Monday, March 31, 2008

Baby steps does it.

According to a contact in Australia, during this year's Earth Hour 'the saving was equivalent to two power stations being temporarily out of service.'

Last year it was a Sydney-based event. This year it has gone global. According to the BBC link in the previous post, (which keeps changing some of the details) Chicago and San Francisco took part, along with Bangkok, Manila, Toronto and Dublin. New Zealand joined in as well. In Bangkok they saved 73.34 megawatts of electricity, which would have produced 45.8 tonnes of carbon dioxide.

In Britain, a number of villages arranged their own lights-out, although there has been no big publicity. 26 councils dimmed lights. I don't know which they were. On the south coast, Brighton turned off the lights on its pier, and in London - which was not officially involved - lights were turned down at City Hall.

Next year, will there be more? I guess it's our call.

5 comments:

Karen said...

I saw a little bit about this on tv last week, but there certainly wasn't much publicity. What reminded me was that Google made their main page black, yesterday, to promote Earth Hour. Very good idea.

aliqot said...

Thanks , Karen. I think Earth Hour is raising awareness even though it's a slow process. I was feeling a bit negative about it after some people made facetious comments (not on here), but even sneering shows people are thinking.

Rich said...

I joinec in! Looking after a baby in the pitch black was interesting. I thought googles dark page was great as it was the first I knew of it. Shame it was so poorly avertised.

Cheers Ric aka Rocket from the Dock

aliqot said...

Hi Ric,

I did advertise it on the Dock, you know! ;@)

Still, next year...

You must be very competent with the baby by now, daring to look after him in the dark.

Ham said...

That's awesome.