oil and natural gas. When these materials are burned as fuel, they give off carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas causing global warming. Coal—the single greatest source of energy in America—also produces sulfur, nitrogen oxide and mercury, which pollute the air and water and are harmful to human health.
Turn off the lights when leaving a room.
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Shut down your computer when it’s not in use and set the monitor to sleep mode rather than using a screensaver. |
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Computer Myth One—Equipment lasts longer if it is never turned off.
Fact: “This incorrect perception carries over from the days of older mainframe computers [1]” and does not apply to today’s electronic equipment. |
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Computer Myth Two—Screen savers reduce energy use of monitors.
Fact: Automatic switching to sleep mode or manually turning off monitors is the only way to reduce the energy used by computer monitors [1]. |
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Replace all incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs). CFLs use up to 75 percent less energy than incandescents while emitting the same amount of light and lasting up to 10 times as long. |
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If every American home replaced just one light bulb with a CFL, 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! [2] |
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Households enjoy an average of $30 in energy savings for each CFL that replaces an incandescent bulb [3] |
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Use the warm or cold water setting when washing clothes.
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Did you know that 90 percent of the energy required to wash a load of laundry goes toward just heating the water? [4] |
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Set your thermostat two degrees cooler in winter and two degrees warmer in summer. |
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Unplug electronics, microwaves and battery chargers when they’re not in use to stop “phantom loads”—energy drawn even when devices are turned off. To simplify things, attach a bunch of these devices to a single surge protector and just flip the switch off when going to bed or leaving home. |
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- Most appliances that use electricity continue to draw a small amount of power even when they are switched off [1]. Just one example: wall cube transformers, such as those on cell phone chargers and ink jet printer cords, continue to use 20–50 percent of their rated power when the device is switched off [5].
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Replace appliances and electronics with more efficient ENERGY STAR labeled models—find them at www.energystar.gov. |
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If each household in the United States replaced its existing appliances with the most efficient models available, we would save $15 billion in energy costs and eliminate 175 million tons of heat-trapping gases [6]. |
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