“You can change a lightbulb, yes?” asks the sunny, funny new website Unscrew America. “If you can change a lightbulb, you can unscrew America.”

The site’s home page is a creepy, conventionally lit cavern with fossil-fueled flames dancing ominously in the distance, but a simple click whisks you away from this incandescent inferno to a brighter future where you can get the 411 on CFLs and LEDs from cute, quirky icons floating across Unscrew America’s cheery universe.

You may be saving your pennies for a Prius, but Unscrew America wants you to know that you don’t have to wait till you can afford a hybrid car”or even be old enough to drive one”to do something significant but simple to help combat climate change. Just think: if every household in America switched five conventional light bulbs to more energy-efficient ones, it would benefit the environment as much as taking 4 million cars off the road.

Unscrew America’s psychedelic, interactive, yellow submarine-kinda site will get you totally psyched about tossing those oh-so-last-century incandescent bulbs and replacing them with more energy-efficient lighting. But that’s only the beginning; click on the “Further Unscrewing” icon, and you’ll find 99 other ways to unscrew America. This terrific pro bono campaign was the bright idea of An Inconvenient Truth producer Lesley Chilcott, whose concept was electrifyingly executed by Austin-based ad agency Idea City. Can changing our light bulbs change the world? Let’s try it and see.

For further illumination on energy-efficient lighting, go to Unscrew America.

I am the luckiest of Luddites, married to a tech genius Mac consultant who knows how to wrestle ornery laptops into submission and can, with the touch of his hands, heal an ailing hard drive. Our tiny apartment is a veritable orchard of Apples; here, a Mac, there, a Mac, everywhere a Mac, Mac (except the bathroom, which is officially a tech-free zone where cell phones and laptops are off limits, although Matt routinely ignores this ban.)

At night, our apartment is a veritable galaxy of LEDs emitting a glow from our routers, a switch, a wi-fi base, cable modem, and multiple printers. It makes me wonder; is our little Mac mecca squandering electricity?

The American Council for An Energy-Efficient Economy says no. The ACEEE has just issued a “groundbreaking study,” according to the CS Monitor, which concluded that “for every kilowatt-hour of electricity used by information and communications technologies, the US saves at least 10 times that amount.”

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From Ann Arbor to Amsterdam, cities are finding clever ways to combat global warming. There’s a “world-wide movement by cities to rein in their runaway energy use,” according to the Wall Street Journal:

“Cities are embarking on all sorts of innovative programs to try to corral the amount of energy they consume. Chicago is planting rooftop gardens to cool down its municipal buildings. New York is working with a private company to harness the power of tidal currents in the city’s East River. Amsterdam is using cold lake water to help air-condition homes.

With energy costs skyrocketing and concerns about climate change mounting, municipal leaders in the US, Europe, India and China are all seeking ways to reduce their cities’ energy consumption and rely more on renewable sources of energy. The Journal gives a rundown of nine cities whose leaders are blazing a trail to a brighter future, from Ann Arbor’s switch to LED street lights to the Mumbai mandate that got all its residents in hot water–solar heated, that is.

For ideas on how you can conserve energy, go to earth911.org.

No one can accuse the Times Square Alliance of dropping the ball on energy efficiency; when the clock strikes midnight tonight, a brand-new New Year’s Eve ball will light up Times Square and give the world a dazzling display of kaleidoscopic, cutting-edge LED technology. A hundred years ago, the first-ever Times Square New Year’s Eve ball—a 5-foot-diameter iron and wood contraption lit with 100 25W light bulbs—was dropped down a flagpole. The ball has been upgraded five times since then, most recently in 1999, when a Waterford crystal ball was created to commemorate the millennium.Tonight, we’re getting a New Year’s Eve ball that’s truly suited to this energy-challenged century; it’s still made of Waterford crystal, but the halogen lights have been replaced by LEDs that are twice as bright but use only a fraction as much energ–equivalent to 10 toasters, according to the AP. What’s next, solar panels on the White House roof? Oh, wait! Jimmy Carter already tried that, like, thirty years ago. Too bad Ronald Reagan took ‘em down. Talk about a dim bulb.

By Kerry Trueman

The City That Never Sleeps keeps its bridges burning bright, all night, and you can see them more than 25 miles away. That’s a lotta wattage. So Mayor Bloomberg’s putting the Brooklyn Bridge on an energy diet, switching the landmark bridge’s 160 100-watt mercury vapor lamps to 24-watt LED bulbs.

The lights will be replaced next year, just in time for the bridge’s 125th birthday, and the move will save an estimated 134 tons of greenhouse gases annually.

Boulder residents lit up–and lined up–at the prospect of swapping their old fashioned, inefficient Christmas lights for super cool LED twinkle lights offered through the city’s Climate Smart program.

Within 45 minutes last night the city had handed out 700 strands of energy efficient Christmas lights, exhausting Climate Smart’s entire supply and forcing them to postpone further exchanges until reinforcements arrive. The city’s ordered an additional 1,000 23-foot strands of LED lights, paid for through the “carbon tax” that Boulder residents voted for last year, making Boulder the first place in the nation to pass a tax to fight global warming. Way to glow!

(The rest of us will have to underwrite our own upgrades to LED twinkle lights, but the good news is that the big box stores are all starting to carry them. Yes, they cost a bit more upfront, but they use only a fraction of the energy required to power conventional twinkle lights. So deck the halls with bulbs of diodes!)

by Kerry Trueman

Do lavish holiday light displays bring out the eco-grinch in you, making you wince at the sight of all that wasted energy? This year, you can feast your eyes on the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree without flinching, because the massive tree’s five miles of LED lights will be powered by 363 solar panels on Rockefeller Plaza’s rooftop.

But the greening of Rockefeller Center won’t end with the holidays; Tishman Speyer, co-owner of Rockefeller Center, also announced plans yesterday to cover the roof of Radio City Music Hall with desert plants, which could recycle over a half-million gallons of wastewater annually. For a concrete jungle, mid-town Manhattan’s getting greener all the time.