The Alliance to Save Energy and other environmental groups that argue that Americans are energy gluttons remain silent about Christmas lighting. Yet holiday lights are a huge exception to their goal of reducing energy usage wherever possible. If Yuletide electricity guzzling is forgiven, why shouldn’t open-air heating and cooling or bright central lighting in every room be excused? Walking around a room to turn on individual lights, for example, wastes the scarcest resource of all, a person’s time. Surely energy uses for human comfort and convenience, even when extravagant, should have priority over purely celebratory uses of electricity.
What about the holiday humbug that celebratory electricity usage depletes our finite resources of fossil fuels and fouls our air? I bring good tidings! The world’s proven reserves of oil, natural gas and coal are at an all-time high, and search costs continue to fall thanks to better technology. Human ingenuity and the wealth to discover new sources of hydrocarbons are vast resources that again and again have outdistanced the “finiteness” of nature. Market economies can look forward to increasing consumption of conventional energies, an increasing range of energy substitutes and falling energy prices.