I want to encourage you to participate in my project for the upcoming burn, Project Swirl. Here's what's up.

If you pay an electricity bill, you're paying for lighting. Typically, incandescent lighting, the kind that's been around since Edison. It's not very efficient; most of the electricity becomes heat instead of light. For a long time, there wasn't much you could do about it. Which really sucks as you watch your bill get increasingly expensive. Even worse, the power plants spew tons of CO2 into the atmosphere for no good purpose.

But we now have a choice. We can replace the incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs), a newer kind of bulb. They consume just 25% of the energy to produce the same amount of light. They last 10x longer. Plus they have a cool swirl shape! These used to be way more expensive than incandescent bulbs and produce inferior light, but no longer. The cost of a single CFL bulb is much less than the cost of 10 incandescents, not counting the energy savings. Which is really fucking cool!

So I began to replace the incandescent bulbs with CFL bulbs in January. It's all done now; it cost a whopping $60. And this is sweet: I've already shaved $66 off my electricity bills. So the new bulbs have paid for themselves already! And they continue to save me money. Less CO2 goes into the atmosphere, and less dead bulbs get sent to the landfills. It's a massive win/win/win for everyone.

So what, then, is Project Swirl? Just this. I want to strongly encourage you all to replace at least one 60W incandescent bulb in your home with an equivalent-brightness 14W CFL bulb. It may not seem very significant, but here's the thing: if each of us on this tribe replaced just one bulb, then in a single year we reduce electrical demand significantly, we prevent 71,165 lbs. of CO2 from being emitted, and we pocket $7,042 for ourselves rather than forking it over to the electric company. All this... and only costs maybe 2 bucks per bulb... a cost which pays for itself in less than a year!

The project goal is to replace 1000 bulbs before the burn. If you replace any bulbs, reply on this thread or message me with the number you've replaced. I will track all this so we can know exactly what impact we're having, and report the final results on the playa. Participants will be commemorated by name on a sculpture I will create and show in the Red Light District. Details forthcoming.

Again: please participate! It benefits the world *and* you personally. It doesn't get better than this.