GOING GREEN
Climate change
Earth Hour: Making a difference?
Last Updated: Thursday, March 26, 2009 | 12:37 PM ET
CBC News
Gordon Kubanek, left to right, Frank de Jong and Chris Bradshaw hold candles below the unlit Peace Tower on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Saturday, March 29, 2008, in observance of Earth Hour. (Fred Chartrand/Canadian Press)It won't reverse global warming, but proponents say Earth Hour is a good way to raise awareness about the climate problems the world is facing.
Held the last Saturday of March, Earth Hour was started by the World Wildlife Fund in Sydney, Australia, in 2007. More than two million people and businesses took part in that first year. They shut off their lights for an hour, resulting in a 10 per cent reduction in consumption on the city electrical grid.
The next year, the event went global. Around the world, 26 major cities and 300 smaller cities and towns signed up to participate. Canadians in about 150 communities, including Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, pledged to turn off their lights for 60 minutes at 8 p.m. local time on March 29, 2008.
In Toronto, much of the downtown core went dark as Mayor David Miller pulled a ceremonial switch to dim the lights at city hall shortly before the hour approached.
In Ottawa, the Peace Tower and its four-faced clock above Canada's Parliament faded to black. Hours later, darkness enveloped Rome's Colosseum, Dublin's Custom House, London's City Hall and other landmarks across Europe.
For Earth Hour 2009, organizers had hoped to sign up 1,000 cities. The week before the event, almost 2,400 cities, towns and municipalities in 83 countries had agreed to take part in the event. Just under 19,000 businesses and 5,500 organizations have signed on.
This year, the lights will go out at the Akropolis in Athens, the Empire State Building in New York City, and Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
But does it make a difference?
Organizers see the event as a way to encourage the world to conserve energy. While it is unlikely that all lights in participating cities will be cut, it is the symbolic darkening of monuments, businesses and individual homes they are most eagerly anticipating.
The goal is to cut electricity consumption by five per cent for an hour. As Bob McDonald, host of CBC Radio's science program Quirks & Quarks observed following last year's Earth Hour, cutting power consumption during a party makes everyone feel good, but the actual reduction it achieves is a drop in the bucket.
"According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, there needs to be a 50 per cent to 85 per cent reduction in emissions to turn the current warming trend around," McDonald wrote. "That's a long way from a big party held one Saturday night a year."
On the other hand, McDonald notes, Earth Hour also demonstrated how dealing with climate change is really going to happen: from the ground up.
The World Wildlife Fund set a target of one billion people shutting off their lights between 8:30 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. on Saturday, March 28, 2009. The organization says that that kind of participation would be equivalent to a "global vote" in favour of taking action on climate change. It would also send a strong message to the world leaders expected to gather at the United Nations Climate Change Conference, which takes place Dec. 9-17, 2009, in Copenhagen. The meeting is supposed to come up with a plan to deal with climate change that will replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.
Not taking part? The organization notes that if every Canadian swapped one incandescent bulb for a compact fluorescent one, the country would save 1.6 billion kWh and 345,000 tonnes of CO2.
