Al Gore Was Right

Twenty years ago this summer, Al Gore delivered environmentalists a jolt of energy with the release of his climate change documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. The film was an unlikely blockbuster — who knew a slideshow could be so gripping? — that became a commercial and critical success, eventually earning Gore an Oscar and the Nobel Peace Prize. His 100-minute monologue helped catapult global warming to the center of the political discourse. But if the film landed with bang, it ended with something of a whimper. As the credits rolled, the filmmakers offered the audience some ideas for how they could help combat climate change. The top suggestion for “changing the way you live” was to “buy energy-efficient appliances: lightbulbs.” The best thing we could do to stop sea-level rise and the eventual inundation of lower Manhattan was to swap out our lightbulbs? To many environmentalists, it felt like bringing a squirt gun to a world war. The gap between the problem at hand and the proffered solution was “enough to sink your heart,” as author Michael Pollan put it in a 2008 essay for The New York Times Magazine. The criticism of the film’s final minutes was so withering that eventually Gore himself would have to backpedal and began frequently telling people that it was just as important to “change laws” as change lightbulbs. Twenty years on, “change your lightbulbs” has become a metaphor for a wan kind of environmentalism, an easy punchline for greens trying to make a point. But here’s the thing: In the decades since An Inconvenient Truth was released, Americans did, in fact, swap out their lightbulbs. As they did, they helped to check U.S. electricity-demand growth for the better part of a generation and avoided the release of many hundreds of millions, if not billions, of tons of heat-trapping carbon pollution. When it came to lightbulbs, Al Gore was right. Changing tens of millions of lightbulbs, it turns out, helped change the real world. The story of how Americans made a remarkably swift and widespread switch from inefficient incandescent lightbulbs to compact fluorescents and LEDs offers important lessons for climate activists today. The experience supplies a proof of concept for how engineering innovations can overwhelm an entrenched technology. It’s an example of how basic household economics — or if you prefer, the market — can shift an entire sector in a virtuous direction. And, perhaps most importantly, it’s evidence that individual actions do make a difference — as long as they are taken collectively and at scale. “I think this is one of the least appreciated, most important energy innovations of recent history,” says Lucas Davis, a professor of energy economics at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. From 2005 to 2020, U.S. electricity demand growth was essentially flat, according to the Energy Information Agency. During that same period, the U.S. population grew by more than 30 million people and economic growth was relatively steady (minus, of course, the dip of the Great Recession). Yet all those new people and all that additional economic activity required almost no new electricity. To some environmentalists, it seemed the United States had reached the long-sought goal of decoupling electricity consumption from economic activity. A primary cause of the plateau in electricity usage was the significant decline in residential electricity consumption. That decline was driven by several factors, including an across-the-board improvement in the efficiency of household appliances. But the drop in lighting’s share of electricity demand was particularly sharp. In a remarkably short period, households and businesses swapped out their inefficient incandescent bulbs (which wasted most of their electricity as heat and which had barely changed since the days of Thomas Edison), for CFLs (a technology that’s now on the decline) and LEDs. When Gore made his movie, illumination accounted for about 15% of home energy use. Today it’s about 6% — roughly two-fifths of what it used to be. That’s a big deal. “The really striking thing about LED lightbulbs is the large percentage reduction in consumption,” says Davis, who charted the transformation in a 2017 paper. “Imagine you were driving a car that gets 30 miles per gallon and you were able to trade it in for one that gets 300 miles per gallon.” New lightbulbs cut illumination’s electricity usage on a bulb-by-bulb level by roughly 90%. If you’re wondering why lighting’s total share of electricity demand only dropped by 60-some percent, it’s because as lighting got cheaper, people used more of it. Even so, no other electricity-end-use innovation of the 21st century comes close. “Refrigerators have become massively more energy efficient,” Davis explains, “but today’s refrigerators don’t use 90% less than the incumbent technology. So it’s a big change.” Davis is an economist, and so naturally he views this success story through a market lens. When consumers were offered a product (LEDs) that could perform the same function as the old technology (incandescents) and which were much more durable and therefore cheaper than replacing your lightbulbs every few months, consumers quickly made the switch. According to Davis, between 2008 and 2016 — the flick of a light switch in macroeconomic time — the price of LEDs plummeted by 94%, making them something of a no-brainer. It’s true that energy efficiency standards put in place by the Biden administration effectively banned the old-fashioned incandescents. But — and this needs to be emphasized — consumers had already made the switch before the government mandate. In 2020 nearly half of American homes were using LEDs for all or most of their lighting; by 2024, that number was almost two-thirds. Ultimately, the economic gravity of a superior product was implacable. That’s a happy takeaway for climate activists. You don’t have to squint hard to see how the lighting success story could be applied to other modern necessities. Take heating and cooling, which gobble up nearly a third of all electricity used by American households. Heat pumps are far more efficient than oil or gas furnaces and standard air conditioning, and consumers are starting to notice. For four years straight, heat pumps have outsold gas furnaces, and last year, for the first time ever, heat pumps accounted for more than half the heating-and-cooling technology in new apartment construction. The heat pump tipping point doesn’t seem far away. Or take transportation, the largest source of U.S. carbon pollution. You can think of electric vehicles as the LEDs of the auto sector. EVs are obviously vastly more efficient than internal combustion engine models, and EVs easily outmatch gas-powered vehicles on performance metrics like acceleration and handling. It’s true that EVs are pricier upfront, but they’re cheaper in the long run due to lower fuel costs and minimal maintenance costs. Even though Americans have been slow to adopt EVs, sales in the rest of the world are booming. As the EV cost curve bends downward, the internal combustion engine will succumb to the same economic gravity that dragged down the incandescent bulb. Quality trumps ideology or nostalgia. Beyond the lessons of technology and markets, the lightbulb conversion story offers climate activists another, more profound teaching, one that has to do with the role of individual action in making broad social change. In some circles, it’s become fashionable to dismiss the role of individual action as a solution to our environmental woes. According to this view, individual action is, at best, performative virtue-signaling and, at worst, lets the oil and gas companies off the hook for their primary role in fueling the climate crisis. The carbon footprint calculator is a Big Oil scheme — didn’t you know? The lightbulb story offers a real-life rebuttal to the view that individual action is a distraction in the effort to fight climate change. Sure, if you’re the only person to switch a lightbulb, nothing much happens. But swap a billion lightbulbs and the world begins to look different. “The individual choices added up to a lot because there were so many of them,” says Amory Lovins, a cofounder of the clean energy think tank RMI who also teaches energy efficiency at Stanford. “Doing many small things with very large numbers of diverse actors can be faster than doing a few big things requiring specialized institutions.” This is not to say that policy action is unnecessary. The transition to heat pumps and EVs may be implacable in the long run. But, famously, in the long run we’re all dead — which is why we need smart policy to spur those transitions at the speed and scale required. Truly, social change is an alloy: Lasting progress requires a combination of policy making and individual citizen action. The Inflation Reduction Act — the American climate movement’s signature policy achievement to date — reflected this wisdom. The law (which has been largely dismantled by the Trump administration and congressional Republicans) briefly created the political and economic conditions for accelerating the clean energy transition. It offered households financial incentives for installing rooftop solar, putting in heat pumps, and purchasing electric vehicles. But those government nudges toward a clean energy economy could only accomplish their goals if people decided to take advantage of them. Without individuals’ commitment to climate action, policy levers would be useless. The carrot only works if someone snatches it. It can seem as if those who pooh-pooh the power of individual action or who blithely dismissed Gore’s lightbulb moment have never encountered a get-out-the-vote campaign. As any veteran of a get-out-the-vote push knows, elections are a team sport. And at the same time, every door knocked is an attempt to get an individual voter to the polls. Similarly, building a truly sustainable society will require countless individual actions — votes, as it were, in the form of personal behavior. Stabilizing the climate and protecting biodiversity require that each of us eat less meat, fly fewer miles, install some rooftop solar, and trade in the gas-guzzler for an electric vehicle — and that we do these things not as atomized solo actors, but as individual members of a collective movement. Ultimately, individual climate action in the absence of robust government climate policy is little more than moral drudgery. Climate policy that makes no demands for individual behavior change is just a political mirage. But policy that’s linked to individual agency, individual commitment, and individual action — well, that’s the hope of the world. Previously in The Revelator: Insects Are Disappearing — Here’s How to Help