You may have already heard about “Earth Hour” planned for March 29, and if so you may find this latest eco-stunt as silly as I do. For those not in the know, Reuters described it this way:
“As many as 30 million people are tipped to switch off lights and televisions around the world to help fight climate change with 24 cities joining Earth Hour on March 29, environment group WWF said on Wednesday. Following last year’s Earth Hour in Australia, where 2.2 million Sydneysiders powered-down for an hour, cities including Atlanta, San Francisco, Bangkok, Ottawa, Dublin, Vancouver, Montreal and Phoenix have also signed on.”
C’mon, folks. Is this really the best message to send about efforts to stop climate change? That it’ll require us all to sit in the dark and give up modern conveniences? I’m all for raising awareness about the problem of climate change and the need to solve it — through market-based solutions that will lead to new energy innovations that keep the economy humming and the lights turned on. But publicity stunts like these simply help to push the issue to the fringe and give climate skeptics more to ridicule.
I blogged about a similar stunt done by NBC during one of their NFL halftime shows in November. Enough already.
As I said back then: “Yes, turn off the lights when you’re not in the room, but there’s no need to sit in the dark.”
This entry was posted on Friday, February 22nd, 2008 at 1:35 pm and is filed under International Environmental News . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
March 9th, 2008 at 12:58 am
Funnily, you put the finger yourself on the correct counter-argument : awareness. Speaking for myself, Earth Hour does not make me think that I need to go right back to prehistoric ages to make a difference about global warming; just that the way I use energy can make a difference. You do know that last year’s event (2 200 000 persons and 2100 enterprises only in Sydney turning their lights off for one hour) had the same effect as taking 48 000 cars off the road for one year? That’s more than enough to make me think that using eco-energetic lightbulbs (13 watts instead of 60 watts) does make a difference. That’s a waterdrop in the ocean, but the ocean is made of waterdrops.
March 31st, 2008 at 3:06 pm
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