I just watched Split Estate, an award winning documentary telling the important story of how our nation gets its electricity...by sending millions of gallons of chemicals (fracking) into the ground to expel the natural gas so we can all live comfortable lives. 

How do these pics come into play?
1) LED bulbs from Green Creative which use less energy, last about 10 x longer than typical halogen or Incandescent bulbs and do not have toxic mercury in them. 
2) Dirty water pumped from a well nearby a natural gas drilling in somewhere USA. 
3) A natural gas drilling platform, getting out the gas to be used by all of us for heating, lighting, AC, etc. 
4) Protest of people waking up to the issues that are plaguing our US citizens across the nation. First it was in remote areas like RIfle, CO but now Natural gas deposits are being drilled in populated areas such as Pennsylvania and soon New York state. 

These images all have in common one thing...our thirst for energy to do all the things that make us comfortable, however for a growing number of our US citizens they are making us sick and even dying. So how do we begin to tackle these issues? Go to the heart of where the drive for more drilling begins...our thirst for energy consumption. 

We can be the heroes or the villains in our own human story and in the case of natural gas, to frack or not to frack that is the question. If you ask those who have abandoned homes, lost investments, declined in their ability to live, it is too high of a price to pay. We humans are the ones who thirst for more energy and don't think about where it comes from or what the process to get the energy involves and who live in the path of destruction to quench this thirst.  Sadly our kids kids will pay for these mistakes long after the drilling has stopped.

So after all that good news... what can be done to make this a hero story rather than the villain story? It is time the heroine stepped in and spread her magic wand and said enough with this silly fracking, enough with the EPA hiding behind the politicians being paid by the industry, enough of being sick and weak in the face of greed, ignorance and lies, enough already. One thing that can easily be done right now today is change the fracking bulb to LED....while were at it change all of them to LEDs.                                                      

Here is a map of the US and the electricity rates mapped out by state. On average we spend .12 Kwhr, however states such as Alaska, Hawaii, California, New York, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Maine are in the top ten for rates that go anywhere from .11 to .33 and typically are in the .19 and above.
In California, things get even more complicated with tiered pricing where the more you use the more you spend. With the use of LEDs the ability to reduce energy prices is real, especially for those businesses in CA that are getting into tiered pricing.
When you take a 50watt Halogen MR16 and bring that down to 7watts for an LED replacement MR16, you get to realize some big savings, especially if you times that by the amount of bulbs you have on.

While visiting my parents in Tuscon, Arizona our family went to visit the Kartchner Caverns. These caverns were discovered by two spelunkers in the 70's and was kept under secret for 14 years before they were able to successfully turn it over to Arizona State Park system. What we found amazing is how long these stalagtites, stalagmites and soda straws take to form...hundreds of thousands of years and here they were in front of us in well maintained live cave. What we found amazing is that fast dripping water develops stalagmites and slow dripping water develops stalagtites and soda straws. 
Meanwhile the humidity inside the cave was 90% while it was in the balmy 70's. Now enter the use of lights. Yes, caves are normally pitch black so the images that we were able to view were all being lit by incandescent lights, which add to the heat of the cave environment. The caverns even won a lighting award in 2000 from the Illumination engineering society. The good news is everything is on dimmers and is lit as the tour guides walk through the space so that dimming system was quite the feat. Now all I think about is, let's get the LED bulbs and linears lamps into the mix so we can reduce the heat load as well as the energy used. I highly recommend if you are anywhere near Tuscon, AZ from the months of Oct 15th to April 15th to take a tour of the great room or the throne room at the Kartchner Caverns...worth the effort and time.