Earth Hour This Weekend
Greenfoot reminds us that Earth Hour is on in Sydney this weekend. Don’t know what Earth Hour is? It’s a campaign to improve awareness of global warming:
At 7.30pm on 31 March 2007, we are inviting Sydneysiders - businesses and individuals - to turn off their lights for just one hour, Earth Hour, as a sign of their commitment to reduce global warming.
Earth Hour is just the start of a campaign that aims to reduce Sydney’s greenhouse emissions by 5% in 2007. The event will demonstrate how simple actions can make the world of difference if everyone takes part. And it sends a powerful message that we care about the future of the planet.
The campaign is aimed at Sydneysiders but everyone from across Australia is encouraged to participate. All you have to do is turn off your lights for one hour at 7:30pm, local time, this Saturday. That should be easy enough to do. They hope it will later become a global campaign.
Update: Earth Hour has been declared a success:
The carbon dioxide saved during Sydney’s Earth Hour was equivalent to taking almost 50,000 cars off the road for an hour, Energy Australia says.
Sydney’s skyline was plunged into an unfamiliar darkness last night as the Harbour Bridge and Opera House, along with 65,000 households and 2,000 businesses, flicked off their lights.
A good round up of people’s experiences can be found over at Oikos.
More Organic Articles
2 Comments so far
Leave a reply
I am a self-confessed greeny and have never heard of Earth Hour! To anyone out there who promoted this fantastic idea - we need to hear more of it in Ipswich QLD. I am sure noone else here has heard of it too. We look forward to the last weekend of March 2008 to practice this idea.
Regards
Sonia Ghiggioli
I guess they promoted it in Sydney more than anywhere else. I did see it got a mention on BBC World so that should have helped.
I don’t see why we couldn’t do this more often. Would it kill us to do this once a month or even once a week? Now that would really make a difference.
I’m pretty fanatical about turning the lights off when I leave a room but I am guilty of leaving the TV on when I’m not really watching anything and I really should turn off my computer when I go out. My goal for this year is to be more vigilant and turn things off as soon as I stop using them.