If you run a business, you and your customers pay an electricity bill. That means paying for lighting. Typically, incandescent lighting, the kind that's been around since Edison. It's not very efficient; most of the electricity becomes heat instead of light. For a long time, there wasn't much you could do about it. Which really sucks as you watch your bill get increasingly expensive. Even worse, the power plants spew tons of CO2 into the atmosphere for no good purpose.

But we now have a choice. We can replace the incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs), a newer kind of bulb. They consume just 25% of the energy to produce the same amount of light. They last 10x longer. Plus they have a cool swirl shape! These used to be way more expensive than incandescent bulbs and produce inferior light, but no longer. The cost of a single CFL bulb is way less than the cost of 10 incandescents, not counting the energy savings. Pretty cool huh?

So I began to replace the incandescent bulbs with CFL bulbs in January. It's all done now; it cost a whopping $60. And this is sweet: I've already shaved $66 off my electricity bills. So the new bulbs have paid for themselves already! And they continue to save me money. Less CO2 goes into the atmosphere, and less dead bulbs get sent to the landfills. It's a massive win/win/win for everyone.

So what, then, is Project Swirl? I want to strongly encourage you all to replace at least one 60W incandescent bulb in your house with an equivalent-brightness 14W CFL bulb. It may not seem very significant, but here's the thing: if each of us replaces just one bulb, then in a single year we reduce electrical demand significantly, prevent tons of CO2 from ever being emitted, and pocket thousands of dollars for ourselves rather than forking it over to the electric company. All this... and only costs maybe 2 bucks per bulb... a cost which pays for itself in less than a year!

The project goal is to replace 1000 bulbs before Monday, August 27th, 2007, the first day of the burn. If you or your customers replace any bulbs or install new CFLs, contact me and tell me how many. I will track everything here so we can know exactly what impact we're having, and report the final results on the playa. Swirlers will be honored by name on a sculpture I will create and display in the Red Light District. All the project details are here:

Project Swirl: crispyneurons.com/wiki/Project_Swirl

We're very, very close to crossing the 50% milestone. So please participate! It's cheap, it's easy, it benefits the world... and you (and your customers) personally. It doesn't get better than this. Thanks so much.

Gecko