‘Twas the last night of Hanukkah, the end of the UN’s COP 28, the umpteenth night of Christmas lights and inflatables and the 12th night before Kwanzaa, and all through my mind was not that this is the 200th anniversary of the original “’Twas the” poem, nor whether anyone was lighting menorahs in Dubai (they were – the first “purpose-built synagogue in the Persian Gulf in a hundred years” opened this winter), but rather, for climate-sensitive souls, the burning question: What is the carbon footprint of these Holidays and their many lights and candles?
A book I gifted to my climate-change students was 2010’s “How Bad Are Bananas? The Carbon Footprint of Everything” by Mike Berners-Lee. As we now light real candles for seven Kwanzaa nights, eight Hanukkah nights, and use seemingly endless days and nights of electronic candles and lights for Christmas, I realize one question the book didn’t address was: Can we assess and minimize those candles’ and lights’ impact upon our fragile planet?
We are in luck; there are others who have done the calculations. Starting with Chester Energy & Policy, its analysis of powering our holiday symbols suggests that for CO2 emissions from lighting a Christmas tree, you have: large incandescent lights, 13.15 kg of CO2; mini incandescent lights, 19.17 kg of CO2; and LED lights, 2.26 kg of CO2. The type of tree purchased to be lit by those lights matters, too – 3.1 kg/year of CO2 emissions for a natural tree versus 8 kg of CO2 per year over the course of the six-year life span of an artificial tree. For all of the electronic lights in windows, lawns and trees, we use more energy to power holiday lights than El Salvador uses in a year, so use LED lights and a timer.
How about the Menorah candles for Hanukkah? The standard Manischewitz paraffin candles many buy emit, over the eight nights, just 0.27 kg of CO2. But beeswax candles are deemed carbon neutral – they emit CO2 recently absorbed by plants and then transferred to beeswax. But don’t use olive oil lamps – those emit 10 times the CO2 of paraffin candles. For the seven Kinara candles for Kwanzaa, lit for seven nights – since these candles also can be paraffin or beeswax, their emissions are less than Hanukkah due to one less night – we have zero for beeswax, 0.20 kg for paraffin.
This does not mean we should be a Scrooge and not celebrate the holidays; we can buy natural trees with LED lights, or use beeswax candles, or both. We can have smaller displays, and not drive dozens of miles to see those of others.
Or there is a fourth holiday you can substitute that has no energy use or emissions – and I highly recommend this one as penance for all the COP28 attendees who traveled to Dubai in those very carbon-intensive jet planes – the holiday of Festivus, made famous in a 1997 Seinfeld episode. Festivus only requires an unadorned aluminum pole (reusable forever), and after a dinner at which people share grievances with each other from the past year, finish with a friendly wrestling tournament. Calorie power!
Some last tips: I wrap presents in recycled Sunday comic pages (8,000 tons of wrapping paper – almost 50,000 trees worth – are annually used to wrap gifts); and try digital cards instead of the 2.65 billion holiday cards sold each year in the U.S. (one tree can make 3,000 cards, thus 883,333 trees are consumed for cards each year).
Now let us all say, as 2024 draws nigh, “Peace on Earth to all, and to all … please turn off your lights.”
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