Earth Hour 2008
This is just a reminder or notice that this year’s earth hour will take place at 8 pm, this Saturday, March 29th. Details about the event can be found here. Although the hearts of the organizers are in the right place, I am not sure this event will be as successful as it could be. I hope I am wrong, and I may be since over a quarter of a million people have already signed up. There are a couple of reasons I think it could be even bigger.
First when you go to the home page of Earth Hour, you are asked to sign up and "agree to receive information from WWF about Earth Hour and other programs". It is stated on another page of the site that "WWF" is the World Wildlife Fund. In any case, asking people to register and agree to receive rather undefined emails is going to be a turn off for some.
Second, the stated single goal of the event is to draw attention to global warming. Nothing is said about other reasons to draw attention to our increasing energy use and dependence on coal and oil. I think if the event was less political and more practical in nature, it would garner more support and publicity.
In any case the plan is simple. Wherever you are, at 8pm local time, turn off all lights for one hour. I don’t know if I will participate, but I might. I lean more towards changes we can make on a smaller scale in our everyday lives than I do towards grand events like this. But who knows? It might be easy enough to do and if it does get millions of people taking part, could even provide an interesting view from space. Maybe I’ll have to ask Bob at Black Holes and Astrostuff what it would take to be visible from a space satellite.
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