[SustainableTompkins] How Many Lightbulbs Does it Take to Change the World?

[Joel and Sarah Gagnon]

I'm guessing most of the subscribers to this list have already made the 
switch. We still have a few incandescents, in low-use locations like cellar 
lights and those hard to substitute chandelier applications. We also have a 
drawer full of incandescents that I am wondering if we will ever use up. 
Any thought on whether it is nobler to discard than to use those energy hogs?

Joel

At 01:19 AM 9/1/06 -0400, you wrote:
>
> >From the latest issue of Fast Company.  The online article  was followed by
>an educational series of readers' comments....
>
>How Many Lightbulbs Does it Take to Change the World? One. And You're
>Looking At It.
>For years, compact fluorescent bulbs have promised dramatic energy
>savings--yet they remain a mere curiosity. That's about to change.
>From: _Issue  108_ (http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/108)  | September
>2006 | Page 74 | By: Charles Fishman | Photographs By: Christopher Griffith
>Sitting humbly on shelves in stores everywhere is a  product, priced at less
>than $3, that will change the world. Soon. It is a  fairly ordinary item that
>nonetheless cuts to the heart of a half-dozen of the  most profound, most
>urgent problems we face. Energy consumption. Rising gasoline  costs and 
>electric
>bills. Greenhouse-gas emissions. Dependence on coal and  foreign oil. Global
>warming.
>
>
>The product is the compact fluorescent lightbulb, a quirky-looking twist of
>frosted glass. In the energy business, it is called a "CFL," or an "energy
>saver." One scientist calls it an "ice-cream-cone spiral," because in its
>most-advanced, most-appealing version, it looks like nothing so much as a 
>cone  of
>swirled soft-serve ice cream.
>
>
>Most people have some experience with swirl bulbs, but typically it hasn't
>been happy. In the early 1990s, you would step into a room in a business
>traveler's hotel, flip on the lights by the door and between the beds, 
>turn on  the
>desk lamp and the floor lamp, then stand in the gloom looking around and
>thinking, "There must be another switch somewhere that actually turns on the
>light." Every one of the bulbs flickering to life was a 
>compact  fluorescent--and
>five of them together didn't provide enough light to read the  card listing
>the lineup of cable-TV channels.
>For two decades, CFLs lacked precisely what we expect from lightbulbs:
>strong, unwavering light; quiet; not to mention shapes that actually fit 
>in the
>places we use bulbs. Now every one of those problems has been conquered. The
>bulbs come on quickly; their light is bright, white, steady, and silent; 
>and the
>  old U-shaped tubes--they looked like bulbs from a World War II
>submarine--have  mostly been replaced by the swirl. Since 1985, CFLs have 
>changed as much
>as cell  phones and portable music players.
>One thing hasn't changed: the energy savings. Compact fluorescents emit the
>same light as classic incandescents but use 75% or 80% less electricity.
>What that means is that if every one of 110 million American households
>bought just one ice-cream-cone bulb, took it home, and screwed it in the 
>place  of
>an ordinary 60-watt bulb, the energy saved would be enough to power a city of
>  1.5 million people. One bulb swapped out, enough electricity saved to power
>all  the homes in Delaware and Rhode Island. In terms of oil not burned, or
>greenhouse gases not exhausted into the atmosphere, one bulb is equivalent 
>to
>taking 1.3 million cars off the roads.
>That's the law of large numbers--a small action, multiplied by 110 million.
>The single greatest source of greenhouse gases in the United States is power
>plants--half our electricity comes from coal plants. One bulb swapped out:
>enough electricity saved to turn off two entire power plants--or skip 
>building
>the next two.
>Just one swirl per home. The typical U.S. house has between 50 and 100
>"sockets" (astonish yourself: Go count the bulbs in your house). So what 
>if we  all
>bought and installed two ice-cream-cone bulbs? Five? Fifteen?
>Says David Goldstein, a PhD physicist, MacArthur "genius" fellow, and senior
>energy scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council: "This could be
>just  what the world's been waiting for, for the last 20 years."
>Swirl bulbs don't just work, they pay for themselves. They use so little
>power compared with old reliable bulbs, a $3 swirl pays for itself in lower
>electric bills in about five months. Screw one in, turn it on, and it's 
>not just
>lighting your living room, it's dropping quarters in your pocket. The
>advantages  pile up in a way to almost make one giddy. Compact 
>fluorescents, even in
>heavy  use, last 5, 7, 10 years. Years. Install one on your 30th birthday; 
>it
>may be around to help illuminate your 40th.
>In an era when political leaders and companies are too fainthearted to ask
>Americans to sacrifice anything for the greater good, the modern ice-cream
>swirl  bulb requires no sacrifice. Buying and using it helps save the 
>world--and
>also  saves the customer money--with no compromise on quality. 
>Selflessness and
>  self-satisfaction, twirled into a single $3 purchase.
>So far, the impact of compact fluorescents has been trivial, for a simple
>reason: We haven't bought them. In our outdated experience, they don't 
>work well
>  and they cost too much. Last year, U.S. consumers spent about $1 billion to
>buy  about 2 billion lightbulbs--5.5 million every day. Just 5%, 100 million,
>were  compact fluorescents. First introduced on March 28, 1980, swirls remain
>a niche  product, more curiosity than revolution.
>But that's about to change. It will change before our very eyes. A year from
>now, chances are that you yourself will have installed a swirl or two, and
>will  likely be quite happy with them. In the name of conservation and good
>corporate  citizenship, not to mention economics, one unlikely company is 
>about
>haul us to  the lightbulb aisle, reeducate us, and sell us a swirl: 
>Wal-Mart.
>In the next 12 months, starting with a major push this month, Wal-Mart wants
>to sell every one of its regular customers--100 million in all--one swirl
>bulb.  In the process, Wal-Mart wants to change energy consumption in the 
>United
>States, and energy consciousness, too. It also aims to change its own
>reputation, to use swirls to make clear how seriously Wal-Mart takes its new
>positioning as an environmental activist.
>It's a bold goal, a remarkable declaration of Wal-Mart's intention to
>modernize and green up a whole line of business using market oomph. 
>Teaming up  with
>General Electric, which owns about 60% of the residential lightbulb market
>in the United States, Wal-Mart wants to single-handedly double U.S. sales 
>for
>CFLs in a year, and it wants demand to surge forward after that.
>Diane Lindsley, the hardware buyer who decides what goes in the lightbulb
>aisles at Wal-Mart, thinks 100 million swirls is perfectly reasonable. 
>"Yes,"
>she says, "it's rational, I think." Before she started buying bulbs for
>Wal-Mart  just three years ago, Lindsley didn't even know what CFLs were. 
>Now she
>pauses  in a way that suggests the kind of determination Wal-Mart can 
>bring to
>bear when  its buyers decide they are going to sell Americans something. "We
>have plans in  place to where it may not take that long."
>Which presents a daunting challenge: Wal-Mart's push into swirls won't just
>help consumers and the environment; it will shatter a business--its own
>lightbulb business, and that of every lightbulb manufacturer. Because 
>swirls  last
>so long, every one that's sold represents the loss of 6 or 8 or 10
>incandescent bulb sales. Swirls will remake the lightbulb 
>industry--dominated by  famil
>iar names GE, Philips, Sylvania--the way digital-music downloads have  remade
>selling albums on CD, the way digital cameras revolutionized selling 
>film  and
>envelopes of snapshots. CFLs are a classic example of creative destruction.
>GE, facing the prospect of mothballing a centurylong franchise in
>lightbulbs--well, GE is smiling and swallowing hard. "CFLs are taking 
>off," says  Robert
>Stuart, who heads consumer marketing at GE for lightbulbs. "No one has  been
>as vocal about this recently as Wal-Mart. One hundred million bulbs in a
>year? It's an aggressive goal. GE will find a way to make sure they are 
>able to
>do that."
>GE, too, has launched a green business initiative: ecomagination, an effort
>to make environmentally sustainable technologies an ever-larger part of GE's
>business. Swirls fit well, despite the inevitable cannibalization. "The real
>issue is, if we don't do it, someone else will," says GE's ecomagination 
>vice
>president, Lorraine Bolsinger, of Wal-Mart's effort to push CFLs. "It's old
>thinking to imagine that you can hold on to a business model and outsmart 
>the
>consumer. You can't."
>Steven Hamburg is an associate professor at Brown University, an expert on
>energy consumption and global warming who helped Wal-Mart think through the
>spiral-bulb strategy. "Can they change the game? Think how many games 
>Wal-Mart
>has changed. There's no reason they can't change this game."
>Fan-Fare
>For Chuck Kerby, it was ceiling fans that made the impact of energy-saving
>swirl bulbs dramatically clear.
>Kerby is a vice president and divisional merchandise manager at Wal-Mart for
>hardware and paint (and ceiling fans) for all of Wal-Mart's U.S. stores and
>supercenters. Lindsley is one of 12 buyers working for him. Kerby, who 
>started
>  out collecting shopping carts from the parking lot of Wal-Mart #189 in
>Kirksville, Missouri, 23 years ago, has known about CFLs for years. "I 
>became
>aware of them when I would travel and go into a hotel room."
>Last year, conversations started in Wal-Mart around the potential of swirls
>to save customers money on utility bills. "Somebody asked, 'What difference
>would it make if we changed the bulbs in the ceiling-fan display to CFLs?'"
>says  Kerby. A typical Wal-Mart has 10 models of ceiling fans on display, 
>each
>with  four bulbs. Forty bulbs per store, 3,230 stores.
>"Someone went off and did the math," says Kerby. "They told me we could save
>$6 million in electric bills by changing the incandescents to CFLs in more
>than  3,000 Wal-Marts. I couldn't believe it. I didn't know I was paying $6
>million to  light those fixtures. I said, that can't be right, go back and 
>do the
>math  again." The numbers came out the same the second time: savings of $6
>million a  year. "That, for me, was an 'I got it' moment."
>It was Lee Scott, Wal-Mart's CEO, who started Kerby and Lindsley thinking
>about lightbulbs. "Last fall," says Kerby, "we had had two 
>hurricanes"--Katrina
>and Rita--"we had oil production disrupted, we had millions of people
>displaced  in the South, and at a Friday officer's meeting not long after 
>Katrina,
>Lee  Scott said, 'Our customers are hurting, our customers' dollar is not 
>going
>as  far as it could.' He challenged everyone in the room to find relevant
>rollbacks,  to lower the price of living and make a difference for our 
>customers."
>  (Wal-Mart-ers really talk that way among themselves.)
>In the wake of Katrina, Scott had asked his staff for a briefing on
>environmental issues, including global warming. One of the people he sat 
>down  with
>was Hamburg, the Brown professor who has won an award from the EPA for his
>ability to explain climate change.
>"It was a very frank conversation," says Hamburg. Not much of a Wal-Mart
>shopper, he had looked at one piece of Wal-Mart's environmental performance
>before. In 1994, he critiqued Wal-Mart's first environmentally sensitive 
>store.
>"As I told Lee, it was a lot of green-wash. He needed to do better....I 
>said,
>'What really matters is what's on the shelves. Wal-Mart's influence is much
>greater in the marketplace than in the built environment.'"
>Hamburg has been working with CFLs since the 1980s, so that subject naturally
>  was on the table with Scott. "I think he knew what they were," says 
> Hamburg.
>"I  said, 'It's a very direct return to your consumers, and it has a big
>positive  impact on reducing carbon emissions. So let's do it. You do it.'"
>The spirals, you could say, were converging. After Scott's exhortation at the
>  Friday officers meeting, Kerby did what a lot of Wal-Mart-ers do when they
>need  to think and reconnect. He went shopping at Wal-Mart.
>"I went across the street to #100," says Kerby. "I thought about what people
>rebuilding would need, I thought about energy costs, I filled the cart, and I
>  brought it all back to the office. I challenged the buyers to look for ways
>to  save money on these important products." One item in his cart: a
>three-pack of  GE compact fluorescents, 60-watt equivalents, for 
>$9.58--$3.19 each. You
>could  buy three four-packs of classic GE 60-watt bulbs for that price, 12
>regulars for  the price of one spiral.
>To Diane Lindsley, her boss's point was crystal clear. "I called GE," says
>Lindsley. "We started negotiating."
>Within two weeks, the price on a three-pack of GE spirals at Wal-Marts across
>  the country was "rolled back" to $7.58. It was a 21% cut--although the 
> bulbs
>  were still $2.53 each, 10 times the cost of an ordinary bulb. The agreement
>with  GE was for a 90-day price cut, to help out after Katrina.
>Did it make a difference in CFL sales?
>"Absolutely," says Lindsley. "Faster than I've ever seen it before. In days."
>
>Then, in late October, says Kerby, "Our friend Oprah had a segment on her
>show talking about CFL lightbulbs. We didn't ask her to do that or 
>anything. But
>  there certainly is an Oprah factor out there. That show led to a 
> tremendous
>sales increase in the category that we have maintained to this day." Month
>over  month, Lindsley is selling double the number of spirals she did before
>Katrina.
>It was a perfect swirl: Katrina, Rita, $70-a-barrel oil, price-chopping,
>corporate consciousness-raising, with Oprah's lightbulb club thrown in.
>"What had started as, 'Let's do something to help the consumer for 90 days,'
>well, it became obvious this wasn't a 90-day strategy," says Kerby. "World
>events had changed the lightbulb category. The time had come for the
>energy-saving lightbulbs. It was going to be a different kind of product 
>going
>forward."
>Inside the Bulb
>Incandescent lightbulbs and spiral lightbulbs make light in entirely
>different ways, and it is that difference that makes spirals so potent. In 
>a  classic
>60-watt incandescent bulb, light comes from the little metal filament
>quivering inside the sealed glass bulb. Electricity passes through the metal
>thread, heating it to 2,300 degrees Celsius, and the filament glows with 
>the  heat
>and throws off light. Electricity creates heat, heat creates light. It's  why
>incandescent bulbs are so hot--the glass is often 300 degrees. In the trade,
>incandescents are sometimes known as "a hot wire in a bottle."
>Compact fluorescents are something else again. In a fluorescent bulb, the
>glass tube is filled with gas and a tiny dot of mercury. Electricity leaps 
>off
>electrodes on either end of the tube and excites the mercury molecules, 
>which
>have a special property: When so excited, they emit ultraviolet light. That
>invisible UV light strikes the bulb's phosphor coating, which itself gets
>excited and emits visible light, which shines out through the tube. Heat 
>is much
>less of a factor--CFLs run at about 100 degrees.
>Making the ionized fog bottled inside a CFL dance to the same steady tune as
>an incandescent has required a lot of research, and an electronics
>revolution.  Early CFLs cost $25 per bulb (and still paid for themselves 
>in electricity
>savings). The light they produced was bluish or pinkish, or varied; the
>phosphor  coating had to be refined. The ballast--built into the bulb 
>rather than
>in a  separate fixture, as with traditional fluorescent tubes--hummed and
>didn't cycle  the electricity quickly enough; it had to be made electronic 
>and
>miniaturized.  Costs came down, as did size. The same wizardry that gives us
>Hallmark birthday  cards that play "Love and Happiness" makes possible 
>CFLs at
>$2.60 instead of  $25.
>It is this--the way swirls make light--that saves so much energy. In an
>incandescent, only 5% to 10% of the electricity passing through the wire 
>becomes
>visible light; the rest becomes heat and invisible UV light. The vibrating
>mercury vapor atoms in a fluorescent bulb produce light more efficiently 
>than a
>tungsten filament. You get more photons for every watt of electricity pumped
>in.  An old-fashioned incandescent makes 15 lumens per watt; a 60-watt bulb
>shines  with 900 lumens. In a CFL, you get 60 lumens per watt. To get 900
>lumens--to get  the light you expect from a 60-watt bulb--you need only 15 
>watts.
>A 60-watt classic bulb and a 15-watt swirl are identically bright--the swirl
>just uses 45 fewer watts.
>The Swirl Cascade
>What really revolutionizes the lightbulb experience, and the business itself,
>  is a second quality of swirls, beyond their ability to squeeze more light
>from a  kilowatt: their longevity.
>The compact fluorescents that GE, Philips, and Sylvania are putting on
>shelves are rated to run for 8,000, 10,000, or 12,000 hours. Few bulbs in 
>a home
>are lit more than four hours a day; at that rate, an 8,000-hour bulb lasts
>five-and-a-half years; a 12,000-hour bulb lasts eight years and three 
>months. As
>swirls take hold, it will be a surprise, a novel event, when a lightbulb goes
>  dark. Imagine all those hard-to-reach bulbs that need to be replaced every
>three  months. From four times a year, to once a decade.
>"This is about selling lightbulbs, but it's far bigger.  This has huge
>implications for the world."
>And the impact of swirls cascades outward. Since every CFL has the life span
>of 6, or 8, or 10 equivalent incandescent bulbs, if Wal-Mart alone sells 100
>million swirls in the next year, it does away with the need for 100 million
>old-fashioned bulbs to be manufactured, packaged, shipped, bought, and
>discarded  next year--and every year until 2012 or beyond.
>How much is 100 million bulbs? It's 25 million classic GE four-packs. That
>many boxes of bulbs would fill 262 Wal-Mart tractor trailers, a ghost 
>convoy of
>  Wal-Mart trucks, loaded with nothing but lightbulbs, stretching 3.5 
> miles--a
>  convoy that will never roll. Every year for six years--just from one bulb,
>this  year. Not to mention the line of garbage trucks necessary to cart 100
>million  burned-out incandescent bulbs to the landfill.
>What you don't make, of course, you never get to sell. As enthusiasm for
>compact fluorescents mounted in Bentonville, there were multiple strategy
>meetings between the Wal-Mart lightbulb people and the GE lightbulb
>people--including a conversation January 12 between Lee Scott and GE CEO 
>Jeffrey  Immelt in
>which swirls were a significant topic.
>GE had launched its ecomagination business push in May 2005--neatly
>summarized by Lorraine Bolsinger: "Green can be green." Scott 
>launched  Wal-Mart's
>sustainability repositioning last October in a speech to his own  executives.
>Understanding the power of the CFL, Scott told them, had helped him  see that
>environmental problems are really a disaster like "Katrina in slow  motion."
>Pledging to take Wal-Mart and its customers and suppliers down a 
>new  path, he
>declared, "Environmental problems are our problems."
>Immelt and Scott agreed in January that a major push on swirls was in order.
>But strategic enthusiasm doesn't change a simple short-term fact: Every new
>energy-saving swirl you sell obliterates sales of six or eight of your 
>classic
>  product. Incandescents won't ever go away--we still use candles--in part
>because  there are some places CFLs simply don't work well. They are not 
>tiny or
>elegant  enough to be chandelier bulbs. They do not work as accent lighting.
>But in as  little as five years, if Wal-Mart sparks a significant 
>conversion to
>swirls, the  lightbulb business will be rocked.
>Total unit sales could be half what they are now. In the short run, there's a
>  bonanza: 95% of sockets in U.S. homes don't have swirls in them, and a
>billion  of them, or more, could. At the moment, with CFLs selling for 10 
>times
>what  regular bulbs do, there's no immediate loss of revenue or profit. But
>prices  won't stay where they are for long. At Sam's Club, Wal-Mart's 
>club-store
>division, GE swirls already sell at $12.73 for an eight-pack--$1.59 per bulb,
>or  just six times the cost of old-fashioned bulbs. At that price, the
>economics  change. Competition from other retailers will force the price 
>even
>lower--especially because of what happens next.
>Once a third of the sockets in U.S. homes have compact fluorescents--once you
>  sell the bulge of conversion replacements--both incandescent sales and CFL
>sales  will fall off a cliff. Incandescent bulb sales could be cut in half,
>because we  won't use them any more. And after we've installed 1.5 billion
>swirls, we'll  only be buying perhaps 200 million a year, because they're 
>on a six-
>or  eight-year replacement cycle. Executives at Wal-Mart are already 
>imagining
>a day  when the shelf space for lightbulbs is cut by 30% or 40%.
>For Wal-Mart, the appeal of swirls is clear, even to GE executives. "Wal-Mart
>  sees its customer putting more money in the gas tank, more into electrical
>bills--their customer is saying, 'I need some help,'" says Bolsinger. "They
>are  very close to that. If they can help a customer save money in the long
>haul,  that's money that comes back to Wal-Mart."
>Once Wal-Mart decides to make swirls an important product, the appeal for GE
>also becomes clear. It's the power of the big dog: GE can either help
>Wal-Mart  sell swirls, or some other lightbulb company will. In either 
>case, GE's
>regular-bulb business shrivels. "The business case is pretty clear," says
>Bolsinger. "If we don't grab the market share of CFLs, we lose." The only 
>way to
>survive creative destruction, in fact, is to get out in front of the tsunami,
>to  catch the wave.
>In the spring, Diane Lindsley changed the way she stocks her 60 feet of
>lightbulb shelves. Like other merchants, she has struggled for years 
>with  whether
>to group energy-saving bulbs in their own section for conservation  geeks, or
>to mix them in with regular bulbs in the hope more customers will try  them.
>Either way, particularly for a shopper schooled by Wal-Mart itself to  focus
>on price, CFLs that cost 10 times what a dependable 60-watt cost are a  hard
>sell.
>Inspired by last fall's rush of swirl sales, Lindsley moved dramatically to
>emphasize them on her shelves. She decided to have it both ways--to group 
>CFLs
>  together and mix them with regular bulbs. She has made swirls the most
>prominent  bulbs in the store: They are now on the top two or three 
>shelves, at eye
>level,  with the old-fashioned bulbs on the bottom. The prominence is
>eye-catching--three or four sections of shelves, with bright yellow and 
>green
>packages of GE CFLs. Horizontally, the swirls form a band of energy savers 
>that
>stretch down a third of the aisle. Vertically, each shelf unit is both 
>energy
>savers and incandescents -- 60-watt-equivalent swirls on top, old-fashioned
>60-watts below.
>For bulbs, "that's the most coveted shelf space in the entire store," says
>Bolsinger. "It was a bold move on Wal-Mart's part to put it there." Lindsley
>was  taking a risk, giving swirls shelf space their sales didn't quite 
>justify.
>She  was positioning them prominently to drive sales, and in anticipation of
>more  growth.
>An even more dramatic push is coming this month, when Wal-Mart will roll out
>a lightbulb education center in every U.S. store. The display, developed with
>  GE, shows 10 categories of lightbulbs, organized by room through a typical
>home,  with a box showing the CFL appropriate in that area, the equivalent
>incandescent, and the energy savings a customer can reap from switching. 
>Each
>category features a warm lifestyle photo of the room in question. Each box 
>is
>color-coded to match color-coding on the shelves of CFL bulbs.
>For a company that measures sales of its merchandise per running foot of
>shelf space, giving up 12 feet of stock space to a static display, however
>entrancing, represents a significant investment. Lindsley is evaluated in 
>part
>based on the bulbs she sells, and "I have to perform, of course," she 
>says. "I
>have to have my sales. I think about it differently. I think about it daily.
>But  this is absolutely the right thing to do."
>This is at least as big a deal for GE. Between 2004 and 2005, it tripled its
>manufacturing capacity for compact fluorescents. By the end of 2006, GE will
>have tripled capacity again. Anticipating the shift to swirls, it plans to
>close  an incandescent bulb factory in St. Louis.
>Making compact fluorescents is expensive and complicated, compared with
>incandescents, in part because of the electronic controls each bulb 
>contains,  and
>in part because swirls remain partly handcrafted. To make each spiral, a
>Chinese worker wearing gloves takes a tube of glass, holds it over an open
>flame, then wraps the heat-softened tube around a metal form. The job 
>requires a
>deft touch so the tube doesn't become flattened while getting its spiral 
>shape.
>
>"For us," says Bolsinger, "the opportunity is to sell enough of them, to get
>down the [manufacturing] cost curve. We're still pretty early in the learning
>  curve." Greater automation would allow GE to both continue to reduce the
>price  of swirls and keep a margin that softens the blow to the 
>incandescent side
>of  the business.
>This fall, GE will rebrand its CFLs as "energy smart" bulbs--in an effort to
>give them a clear identity equivalent to "soft white"--and launch a major
>print  advertising campaign to support the Wal-Mart push. Working with 
>Wal-Mart,
>GE has  made its bulb packaging both more dramatic and more explicit--it
>promises that  the 60-watt equivalent "saves $38 in energy." Spend $2.60, 
>earn $38.
>These days,  that's a great return.
>At the Wal-Mart home office, they talk about swirls with a zeal that goes
>beyond product promotion, as if the bulbs are a pioneering product, a new 
>way of
>  thinking about retailing. Says Andrew Ruben, Wal-Mart's vice president of
>sustainability: "We realize that we can influence big things. Energy usage.
>Efficiency. Dependence on foreign oil. And we realized that if we're really
>going to move things, it's not about our direct footprint--our stores, our
>offices--it's about our supply chain and our customers. So this is about 
>selling
>lightbulbs, but it's far bigger. This has huge implications for the world."
>Chuck Kerby did swap out the ceiling-fan bulbs, at least in most Wal-Marts.
>The idea surfaced in November; it was executed in February. And Kerby has a
>clear vision of the future.
>"It's certainly possible to see a day when a cartoonist will draw a cartoon
>with a character having an idea," says Kerby, "you know, with the
>traditional-shaped incandescent lightbulb going on over the 
>character's  head--and my
>grandchildren will look at that and not know what it means. And  that's 
>not a bad
>thing, because we'll be living in a much better world."
>Charles Fishman (_cnfish at mindspring.com_ (mailto:cnfish at mindspring.com) ) is
>a Fast  Company senior writer.
>
>***************************************
>Gay Nicholson, Ph.D.
>
>607-533-7312 (home office)
>607-279-6618 (cell)
>
>1 Maple  Avenue
>Lansing, NY 14882
>gaynicholson at aol.com
>
>Sustainable Tompkins
>Program Coordinator  (http://www.sustainabletompkins.org/)
>w_ww.sustainabletompkins.org_ (http://www.sustainabletompkins.org/)
>
>Southern Tier Energy$mart Communities
>Regional  Coordinator
>Cornell Cooperative Extension of Tompkins County
>615 Willow  Ave., Ithaca, NY 14850
>agn1 at cornell.edu
>
>_______________________________________________
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