"Earth Hour" gains momentum
- Liz Barratt-Brown
- Senior Attorney, Washington, DC
- Blog | About
- Posted March 28, 2009 in Living Sustainably , Moving Beyond Oil , Solving Global Warming
On Saturday, March 28, millions of people and thousands of cities and municipalities participated in "Earth Hour" - a World Wildlife Fund organized event aimed at building awareness and action to stem climate change by turning lights off for the hour from 8:30-9:30 PM. First lights were dimmed in Australia and Asia. Then Europe and Africa followed. And finally North America and Latin America.
There's been lots of back and forth about Earth Hour - shouldn't we really just focus on changing our lightbulbs for greater impact than turning off our lights for an hour? I, for one, don't buy the sceptics' arguments and think it is a heartening thing to have millions of people participate in a worldwide event focused on global warming.
Sitting here in darkness, save my few candles, I observe two things - first that my computer is on and most of the lights in my neighborhood appear to be on. Too bad. That said, I have scrolled through the photos of lights going out at the pyramids in Cairo, at the Eiffel Tower in Paris, at Big Ben and the Parliament buildings in London and - maybe most remarkably - across many cities that I wouldn't have guessed would participate - Dubai, Jakarta, Bejing, Istanbul, Hong Kong, etc... According to WWF's web page on the event, in 2007, only Sydney, Australia - where the idea was hatched - participated. In 2008, 400 cities participated. This year, over 4,000 cities and municipalities are participating, including Las Vegas. That one I have to see.
I didn't join the others from my city who gathered in Freedom Plaza to watch Washington D.C.'s largest municipal building darken or before the National Cathedral. I have been spending the hour reading about the event and following some pretty interesting links. I clicked on a Yale link because I went to school there and I was interested to learn that Yale has a forum on climate change and the media. There was a news clips about Greg Craven, the Oregon High School teacher who posted a YouTube video on climate change to reach young people where they live - e.g. on the Internet. The video had a pretty eye-catching title - "The Most Terrifying Video You'll Ever See" and it had been viewed, according to the short clip, almost 2 million times. I had to check it out to see if it lived up to its name and what young folks had watched that many times. What I found was a video that in a few minutes lays out a rationale for why we have to pick column A to save the world.
I want you to go and watch the video so I am not going to tell you much more about Column A - but what struck me in watching this video is how the worst case for acting and being wrong about global warming (e.g. it doesn't happen) is that the world spirals into a global economic depression. Well, we've already got that (the video was apparently made before the events of the last half a year). The worst case for not acting and being right (e.g. global warming happens) is economic, social, political, health, and environmental collapse - or as Greg explains - the end of the world as we know it. He continues that under the worst case, it is all coming soon and won't be delegated to some distant grandchild. He does all this in a dispassionate way which is probably why this video is so terrifying. So please take a few minutes to watch it.
My hour would have gone by washing dinner dishes, putting laundry in the dryer, finishing cleaning up my desk and maybe picking up "The Omnivore's Dilemma" (a great read by the way). It would have been an hour that would have passed like any other, powered by coal from Appalachia (probably from the horrible practice of mountain top removal that NRDC is profiling right now on Switchboard).
Thankfully, there are millions who did much more than me to mark Earth Hour and who will get politically active as a result. That is a great and necessary thing. As for me, I am grateful for my hour steeped in candle light and spent scrolling through the photos from around the world. I enjoyed feeling the human collective, rather than fossil, energy in the moment. And I am grateful for learning about Greg Craven and his YouTube video that is reaching so many young people.
Let's hope that Earth Hour helps lead us closer towards making the momentous changes needed (e.g. to choose Column A). We must move from Earth Hour to Earth Year, Decade, Century - because we need to figure out - and fast - how to let the planet do what it has for the term of our time here - give us a liveable climate.
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Comments
wrench — Mar 29 2009 10:43 AM
I celebrated this special hour by:
- Let my SUV's run in the drive for an hour.
- Revved my large chainsaw and made threatening gestures to the trees on my land.
- Turned on every light on in the house, the offices and the warehouse.
- Restrung the 10000 christmas lights and let them light up my front yard.
- Run my AC set at 50
- Turn my boiler up to 70
"Candles seem natural, but are almost 100 times less efficient than incandescent light globes, and more than 300 times less efficient than fluorescent lights. If you use one candle for each extinguished globe, you're essentially not cutting CO2 at all, and with two candles you'll emit more CO2. Moreover, candles produce indoor air pollution 10 to 100 times the level of pollution caused by all cars, industry and electricity production."
[edited per our comments policy -- name-calling is out of bounds. - Ian @ NRDC]
Have you not been reading the mounting evidence against the politically motivated climate alarmism movement? Grow up....
Ben Tan — Mar 29 2009 10:48 AM
I watched Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" just before earth hour in Singapore. Also visited some sites to learn more about Renewable Resources and got to know more about climate change, global warming. Hope there are more such activities to make people like myself to get more serious about saving the planet.
Red Desert — Mar 30 2009 07:42 PM
Thanks Liz--I'd forgotten about "Earth Hour", but I caught your post Saturday before leaving work here on the West Coast.
I spent the evening on a hillside in front of the house—something I hadn’t done for a long time. The hill forms one side of a gap in the Hollywood Hills--realtors would pitch the vista as a "canyon view". But it's not really a canyon and it's not like the water gaps back east. It must be structural, as in geologic, a pass or a saddle, but the top of this pass is somewhere buried below the surface of the Los Angeles basin.
Houses are densely scattered all across the steep face of the hill on the opposite side. A heterogeneous collection of structures and styles, but a great many are finished in light colored stucco. In the morning, these houses reflect the dawn sky back to those of us on the eastern side. On a clear morning with a setting full moon, it can be a startlingly beautiful sight.
But tonight the houses are dark shadows punctuated by electric light and the air is littered with haze. The brand new moon is a dark, dull circle with a narrow yellow arc suspended across the bottom—hanging down as if the arc of light had weight. Visible above the crest on the left, the Santa Monica Mountains retreat in shadows towards the Pacific, and left of the mountain front, the seemingly infinite grid of Los Angeles.
The moon sat as scripted (this is Hollywood) right on cue. By 9:27 it was just over the trees, by 9:29, it was nearly impossible to see. The tip of an arc emerged briefly through an opening, glowing—I couldn’t help thinking--like a distant October wildfire. By 9:31 it was gone.
Red Desert — Mar 30 2009 08:33 PM
Wrench--
Did you really re-wed you chain saw? Please, no need to go into details, but the nuptials?
My hat's off to you--you're willing to give it up for the things you believe in.