I know, I know, incandescent light bulbs are the devil. The fact that any of us still use this antiquated technology is a testament to our stupidity as a species…BUT!

It’s actually far more efficient than any other light source from Edison’s day. A 40 watt light bulb produces about as much light as 40 candles. If you burned 500 candles instead of using a 40 watt light bulb, you would be burning several gallons of paraffin (refined from crude oil) per day, resulting in about 10 times more CO2 emissions.

Of course, we don’t burn 40 candles. We burn one or two or three. So, yes, paraffin candles are not a significant polluter. When I switch off my lights this Earth Hour, and light my candles, I will be replacing 12 watt CFL with three candles. The result, honestly, will be about neutral. The candles will produce a little bit more CO2 than would be produced by the CFL. (thanks, by the way, to enochthered for doing all the math for me.)

The big difference is the amount of light I’ll have to work with. With just my candles burning, chances are my wife and I will have a hilarious dinner in which we can’t find the forks, and then we’ll try to read our books without enough light to actually read them and then, probably, we’ll find some darkness-related activity to entertain ourselves.

And yes, that sounds lovely, but the candle is not saving any energy, it’s just making the world a little softer for one evening. And, hopefully, it will remind us of the gifts that technology brings us, so maybe we can not take them for granted quite so much.