So you want to save the planet? What should you consider first?

April 22nd is Earth Day and you might be wondering what should we do? After all, the problem of global warming is huge and we have an administration that is worse than an ostrich in facing the problem. Yet, there are so many things we can do, that the question becomes where do we start?

Back in the 1970s during the oil shock that created long lines at gas stations, a man named Arthur Rosenfeld did some calculations and came to a surprising answer.

When the OPEC oil embargo hit in October 1973, Rosenfeld did a little math. He discovered that if Americans used energy as efficiently as the Europeans or Japanese, the United States could have been exporting oil in 1973, rather than sitting in rationing lines at gas stations. The solution, he realized, was not to bend the Arab oil regimes to America's will but to end America's thralldom to them by wasting less energy.

This discovery, that energy usage had a strong demand side component, put him on the road to a life long journey in looking at how we use energy. And it led to the invention of some simple, yet powerful technologies which we are still employing today.

The following summer, Rosenfeld and a few like-minded physicists organized a month long workshop, held at Princeton, that attracted top scientists and engineers from fields such as building design, transportation, the manufacturing sector, and gas and electric utilities. "We began looking at some things that were all sort of common sense," he recalls. "Change incandescent lights to fluorescents, make better use of skylights, put more insulation in buildings, that kind of thing. By the end of the first week, we realized that we had blundered into one of the world's largest oil and gas fields. The energy was buried, in effect, in the buildings of our cities, the vehicles on our roads, and the machines in our factories. A few of us began to suspect that the knowledge we gained during that month would change our lives."

Realizing that the answer to many of our energy problems was using what energy we already had more wisely, Rosenfeld help create the energy efficiency standards such as California's Title 24 which we all live by now. He did this by working on the problem like how do you build houses that need less airconditioning where its hot and less heating where its cold. And the result?

California's building efficiency standards (along with those for energy efficient appliances) have saved more than $56 billion in electricity and natural gas costs since 1978. It is estimated the standards will save an additional $23 billion by 2013.

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