HuffPo: Turn Off Your Christmas Lights

According to The Huffington Post, Christians should be in the dark during Christmas – literally.

Huffpo implies that Christians should turn off their Christmas lights because the total amount of energy expended by Americans for Christmas lights supersedes the energy use of countries with lousy economies, as reported in a study proffered by the Center for Global Development.

The study, authored by Todd Moss and Priscilla Agyapong, quotes a 2008 report from the Energy Department claiming decorative seasonal lights totaled 6.6 billion kilowatt hours of electricity consumption annually in the United States. Moss and Agyapong write, “That’s just 0.2% of the country’s total electricity usage, but it could run 14 million refrigerators. It’s also more than the national electricity consumption of many developing countries, such as El Salvador, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Nepal, or Cambodia.”

Moss tweets:

If countries cannot produce enough energy to afford Christmas lights, perhaps they should emulate capitalist countries a bit more.

A study from the World Bank shows how lousy the economies of the countries mentioned by Moss et al. are: Cambodia ranked 115^th worldwide, El Salvador ranked 105^th, Ethiopia ranked 79^th, Nepal ranked 108^th, and Tanzania ranked 85^th. Yet tiny Hong Kong ranked 38^th, with more than five times the GDP of Ethiopia.

A series of questions for HuffPo: If Christians turn off their Christmas lights, would that magically turn into energy for Cambodians? If Americans are supposed to turn off their Christmas lights, just where should that energy be spent? Does turning off lights mean no more Monday Night Football?

And most importantly, just how far is HuffPo willing to go to target traditional Christianity?

Just asking.