April 22nd is officially Earth Day, which hopes to bring more awareness to global environmental concerns. If everyone can do their part today (and everyday), by reducing electricity use, using less water, walking instead of driving, and making choices that are better for the Earth, then we will make considerable progress in dealing with the challenges of global warming.

The prospect of reducing greenhouse emissions and combating global warming seems like an impossible task, but if everybody made even just the smallest choices to lower their home temperatures by one degree and wear a sweater, or turning off the air conditioning for an afternoon, or switching to a push lawn mower instead of a gas mower, their decisions would contribute to thre greater good.

You might have noticed more and more L.E.D. (Light Emitting Diode) lights, flashlights, and other forms of lighting showing up in your hardware and department stores. That's because LEDs are far more efficient than incandescent lights, using less energy, lasting longer, and providing more light.

You might've seen these last Christmas season, LED strings of ornament lighting. These sets of lights use an amazing 1% of the energy that traditional strands of Christmas lights would use. New LED seasonal decorative lights can easily replace your existing incandescent holiday lights, and you can expect them to last over 20 years of normal usage (that represents a rated life of 50,000 hours), compared to the 600-1,00 hours for incandescent lights. You can quickly realize the savings, even if you end up paying more for LED holiday lights.

As our awareness of the reality of global warming increases, we all try to do whatever small parts we can to reduce our carbon footprints, whether it's using our cars less each week, turning off unnecessary lights, installing programmable thermostats, and taking other steps to reduce energy consumption and promote conservation.

What people fail to realize, is that every little bit helps, whether you choose to walk to the supermarket once a week, or watch one hour less television every night. It all adds up.

If every individual or family switched to energy efficient compact fluorescent light bulbs, or turned down their thermostat by one degree (fahrenheit or Celsius), or left off their air conditioning units at night, we would reduce energy emissions by a great percentage, which would then slow down the progress of global warming.

A twisy compact fluorescent light bulb

Compact fluorescent light bulbs (also called "compact fluorescent lamps" and "low-energy light-bulbs") use far less energy than traditional incandescent bulbs, and surprisingly give off more light, mostly due to their unique "spiral" design. This twisty style of light bulb has a slightly lower efficiency than the tubular fluorescent light bulbs, mostly due to the extremely thick layer of phosphor on the lower side of the twist part of the bulb, which allows the light to be distributed outwards.

A programmable thermostat is a thermostat which is designed to adjust the temperature according to a series of programmed settings that take effect at different times of the day. Programmable thermostats may also be called setback thermostats or clock thermostats.

Heating and cooling losses from a building (or any other container) become greater as the difference in temperature increases. A programmable thermostat allows reduction of these losses by allowing the temperature difference to be reduced at times when the reduced amount of heating or cooling would not be objectionable.

Energy conservation is the practice of decreasing the quantity of energy used. It may be achieved through efficient energy use, in which case energy use is decreased while achieving a similar outcome, or by reduced consumption of energy services.

Energy conservation may result in increase of financial capital, environmental value, national security, personal security, and human comfort. Individuals and organizations that are direct consumers of energy may want to conserve energy in order to reduce energy costs and promote economic, political and environmental sustainability. Industrial and commercial users may want to increase efficiency and thus maximize profit.