‘Twas the 4th night of Hanukkah, 11th night of COP 28, umpteenth night of Christmas lights and inflatables, and 16th night before Kwanzaa, and all through my mind is not that this is the 200th anniversary of the original “’Twas the” poem, nor wondering if anyone is lighting menorahs in Dubai (they are—the first “purpose-built synagogue in the Persian Gulf in a hundred years” opened this winter in the UAE), but rather for climate sensitive souls the burning question: “What is the carbon footprint of these Holidays and their 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. But as we now light real candles for 7 Kwanzaa nights, 8 Hanukkah nights, and use seemingly endless nights of electronic candles and lights for Christmas, one question the book didn’t address was: Can we assess and minimize those candles’ and lights’ impact upon our fragile planet? No one in Dubai is seeking the answer, thus let us now do so.
We lawyers are in luck—there are others who have done the calculations! Starting with Chester Energy & Policy, their analysis of powering our holiday symbols suggests for CO2 emissions from lighting a Christmas tree– 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, vs 8.0 kg of CO2 per year over the course of the 6-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!
And the Menorah candles for Hanukkah? The standard Manischewitz paraffin candles my wife bought emit, over the 8 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. By the way, don’t use olive oil lamps—those emit ten times the CO2 of paraffin candles. For the 7 Kinara candles for Kwanzaa, lit for 7 nights– since these candles also can be paraffin or beeswax, their emissions are less than Hanukkah due to one less night—0 for beeswax, 0.20 kg for paraffin.
But that does not mean we shouldn’t celebrate the holidays; we can buy natural trees with LED lights, or use beeswax candles, or both. Or there is a 4th holiday you can substitute that has no energy use or emissions, and I highly recommend this one as penance to all the COP 28 attendees who traveled to Dubai in those very carbon intensive jet planes—the holiday of Festivus, made famous in a 1997 Seinfeld episode — 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 US (one tree can make 3,000 cards, thus 883,333 trees are consumed each year).
Now let us all say, as 2024 draws nigh, “Peace on Earth to All, and To All—Please Turn Off Your Lights”.
