Earth Hour 2011 Eiffel Tower
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The Best Science Writing Online 2012
Showcasing more than fifty of the most provocative, original, and significant online essays from 2011, The Best Science Writing Online 2012 will change the way...
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Consider an hour without power, from 8:30 to 9:30 p.m. Saturday, local time. Organizers say as many as 1.8 billion will join in the symbolic environmental event worldwide. But if you live in the US, your neighbors may think you just blew a fuse.
Earth Hour starts in the mid-Pacific Islands on Saturday night, March 31 with an hour of voluntary electrical blackouts in Tonga.
The event moves on to the western Pacific and Indian Oceans, where stars helping promote the event include an Australian model, an Indian cricket champion and a Russian heavyweight boxer.
Following the sunset, Earth Hour heads west, where hotels and office buildings across the Persian Gulf will go dark. In Dubai, the world’s tallest building – the Burj Khalifa – will stand lightless. Five-star hotels in Saudi Arabia will burn a few hundred gallons less oil in that quiet hour. Even Libya, fresh from many involuntary blackouts, will host Earth Hour events.
A long list of events are also scheduled for Europe: Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower and the Leaning Tower of Pisa will all go dark for one hour when the clocks strike 8:30 p.m.
Barely notice
Yet few Americans have ever heard of Earth Hour, and only a few dozen high profile events are scheduled. While the Empire State Building and the United Nations in New York City will go dark, most of New York will barely notice.
Earth Hour has only one US press coordinator to publicize the event. Slovenia has two. India has three. Brunei has five.
Conceived in Australia in 2007 at World Wildlife Fund's Sydney office, and promoted by the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper, Earth Hour’s global popularity may reflect a disparity between U.S. and international receptivity to environmental symbolism.
“In Asia and the Middle east, you'll find that people are less aware about the risks of climate change and global warming,” a spokesman for the Kuwaiti team said. “The Earth Hour campaign carries a simple message … so that people can be easily engaged environmentally.”
Of course, the U.S. has had its own original Earth Day celebration since 1970. A Google news search delivers 33,000 links focused on Earth Day, more than three weeks away. Earth Hour, meanwhile, had only 6,000 hits hours before it began in the far Pacific.
Strikes a chord
The original Earth Day has been the centerpiece of the US and European environmental movement for four decades, and it continues to engage grassroots groups around world, said Dennis Hayes, the principal Earth Day founder who continues to chair the global advisory committee.
The lack of enthusiasm stateside for Saturday's event could be cultural: From Earth Day to Earth Hour seems like downsizing, a concession to the less committed, Grist Magazine joked.
But the serious news about Earth Hour is nearly all international.
Hundreds of items in small publications in Asia, Africa and the Middle East show that the event strikes a chord in smaller cites as much as large ones, and in traditional societies as much as westernized ones.
Typical was a statement by the mayor of Taguig – a city of 600,000 in the Philippines. "Participating in the activity signifies one's support for environmental protection, as well as the campaign to solve or at least mitigate the ill effects of climate change to the environment," said Lani Cayetano.
Bill Kovarik is a journalist and a professor of communication at Radford College in Southwestern Virginia.
This article originally appeared at The Daily Climate, the climate change news source published by Environmental Health Sciences, a nonprofit media company.
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14 Comments
Add CommentHosting an event at UPenn in Philadelphia and found it difficult to get the Philly gov. on board. Hoping to use this year's as a pilot event to show them how effective it can be in raising awareness. I was surprised to hear from the Mayor's Office of Sustainability that a couple buildings do actually turn off, but they don't publicize and no one else i had talked to knew about it. Really hoping to be able to grow Philly's participation in the coming years!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf you happen to live in Philly, learn more about the event here: http://www.facebook.com/events/187101251403097/
If you live in the USA, your rulers, the Koch brothers, disapprove of Earth Hour as less of their products would be used, and so their profits decline.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThanks for a great article on Earth Hour. Hopefully this year it catches on in the States!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWanted to let you know that average citizens can help create a very large donation to Wildlife Conservation efforts.
Basically, we are trying to win Walmart's #GOTS contest to generate a huge donation towards wildlife conservation. You can watch the video at SmanimalWorld.com.
Help the Smanimals save animals!
In the USA it is lights on!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/03/30/let-there-be-light-human-achievement-hour-to-coincide-with-earth-hour/
The event is about saluting the people who "keep the lights on and produce the energy."
- Myron Ebell, Competitive Enterprise Institute
Sponsored a libertarian think tank.
I like it. Earth hour is a joke, sponsored by people who have ZERO knowledge of Energy. In northern areas, turning the lights off in April causes clean, green Hydro Electricity to be replaced by filthy, fume belching Oil & Gas furnaces. Big accomplishment that is.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe easiest and most sensible thing is to simply replace dirty Coal, Oil & Gas energy with clean, green Nuclear & conventional Hydro power. But Big Carbon don't want that to happen, so they LOVE silly, pointless charades like "Earth Hour" and "Solar Power" and "Wind Power" - that make Greenies of the technologically illiterate clan, very happy, the status quo is preserved, Oil,Gas & Coal are burned like there is no tomorrow, and politicians and greenie morons can wave their "clean energy" banner pretending something is being done, when in truth ZIP is being done - and flagship Greenie Country Germany is the singular example, lots of hype, but they produce one of the highest GHG emissions in Europe of 600 gms CO2 per kwh generated, vs No-Hype France @ 83 gms CO2 per kwh produced. Lot's of Earth Hour proponents in Germany.
Earth Hour: "...Conceived in Australia in 2007 at World Wildlife Fund's Sydney office..."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLet's take a look at the WWF.
These Sleazoid Pimps actually published this document:
http://www.scienceblogs.de/primaklima/G8_Scorecards_2009.pdf
In it they rate France at 350 gms CO2/kwh, even though the TRUTH is France has 83 gms CO2/kwh output vs WWF's poster boy Germany is 601 gms CO2/kwh. So where do these cretins get the 350 from:
"...WWF does not consider nuclear power to be a viable policy option. The indicators "emissions per capita", "emissions per GDP" and "CO2 per kWh electricity" for all countries have therefore been adjusted as if the generation of electricity from nuclear power had produced 350 gCO2/kWh (emission factor for natural gas). Without the adjustment, the original indicators for France would have been much lower, e.g. 86 gCO2/kWh..."
www.energyfromthorium.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1625&start=0
Another example of Sleazy, dishonest, disinformation cooking the books on Wind Power:
http://uvdiv.blogspot.com/2009/10/wwf-cooking-books-again.html
Rating the Capacity Factor of Wind at 40-60% when in fact is more like 15-30%, 18% in posterboy Germany.
So WWF with > $700M in revenue every year, how come Cancer Research, Starving Children, devastating diseases like Cystic Fibrosis can't get money like that. And six figure salaries with lot's of perks for the executive. And a total dictatorship, not even a hint of democracy in the WWF:
ecofascism.com/review26.html#WWF-Germany
"...WWF-Germany is a foundation with a self-perpetuating board of directors dominated by wealthy big game hunters. It hasn't even the pretense of internal democracy..."
Cool, thanks.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe article states:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"The event moves on to the western Pacific and Indian Oceans, where stars helping promote the event include an Australian model, an Indian cricket champion and a Russian heavyweight boxer."
If the organizers of this 'cause celeb' had only reached out to Hollywood, they could have successfully changed the entire (media) world, again!
Do a fly-over of North Korea on "Google Night". But for PyongYang, THEY'VE been participating in "Earth Hour" since the dawn of civilization.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI will live to see all of your cataclysmic predictions proved false. I will live in increasing comfort and luxury, as will most people in the world who embrace freedom and capitalism rather than tyranny and bureaucracy.
But I will not live to see the end of the constant bleating of people who quite frankly want to take over the world; the tyranny of small minds who believe so fervently in the fantasy one world run by them, the people who mean well, who care so much more than the rest of us.
"If we could just get everybody to turn off their lights for one hour, then, the world would be a better place, somehow,for sure". Ask a representative of that virtual Stone Age Culture in North Korea if they wouldn't like a little light of an evening.
Better yet, why don't you direct all of your ridiculous "Earth Hour" energies toward toppling the Government of North Korea? You could slip in by cover of night (piece of cake, am I right?), and do an Occupy Wall Street Protest right in front of Menta Lee Ill for a couple of minutes before they mow you down where you sit. No pepper spray wasted on useful idiots like you.
You will have died, but at least you will have died for a worthy cause.
Thank God and His chief representatives on earth... the
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBrothers Koch, Bush I&II, Cheney and The Donald, that
we don't have to worry our pretty little heads about
silly things like climate change or "earth hour". We
have been assured repeatedly by such Archangels that
global warming and environmental collapse are merely godless, communazi, feminist, and possibly homosexual travesties.. perpetrated by grant-greedy scientists.
It is clear to those of us who dote on Rush's every syllable that idolators of theory, data and mere facts have caused the rest of us to lose our way to the path
of Received Authority and Wisdom (or among we anointed:
"Gollygeewhizdom"). Let's keep the lights on all night.
In fact, why not turn EVERYTHING on?!.. water, gas
and all! We'll show those seven billion hypothetico-deductivistic foreigners who are not us that we are not to be toyed with and that we don't need any aliens to pull the wool over our eyes. Our humble rich and their
devoted servants in Washington do that just fine, thank
you very much.
In fact, when the light all over the world was down, we could understand the importence of electricity and I could not help saying: And God said there would be light.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSounds like a bad guy from the show "Captain Planet".
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisClimate change will put the lights out for us if we continue to damage our atmosphere like you would have us do. It got pretty dark in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, right?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is estimated that people from more than 152 countries and 7000 cities/towns participated in Earth Hour 2012. Based on my readings and views of a blog article that I posted: http://tripleeagent.blogspot.com/2013/03/earth-hour-2013.html, Europeans were much more aware of Earth Hour 2013 than Americans. I'm guessing that it came and went before most Americans realized, but we are likely becoming more aware each year.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this