Can LED's Save The World?

One of the great "green" advances of this Holiday season is the advent of affordable holiday lights made with LED's--light emitting diodes--in place of energy-hogging incandescent bulbs.

As a general rule, LED's use roughly one-tenth the electricity of incandescent bulbs to generate the same amount of light, so they certainly are energy efficient.

Lights made with LED's also are more flexible--they can be made into many different shapes, can be embedded in various materials, and, because they use so much less electricity, can be run for long periods off batteries, remote from an electric outlet.

And, LED's are more durable--they're very difficult to break--come in more and brighter colors, and last longer. In short, they're perfect outdoor lights.

And therein lies the problem. You see, humans love to light up the night. If they can do it various colors, all the better. So, will humans simply replace all their incandescent (and fluorescent--LED's are three times as efficient as fluorescents) bulbs and save the universe by reducing electricity use for lighting by 90%?

Of course not. Instead, they'll simply have more lights. As the cost of LED's continues to decline, expect to see them where you wouldn't have before.

Do you like that nifty floor lighting in the airplane that will guide you to the exit in an emergency? Imagine if every highway, every sidewalk, every driveway, were lined with such lights.

Do you think it's cool when a building is outlined in colored lights? Imagine if LED's are embedded into building materials to create massive masterpieces of illuminated building art.

What about those truck drivers with the lights all over their trailers? Now they can go hog wild. And yes, auto manufacturers are already looking for ways to incorporate the lights throughout the next generation of vehicles.

Then there's the third world, where lighting and the energy to run it is very expensive. But you can imagine remote villages suddenly lit up by LED's.

Another quality of LED's is their brightness--some can easily give off that nice Christmas-tree effect even in daylight. And so they will--instead of turning on the lights at night, why not burn them all day!

No, LED's probably won't save the world from global warming. But they might help us illuminate as tourist attractions the various underwater cities we'll be creating in the next century!