When 2.2 million people in Sydney all turned off their lights for an hour in 2007, it reduced their overall energy consumption by over 10% for that hour. I think that’s a pretty neat achievement for something so easy to do. We had a similar thing shortly after with Lights Out London and that worked, too. This year, WWF have decided to take the step a little further by asking the entire world to participate. Come March 29th 2008 at 20:00, all you have to do is turn off your lights for an hour.
Of course, it won’t be the world all taking part at exactly the same time; the action will take place as each time zone hits 8pm. Current capital cities that have announced coalition include Bangkok, Chicago, Copenhagen, Dublin, Melbourne and Montreal. You can see the full list of entrants here and more are expected to join over the month.
I think Earth Hour is a good idea simply because of how easy it is. A lot of environmentally friendly acts can take time that people generally don’t have to spare. Being able to join in something so easy that makes a big difference, is exactly the kind of thing anybody can get involved with. It’s like how recycling used to be so difficult years back, you’d have to pile up everything and wait for a chance to visit the bottle banks and then drive elsewhere to recycle all the paper. Now in the UK, virtually everywhere has weekly recycling collections for most types of packaging and that’s easy for everyone to do.
Earth Hour won’t really save the world, but it’s a decent step that gets you thinking about how easy it is to save energy here and there. Plus you can help no matter where on Earth you are at the time.
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