Earth Hour

1,858 cities, towns and municipalities in 81 countries have already committed to VOTE EARTH for Earth Hour 2009, as part of the worlds first global election between Earth and global warming.

On March 28 you can VOTE EARTH by switching off your lights for one hour.

Or you can vote global warming by leaving your lights on.

Earth Hour 2009 – What Will You Be Doing?

Cuddling up with your loved ones and admiring the stars in the night sky or organising a treasure hunt in the dark? At 8:30pm on Saturday 28 March, people from all corners of the world will turn off their lights for one hour - Earth Hour - and cast their vote for action on climate change. Anybody can participate and join together with millions of people across the globe celebrating Earth Hour.

Earth Hour is about taking simple steps everyday that collectively reduce carbon emissions – from businesses turning off their lights when their offices are empty to households turning off appliances rather than leaving them on standby.

Here are 10 different ways to spend Earth Hour and reduce your carbon footprint:

1. Attend a local Earth Hour event or organise your own by throwing an Earth Hour street party with your neighbours
2. Gather family & friends for a night picnic in your local park and look at the stars
3. Enjoy a family dinner by candlelight
4. Organise a treasure hunt in the dark
5. Take the dog for a night walk
6. Have a candle-lit bath
7. Sit in the dark and share stories
8. Organise a family night playing board games
9. Share a romantic night in with your loved one
10. Upload your ‘on the night’ photos and videos to flickr and YouTube respectively, and then add them to the Earth Hour flickr group and the global YouTube Group.

Earth Hour Executive Director, Andy Ridley, is encouraging people to participate in whatever way they choose and to think beyond the hour.

“There are no hard and fast rules surrounding participation in Earth Hour. We only ask that you flick that switch and have fun doing whatever you choose to do during that time.

Make Earth Hour work for you. Families with young children should feel free to turn their lights off earlier than 8:30pm and for those having too much fun in the dark during the hour, don’t feel you have to limit yourself to one hour and switch back on at 9:30pm.”

To find out more about Earth Hour, visit the official website www.earthhour.org, sign up and join millions of people in more than 1,400 cities and towns in 80 countries throughout the world by turning off your lights for one hour at 8:30pm on Saturday 28 March.

Turn Them Off
by Keith Orchison

As a gimmick, the weekend’s Earth Hour has to be judged a success – for one thing it garnered the environmental activists 3,900 news articles around the world in 48 hours. It was reportedly the top search item on Twitter and a 30-second clip on You Tube attracted tens of thousands of views.

It has become, said one US commentator, a sort of open-source movement against global warming.

However, if you did turn your lights off for Earth Hour why did you not first ask yourself why you had them on and were they necessary at all?

But, regardless of the stupidity of having any lights on before Earth Hour, if the same effort could be conjured to persuade the users of the world’s one billion PCs to power down their PC's for just one night, that would save the energy used by the Empire State Building for the next 30 years.

Contrasting the popularity of Earth Hour with the broad failure over the past three or four years to create a movement to stop individuals and organisations from running idle computers is – at least to me – an interesting contrast between the 'feel good' aspects of the global warming debate and the hard reality of taking meaningful action.

Examined one by one, PCs may not appear to be a big energy hog, but they and their monitors account for 39 per cent of the global emissions of the information and telecommunications technology industry worldwide – and it accounts for two per cent of global greenhouse emissions, equivalent to the gases released by air travel and a third more than the total emissions of Australia.

What’s more, money can be saved by adopting the PC shut-down. A new report last week by a software company and the US Alliance to Save Energy, examining workplace PC power consumption in America, Britain and Germany, claims that the practice would save $US2.8 billion, £300 million and €918 million in those three countries respectively every year.

Powering down a fleet of PCs in a company, the survey claims, can save more than $US36 a year per desktop unit.

In the context of Earth Hour, equally importantly, the practice in the US alone is estimated to have the ability to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 20 million tonnes a year.

A third of the thousands of workers interviewed as part of the survey said they had no idea what their PC power scheme settings are or how to change them. Most don’t power down their PCs before going home.

Looking forward, while mature markets in the US, western Europe and Japan account today for 58 per cent of the world’s PCs, the growth in demand in the developing world, according to Gartner Research, will see the number in use globally double to two billion by 2014.

The environmental activists who created Earth Hour make no attempt to disguise its purpose. Carter Roberts, chief executive of WWF, said at the weekend: “This is a statement. In and of itself it’s not going to save much energy. The idea is to create political energy.” WWF argues that the stunt delivers a “mandate” to international governments to “tackle climate change.”

This was taken up in Bonn by Yvo de Boer, the lead UN climate negotiator, now entertaining delegates from 175 countries in yet another talk-fest about the talks to take place in Copenhagen in December. “Earth Hour,” he said, “tells every government representative to seal a deal in Copenhagen.”

How many of the delegates in Bonn powered down their PCs overnight, I wonder?

Meanwhile, if you overdosed on Earth Hour, I can suggest a mental emetic: go on to the US Energy Information Agency website. There you can find some updated predictions about sources of worldwide electricity supply.

Looking out to 2020, the agency forecasts that, while power generation from non-emitting supplies will rise 19.5 per cent for nuclear and 14.4 per cent for renewables in 10 years, use of fossil fuels will rise by far more – 49.4 per cent for gas and 34.8 per cent for coal.

What amount of 'political energy' created by the weekend’s stunt will impact on that, do you suppose?

Keith Orchison, director of consultancy Coolibah Pty Ltd and editor of Powering Australia yearbook, was chief executive of two national energy associations from 1980 to 2003. He was made a Member of the Order of Australia for services to the energy industry in 2004. He writes Business Spectator's resources and energy blog, Powerline.

But, regardless of the stupidity of having any lights on before Earth Hour, if the same effort could be conjured to persuade the users of the world’s one billion PCs to power down their PC's for just one night, that would save the energy used by the Empire State Building for the next 30 years.

But, but, but....

That would be 5,000 credits! (I sleep a lot!) :)

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