I became aware of Earth Hour when a girl at Yahoo sent an e-mail to a mailing list wondering why Yahoo wasn't participating in the event. The general attitude of the e-mail was, oh my goodness, we're not supporting the environment and our competitors at
Google are blacking out their webpage to raise awareness. I don't know about her, but I think Yahoo does a pretty good job of supporting environmental causes. It has a portal,
green.yahoo.com, which has lots of great material.
In either case, she posted this video which promotes Earth Hour 2008. The gist of it is, celebrate Earth Hour by turning off your lights for one hour on March 29st 8:00pm to reduce your carbon output.
After watching the video, I became rather cynical. I absolutely hate the hype and self-gratification that this type of event generates. You get a lot of celebrities and corporations jumping onto the bandwagon basically going, wow, look how good we are to the environment... as they drive off in their SUVs. Lets all celebrate this historical difference we're making by sitting in the dark for an hour, look at our sacrifice!
I was also quite skeptical about the environmental benefits of such an event. dr5.org has a blog entry entitled, "
Earth Hour is the Perfect Example of Environmentalism" which summarizes my feelings on this event quite well:
In case you missed it, environmental groups told us that we should turn off all lights for one hour tonight. This is the perfect example of what environmentalism is all about–all spectacle and no benefit for the environment.
Earthhour.org explains that “On 31 March 2007, 2.2 million people and 2100 Sydney businesses turned off their lights for one hour - Earth Hour. If the greenhouse reduction achieved in the Sydney CBD during Earth Hour was sustained for a year, it would be equivalent to taking 48,616 cars off the road for a year.” [...]
The problem is that in reality, Earth Hours don’t achieve any real greenhouse gas emissions reductions. Turning off the lights would only reduce greenhouse gas emissions if that means this caused less coal or natural gas to be burned at a power plant. But turning off the lights for one hour will not achieve this. Coal and natural gas-fired power plants have to be kept “at temperature” and ready to produce electricity. Often these types of plants keep their boilers at 700 degrees F or higher. It can take days to heat up a boiler to these temperatures.
Reducing electricity consumption for one hour, as called for with Earth Hour will not cause the plant owner to burn any less fuel because the boilers have to be hot and ready to produce electricity at the end of the hour.
