When William Shakespeare wrote Love’s Labour’s Lost he would have used light from tallow candles at a cost (today) of £12,000 per million-lumen hours. The same amount of light from electric lamps now costs only £2! But today’s low-cost illumination still has a dark side. Globally,...

In IEA member countries, electrical appliances are the fastest growing energy users, after automobiles. Cost-effective technology exists that could improve the energy efficiency of appliances by more than one-third in ten years. The greenhouse gases emitted as a result of the use of appliances...