In Monday’s GreenSpace column, I wrote about Earth Hour, a global event this Saturday to bring awareness to climate change. Here are more details:
The plan is to get everyone possible to turn off all non-essential lighting from 8 to 9 p.m. And then, once they turn the lights back on, to take steps to lessen the energy they consume.
It started as a one-city event last year in Sydney, Australia. And it succeeded beyond what any of the organizers dared dreamed. More than 2.2 million residents and 2,100 businesses switched off the lights. Calculations show the act led to a 10.2 percent energy reduction across the city for that one hour.
So now the event, sponsored by the World Wildlife Foundation, is going global. “What began as one city taking a stand against global warming caught the attention of the world,” says the website, www.earthhour.org. It’s a cool site with lots of information. As of this morning, 12,738 businesses had signed up. Click and that and you’ll see a list. Nearly 200,000 people had signed up.It starts at 8 p.m. local time in Christchurch, New Zealand – the wee hours here – and follows darkness westward, cascading through the world’s time zones, ending in San Francisco.
Funds were limited, so although they want everyone possible to participate, they had to limit the number of “official” cities. In the U.S., it’s one for each time zone. I hear Philadelphia was up for consideration, but Atlanta beat us to it. Other cities are Chicago, Phoenix and San Francisco.
The organization plans to post “before” and “during” photos on its website. So when you get up Saturday morning, you’ll probably be able to see what’s already happened in New Zealand and a few other cities.
WWF spokeswoman Leslie Aun acknowledges that the energy savings of the single event “isn’t going to have much of an effect on climate change. Let’s be honest.” But the idea is to raise awareness and make changes after that.
Perhaps the biggest change in Sydney came from large office buildings that generally leave the lights on all night. “Almost every single building in America has a specific lighting system. Engineers have to figure out how to turn the lights off,” Aun said.
“What we found in Syndney is when a lot of people turned lights off, they said hey, why don’t we leave them off?”
GreenSpace - her column about how to reduce your carbon footprint in everyday life - appears every other Monday in Health & Science.
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