The primary purpose of this blog is to provide information on all sides of the global warming debate, but I will also provide other content as well. Many people are concerned about the impact that they are having on the environment. Perhaps they are interested in how to calculate their carbon footprint. (Note: This is not an endorsement of NativeEnergy.) And maybe they'd like to know what actions they can take to reduce their carbon footprint.

I've heard a statistic in a couple of places and found it here. If every household in the U.S. would replace one light bulb with an Energy Star qualified compact fluorescent light bulb (CFL), it would prevent greenhouse gases equivalent to the emissions of 800,000 cars. CFLs use 66% less energy than a standard incandescent bulb and last up to 10 times longer. Reminds me of that commercial with the guy who says, "It feels good to save the cash....er.....planet."

By the way, if you zip on over to the energystar.gov site, you can take an interesting quiz on energy star lighting. I got 8 out of 10 without reading all their supporting material first - go ahead and beat me.

A Vermont advocacy organization called the Vermont Public Interest Research Group (VPIRG) has released a report titled Building Solutions: Energy Efficient Homes Save Money and Reduce Global Warming. While the group's home page makes their political leanings clear, and I don't advocate any political party or affiliation, I do appreciate some of what the report has to say about making homes more energy efficient. The report is too bold, in my opinion, in many of it's statements on global warming.

Vermont has many older (pre-1940) homes with poor insulation and older home heating equipment. New furnaces are as much as 40% more efficient than models which are over 15 years old. In addition, improving weatherization and insulation of a home - which can cost a couple of thousand dollars but will generally pay for itself within 4 years, according to the report - can also reduce the burden on the state, as lower-income families may require less assistance to pay their heating bills. Since the cost of heating oil - one of the most common sources of heat in the Northeast - has skyrocketed in the last 7 years, more families than ever before are requiring assistance to pay their heating bills.

I know from personal experience that upgrading a furnace in an older home can have a dramatic effect on fuel oil consumption. Our previous home was built in 1945, and when we moved in, it had the original furnace. The thing ran like a champ, but it was tremendously inefficient. When we upgraded, we found we used at least one third less fuel oil than we had used before. Some weatherization is expensive, such as replacement windows, and some, such as blocking drafts through electrical outlets on outside walls, is not. Lots of information on weatherizing your home can be found here.

Join Katie Fehlinger as she touches on some of this week's global warming-related headlines and interviews our own Dr. Joe Sobel.

On this week's edition of Headline: Earth, Katie hits the week's headlines, and Mellissa Magee shows you a few ways to save some money, and reduce your home's "carbon footprint."

As a mom of young children, I spend a lot of time explaining the evils of waste. "Don't leave the water running" and "Turn off that light!" are common phrases in my vocabulary. I have to say when I first read the Newsweek headline 7 Ways to Save the World, I rolled my eyes a little bit - I just dislike headlines like that. But the article? The article is great. All about efficiency. Love it. I read an article on efficiency in a special edition of Scientific American back in September which started off by explaining that conversion from energy source to final energy (what you consume), two thirds of the energy is lost. If we can increase efficiency, we can save energy (and money) without significant adjustments in our lifestyles.

So what sorts of changes can we make to increase efficiency? Add insulation to our homes, including potentially replacing old, leaky windows. Change over to compact fluorescent bulbs - much of the energy used to light incandescents is wasted as heat, an unwanted byproduct in the summer months, replace heating and cooling technologies with heat pumps, increase efficiencies in factories - and some of the examples in the article are truly impressive, German chemical giant BASF using heat produced in one factory to power the next in an interlocking complex of more than 200 chemical factories, drive green - can't afford a hybrid? Consider a diesel. Buy more energy efficient appliances and last of all, juggle payment - although this seems like an option for corporations than for individuals, except in California, where utilities are paying customers for cutting power use by 10 percent or more.

Okay, so what's the bottom line? Why wouldn't we choose to be more efficient and save money in the long run? Quite simply, it's the upfront costs. New windows? OUCH. Even adding $1000 in insulation can be pretty daunting. Many Americans are living paycheck to paycheck and simply can't afford to pay extra for a hybrid or a diesel car or truck. Energy Star appliances can be much more in initial cost than basic appliances, and it's hard for many of us to justify that front-end cost. We have a washer and dryer that are 12 years old and tremendously inefficient. We want to replace them, but it always seems that something else demands the dollars.

Simple things you can do include this do-it-yourself energy audit tool, which can help me to make your home more energy efficient. You'll need your energy bills and some knowledge of the insulation in your home to make use of this tool.

Over the past several months, California has taken many steps which position it as the leader in the nation in efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Nonetheless, I was a little surprised to see that California Assemblyman Lloyd Levine plans to introduce a bill to ban incandescent light bulbs by 2012. I understand that the technology behind incandescents is almost 125 years old and they are tremendously inefficient - with only about 5 percent of the energy they receive being converted to light. Compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) use at least 2/3 less energy and last much longer. They also produce up to 70 percent less heat than an incandescent lamp. As I said earlier this week, I LOVE efficiency, but this.....

Assemblyman Lloyd Levine plans to introduce the bill this week, saying the spiral light sources are so efficient that consumers should be forced to use them.

I have to say that makes me a little uncomfortable. It's just the use of the word "forced," I guess. I suppose that's how some motorcyclists feel about helmet laws - which I'm in favor of, by the way.

One of my first entries on this blog was about CFLs. I've been replacing most of the incandescents in my own home with CFLs as they've been burning out, and I've generally been very happy with the results. The only - minor - irritation is the extra beat it takes after flipping the switch for the lamp to light. I do have some fixtures that CFLs just would not look right in, and I wouldn't be happy to have my choice legislated away from me.

CFLs do contain mercury and need to be recycled accordingly. I read a piece on environmental blog treehugger.com which argues that CFLs actually reduce mercury pollution because most of our electricity is produced using fossil fuels, especially coal, which gives off mercury during its combustion.

The Allegheny Front (a producer of environment-related radio content for western PA stations) recently ran this piece (The Price of Global Warming) on carbon offsets. Many providers now sell carbon offsets to individuals and organizations that are looking for ways to reduce their contribution to global warming. The money generated by the purchase of these credits would, for example, go toward planting trees that would theoretically absorb enough carbon dioxide to balance the pollution generated by an SUV or a factory. As discussed in the piece (which runs a little over four minutes), there's no standardization yet when it comes to carbon offsets, so prices vary significantly from provider to provider.

If you're interested in possibly purchasing an offset (which I'm not endorsing here since I haven't done any research on any of the companies or their products) or at least finding out more information about offsets or their providers, then here's a handy guide to carbon offset providers.

USA Today had an interesting article on Tuesday titled Global Warming a Hot Spot for Investors. The article singled out climate change as the major investment theme of the future. Financial services firms are busily working, trying to figure out which stocks and sectors will be helped and which will be hurt by climate change.

For investors, it doesn't matter if global warming is real or if man is causing it - what matters is how people react to the perceived threat. Money will be made, and lost, based on who winds up being the winners and losers in the battle against climate change. Will ethanol be the fuel of the future for cars? Will it be produced from corn, or from some other source of biomass? What about biodiesel? Or hydrogen? What if someone comes up with a device that scrubs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and claims that $25 million prize from Richard Branson? That could turn a small start-up company into the next MicroSoft. Only time will tell where the money will go. But there is money to be made from climate change. Lots of it.

I've been watching an episode of PBS' Nova titled Saved by the Sun, about the resurgence in interest in solar power. It's interesting stuff, but still so expensive that on a consumer level, a person has to be devoted to environmentalism to invest in the technology. To provide even most of the electricity needed for a typical home, you are looking at a significant cost. The Nova site includes the story of the conversion of a typical '60s tract home in Southern California to solar power; the family purchased 6-kW of photovoltaic power, 2-kW more than a typical home needs, because they also power an all-electric Toyota RAV4. The initial cost of the solar system? $36,000 - almost half of which was covered by rebates and tax incentives. Other energy improvements the homeowners made - new windows, new roof, added insulation - the full cost to the homeowners added up to $43,000. The system will pay for itself in just over 7 years.

The Nova program also led me to Maine's solar house - an interesting site for anyone who wants to learn more about designing and building a home powered by the sun. This home uses a 4.2-kW array of photovoltaics has a separate array of solar hot water panels that generate heat for the home through radiant heating - the heated water passes through tubing under the floors.

An article on ABC News in early July (Ditching Bottled Water to Go Green) talks about the possible link between bottled water and global warming, citing that the entire bottled water generation process, including bottling, packaging, and shipping creates pollution and greenhouse gases.

I thought that this was particularly noteworthy in light of a Reuters article that I found on AOL (Aquafina to Clarify Water's Source), which states that Aquafina will now include "Public Water Source" on the bottles rather than "P.W.S." in order to clarify that the source of the bottled water is good, old-fashioned tap water. Apparently, Dasani, as well as Aquafina, is made from "purified water sourced from public reservoirs."

The global warming connection mentioned above in only one part of the story as far as environmentalists are concerned. There is also the problem of waste since, each year, people are using 30 billion throwaway bottles of water. I wonder if people will be less likely to buy bottled water if they know that it's just tap water.