Earth Hour
Filed under: Energy, Lead Story — Michael van der Galien on March 29, 2008 @ 7:47 pm CET
Today is “Earth Hour” day (supported by google). The idea is to turn off your lights from 8PM to 9PM local time, so as to raise awareness of a worldwide energy conservation effort.
Via Little Green Footballs… Google Europe has gone black. They call it “Earth Hour.” The intention of the project is to “raise awareness of a worldwide energy conservation effort called Earth Hour.” That’s why Google UK has “turned the lights out.”
Sadly, however, it doesn’t make one iota difference: “As to why we don’t do this permanently - it saves no energy; modern displays use the same amount of power regardless of what they display.”
If you want to reduce the energy consumption of your PC you can do something: “joining the Climate Savers Computing Initiative.”
On Saturday, March 29, 2008, Earth Hour invites people around the world to turn off their lights for one hour – from 8:00pm to 9:00pm in their local time zone. On this day, cities around the world, including Copenhagen, Chicago, Melbourne, Dubai, and Tel Aviv, will hold events to acknowledge their commitment to energy conservation.
Since I find it quite a good project I’ve decided to do the exact same thing. Except for that I will not turn off the lights in my home. And I won’t shut down anything else either.
On top of that, I’ve also decided not to make PoliGazette dark because there’s absolutely no use in doing so. Even if it was useful, however, I wouldn’t have done it.
At PoliGazette we care about energy; but we don’t care much about empty, useless deeds.
If you would like to join us in our attempt to bring awareness to this wonderful “Earth Hour” initiative, don’t do anything.
Just like us!
And Google.
And… Kate (Canada’s finest blogger)!
Quite right. At 8pm tonight, rational Canadians will become aware of which of their neighbors live on programmed-control thought timers.
And then there are those who, while admitting their own token effort “won’t make any difference”, think that an hour of illuminating dissent will result in “driving up your electric bill”. This is less awareness raising than it is an IQ test for the candle powered.
UPDATE: and Ed!
According to Harper’s, Google and its competitors have now started building data centers in places like Lithuania, Dublin, Siberia, and Shanghai. What do all these locations have in common? Except for Lithuania, where 78% of the power will be nuclear, all of them rely on carbon-spewing energy production with lower prices and fewer controls on emissions. So much for Earth Hour, eh?
1 Susan Duclos
March 29, 2008 @ 8:24 pm CETGood for you. These feel good gimmicks are nothing more than that, they accomplish nothing and ignore any long term ideas or solutions.
Well said Michael.
2 Dylan
March 29, 2008 @ 8:35 pm CETMichael, check out google.fr or some of the other Google sites in Europe (google.de or google.com/intl/sl for Slovenia). None of them are blacked out.
Seems Google is all for Earth Hour as long as you only search in English.
(BTW - As I type it is still Earth Hour here in France and no one is doing anything as far as I can see…)
3 Michael van der Galien
March 29, 2008 @ 8:41 pm CETIt’s earth hour here as well Dylan and… no one’s doing anything here either.
Or they just have very strong candles.
Susan, thank you!
4 Rockeyes
March 29, 2008 @ 10:49 pm CETGot to start somewhere. It was also nice for friends and family just to sit, talk and read for an hour without the drone of a poor quality program on the TV in the background. However, if we really care and the government practices what it preaches, why are we and it hell bent on disrupting millions of lives by destroying houses and pastures, creating tonnes of polluting gases and producing unwanted noise pollution by expanding air traffic and airports? How is it the Spanish owned company BAA can dictate to us these demands? Is it morally acceptable that every person is paying more and more tax in the name of the environment yet it?s still cheaper to fly from one end of the UK to the other for a ?Good night out? than it is to drive or catch a train to see friends or family that are only a fraction of that distance away? When we start to pay congestion charges to pop into our local town and paying per mile to get to work via ?smart CCTV?s? and ?chipped cars? will it be then that we ask who is really gaining from all this?
5 Sy
March 30, 2008 @ 1:08 am CET"It was also nice for friends and family just to sit, talk and read for an hour …"
In the dark?
6 Free Thinker
March 30, 2008 @ 3:28 am CESTWith a snowstorm raging on the eastern prairies during earth hour it would seem to be incredibly stupid to sit in the dark and freeze.