Americans also leave the water running when they brush their teeth or shave. I had a friend who picked up this nasty habit after living a couple years in the US for school.

Heh. My dad's theory is that we'd save a load of energy by if we would impose our own "black outs" every night. As a bonous, we wouldn't have the light pollution that prevents us from seeing the stars. As for wasting water, folks raised in areas with visible water issues are usually much better about running water. I learned as a kid in Colorado to always turn the faucet off.

We Americans also leave our cars running while we pop into the store for a few items or wait to pick somebody up. Another thoughtless, wasteful, environmentally irresponsible cultural habit.

Unfortunately, it's not just Americans. I see a lot of that here in Canada. One of the things that annoy me most is people "cleaning" their driveways with a water hose. Come on!

Great post, John, and thanks for sending the question, Rajesh.

Wasting water is relative to ones geography. My water comes from a Great Lake and costs $0.0075 a gallon. I'm just borrowing the water and returning it a little further downstream. If purifying, pumping, and processing water was truly a waste, it would certainly cost much more.
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Excellent point; and with some surprising outcomes. For example, if you live in the City of Chicago or its western suburbs your wastwater is discharged into the Chicago/Illinois River or Desplaines/Fox River systems which means that your non-evaporated withdrawls have been transferred to the Mississippi rather than the St Lawrence basin. This is not the case for other Great Lakes cities however.

Lots of costs are externalized and/or subsidized. Even if you didn't get a bill for potable water, wasting it still wouldn't be a very good idea.

I was taught to turn the lights out. I remember after once having left one on in my sister's bedroom, my father made me sit there by myself and stare at the lamp for awhile, so next time I'd remember! Now my apartment is so small, it hardly feels like there is another room to leave the light on in. I wonder how it would look here in NYC if all the business buildings turned out the lights at night. I was out of town during the blackout, but I imagine it would have a big impact. Additionally, I don't understand the logic behind stores using a/c in the summer to the point of becoming a refrigerator and then leaving the door open to the street? WHY?

One of the worse thing I've ever heard about is an A/C that basically works by cooling the air that goes through it with running water. It's like leaving the tap open all day long...

Maybe this is just an urban myth, but I've always been told that "powering up" a flourescent lamp (used by every business I've ever worked for) uses more or less the same electricity as leaving it on for 15-30 minutes. At that point, especially in a business, it's more efficient to leave the lamp running if people are going to be milling about every 10 minutes or so.

Doesn't explain why they're left on overnight. We don't where I work, and I often wander around my house turning off lights (all flourescent) that were left on in unused rooms.
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Well...there are several dimensions to this comment. The old flourescent lights contained PCB's in a transformer ballast. These had to get up to temperature to work effectively, hence the long flicker in period. Modern electronic ballasts do not need the warmup phase and suffer less efficiency loss by far.

The oft stated reason was that office buildings often left lights on for security reasons or so that a late-worker can find his/her way around. The real reasons I think are a combination of laziness and not wanting to pay an operating engineer to course the whole facility, shutting lights off after the "night watchman" or a janitor passed. There are also complex reasons having to do with how cubicles are laid out compared to the original lighting plan. The latter can be overcom with beneath the floor utility routings and use of localized work station lights.

This may sound like a silly question, but how much light from houses can be seen from space? Isn't it more likely that most of the light seen in the photo from street lights and cars?
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Then the future of civilization and life are threatened because people have been afraid to ask questions, appearing silly is nothing to worry on. I addressed the streetlight subject in passing in the post. In dense urban areas the total luminosity comes from whatever bounces up, some of which originates from windows My favorite suburban gesture of energy arrogance is the placement along building exteriors of flood lights to wash the architecture in a steady glow. While this started in office parks trying to attract high end clients (making the office homey) it has spread to to point where entire MegaMansion developments come with the exterior floods as part of the capital design for all buildings. Taking it to a logical extreme for guilt remediation, I have lately seen solar powered exterior landscape floods with large sealed lead acid batteries. This certainly trasncends our relationship with the dark and moves our homes into a "vanity plate" mentallity.

check this out
http://tommcmahon.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/africa1.jpg

Chris, I think that it has more to do with shortening the life of the fluorescent than with the energy it takes.

Some tips from an old TH post (User Tips for Compact Fluorescent Lightbulbs) by Christine recommend that you turn off a compact fluo if you are leaving a room for more than 3 minutes, and a standard fluo if you leave for more than 15 minutes.

My office just went with motion-sensor switches that cut the lights if there is no movement in a room after a set amount off time. What I great Idea. I think we will install those in our home, too.

Light pollution, much of it from badly designed or just plain wasteful nighttime lighting of unused buildings, also causes huge problems for both amateur and professional astronomers. The International Dark-Sky Association is devoted to reducing light pollution and has a lot of great information on their website: www.darksky.org.

If you turned off lights in a retail space, shoppers would think the store was closed. Most businesses use cubicles and those usually share over head lights. You really can't turn off a light if you leave for lunch or something because you don't know who is still there for one. That's why it's often left on in business-mall-type offices. Someone is always there early and someone always leaves late. Even if each worker were given a way to control some type of personal lighting, what would really be the saving to efficiency? Each person could leave it on too. Maybe I am missing the point of the article.
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As someone who has worked in dozens of corporate jobs I can testify that after2 or 3 years the original overhead lighting plan seldom has any relationship to where people sit. Many of the big overhead lights are beaming down on computer screens or empty aisles. Moreover, if you have been tracking development trends you'll have noted that average cube size has shrunk about 40% over the last decade. Because overhead light placement has not changed in concordance, the result is that allmost all cubes have un-timed workstation lights. Another change is coming with the trend toward natural daylighting. OVerhead lights are becoming fewer and workstation lights again becoming more common. A third change --- and this is surely the most critical one to my mind ---- is that the entire desktop reading/writing metaphor is changed. We all look at flat panel displays. Overhead lighting is more of a nuisance than an aid for the largest part of the work day! Yet our lighting layout and brightness standards are anchored on the archetypal work setting of green eyeshades and arm bands. I could go on but hope this clarifies enough.

Total darkness is not always practical, but I'm sure that many office buildings could wire things up so that at night there's 1 in 3 or 1 in 4 ceiling lights that are off.

As regards leaving lights on, I rather suspect that a lot of it is sheer irrational fear of the dark. I grew up on a farm where on a dark night you literally couldn't see the hand at the end of your arm. Visiting friends / family from urban areas were always freaked out by this. When teaching Outdoor Education at camps for city schools one of the activities I find weirdest is the "Solo" where students are left by themselves in the dark in the bush for 5 minutes. For most of them this is the first time EVER they've been alone in the dark, and you have to monitor it reasonable carefully, as you'll get about 1 in 10 students Freak out to a greater or lesser extent. To someone used to walking 3 or 4km across paddocks at night to visit friends it seems excessive.

As regards water usage, as someone else pointed out it depends very much on where you're taking the water from and where it's going to afterwards. Here at the shop we get our water from a farm supply (A dam filled by rainwater runoff from the surrounding hills). This water is full of enough sediment that it blocks the washers in the taps every few weeks and end up running pretty constantly. Customers are often insensed by this as it is "Wasteful". Is it though? The waste-water goes out and into a garden system, keeping the grass green. Would it be less wasteful to let the water evapourate in the dam? Sit in the ground further up the hills? Run into one of the largest rivers in NZ where it'll hit the sea in 60 odd Kilometers and become non-potable anyway? At what point does "wasting" water become wasteful...?

Its not just the US.

Yeah, I'm sure no other country on the planet looks like this at night. Not Francy, not Germany, not China, not Britain, not Spain, not Canada...

Give me a break. This article sucks. The only reason this should be dugg is to expose the stupidity of the author of this article and those reading it.

Excuse me, but the way this is portrayed is simple anti-America propaganda. Here is the real picture, without the bash America crap. Notice Europe. Looks as bright as the U.S.

http://www.bluecamaro.com/photo/Spacestation.jpg

Just Americans, huh? The photo I see suggests Canadians, Mexicans, Caribean Islanders, Panamanians, Venezuelans, etc. seem to have the same problem.

Leaving on lights is wastful no matter who's doing it. Don't just single out Americans when your own "evidence" shows otherwise.

You should really show the rest of that picture. Europe is just as bad as the States.

 

The image included is cropped from a nasa created image of what the night sky looks like. The original image is of the whole world. Europe and Japan are just as heavily lit as the U.S.

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap001127.html

What about cities, parking lots, and other NON PERSONAL sites that waste a lot more than the personal places.

Out fear of "Fear" has led us to all sorts of outdoor lighting. Be it fear of curves on roads or neighbors in our yards.

Most of the light in the image is from street lights, not home/office/business interior lighting.
Also, look at the full image some time - implying this phenomenon is exclusive to America is yet another example of manipulating data to fit an agenda.

Regarding Jill's link post in the comments above, it would seem that we could ask Europe to turn off the lights as well.

I would suspect the same would be true of Japan and China.

Honestly, any industrialized nation is going to saturate itself with light, as industrialization begets 24/7/365 operations.

Now, my guess is that the above shot is most likely a composite. It looks like a segment of a "world at night" photo that I've seen once before. If that is the case, then it is possible that we're only seeing the light use at peak nighttime hours across the various land masses. True, in that case there'd still a lot of energy used and a lot of energy wasted, but it's not the same as saying all of these cities are burning with this constant level of brightness from dusk to dawn each night.

Just my thoughts. Thanks.

Contrary to what many people believe, this image is a representation of the Earth at night. This image was actually created a "long time series of images of the Earth at night." It is not a snapshot, but an amalgamation. Also note that the resolution for each pixel is about 100 km square so there is not much detail here.
Here is the reference and copyright Shame on treehugger for not giving credit to the authors.

BTW, this takes nothing from the fact that indeed, the west is more lit than 'the dark continent'.