Has anyone checked German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel's figures?

I'm sure he got the number from somewhere and didn't just pull it out of his butt. But we can do a quick and dirty check.

Let's say you replace each 60 Watt incandescent with an equivalent 13 Watt CFL. And let's say the average lightbulb is on for 4 hours a day. You're saving (60-13)*4 = 188 Watt-hours of energy per day per bulb.

Say the average home has 10 such lightbulbs. That's 188 * 10 * 365 = 685 kWh (kilowatt-hours) per year per household energy savings.

Let's assume the EU power grid mix is similar to that in the USA, where 1 kWh creates 1.3 lbs of CO2 emissions.

http://www.ecohuddle.com/wiki/carbon-footprint-cal...

So your 685 kWh per household is saving close to 1,000 lbs of CO2 per year, or about half of a metric ton.

There are 490 million people in the EU

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world...

Say that's 50 million homes, and there's your 25 millon tons of CO2 saved per year. Definitely a reasonable number.

Well the population of the EU is 500,000,000

you are saying a saving of 25,000,000 tons of co2

you would fist have to find out how much co2 a 100w globe produces

these guys have already done that

http://www.howstuffworks.com/question481.htm

This is about 1850 pounds which is 840kg

As the average CFL globe uses ~1/3 of the power for the same brightness as an incandescent, so the CFL would produce ~280kg a saving of ~560kg of co2 per globe

how much per person would the savings have to be to obtain a 25 million ton reduction in co2 in a population the size of the EU, just 50kg per person. Given the saving CFL achieve the 25 million figure is easily possible.