It can be easier than you think to make a difference in your home and your community.

In fact, it can be as easy as changing a lightbulb. With the coming of shorter days and falling temperatures, we have a tendency to spend more and more of our days inside with the lights on. What types of lightbulbs you use, however, can affect the temperature, ambiance and mood, as well as your household's bottom line.

One dollar in every five you spend on electricity goes to pay for lighting, making it one of the easiest areas in your home to save energy. That's about $200 a year you're spending to light your home! Energy Star-qualified lightbulbs are cost effective because they can last more than seven years, compared to about 11 months for an incandescent bulb--that's eight times longer.

A compact fluorescent lamp screws into a regular lightbulb socket but has a longer life and uses less electricity'and there's no loss in lighting quality with compact fluorescents, either. Energy-efficient lightbulbs with the Energy Star seal offer the same warm, bright light you've always known. You can even find lightbulbs that simulate daylight, to give the rooms in your home a natural look.

Traditional incandescent bulbs generate 10 percent light and 90 percent heat. Because Energy Star-qualified lightbulbs run cooler, they make your home more comfortable.

When you choose an Energy Star-qualified lightbulb, you are making a difference for the environment by reducing air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. As a matter of fact, if every household in the United States changed just one incandescent lightbulb to an Energy Star-qualified bulb, the combined efforts would save more than 5.6 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity--that's enough to light all the households in Washington, D.C. for almost 11 years. Also, the same action would prevent 8.9 billion tons of carbon dioxide gas from going into the air. A comparable fact would be like removing 780,000 cars from U.S. roads end to end, stretching from Atlanta to Los Angeles.

People across the country are joining the U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Housing and Urban Development by pledging to switch one lightbulb at home to an Energy Star-qualified bulb. Last year, 70,000 people signed Energy Star's Change a Light, Change the World Pledge, saving more than 23 million kWh of energy and preventing over 18,500 tons of greenhouse emissions. This year, the goal is to get half a million people to take the pledge.