The goal of PIRG’s Energy Service Corps is to give people the tools and the knowledge they need to be part of this solution.
We want to help people save energy, save environment and save money all at the same time. The Problem: Rising Energy Demand & Inefficient Energy Use = High Costs & Global Warming. All of us need energy to power almost everything we do in our lives. The problem, however, is that 85 percent of the energy we use in this country comes from burning coal, oil and gas, fossil fuels that spew dangerous po
llution – crazy, when more than 175 million Americans already live in places where the air is dangerous to breathe. The cost of this energy is also too expensive for many Americans – in 2009, more than 12 million households risked having their utilities shut off because they couldn’t pay their bills. And burning these fossil fuels makes global warming even worse! Our Solution: Save Energy, Save the Environment, Save Money. One of the easiest things we can do to help solve this problem is to cut the amount of energy we waste at home. If we all made simple changes –like screwing in compact fluorescent bulbs, sealing cracks around our windows and making other simple ‘fix-its’ to their homes, we could cut the amount of energy we use at home by half. This means that across the country, we wouldn’t have to build 300 new polluting power plants and would save more than $600 billion dollars over the next twenty years.