Earth Hour 03.29.2008

Last night, 10781 Ackers Drive did its part to save the planet. Mark it.

Earth Hour is, according to Wikipedia, "an international event that asks households and businesses to turn off their lights and non-essential electrical appliances for one hour on the evening of 29 March at 8 pm local time until 9 pm to promote electricity conservation and thus lower carbon emissions." I only became aware of Earth Hour yesterday thanks to Google's efforts to promote the event.

Earth Hour was started in Australia, and it is promoted there by some environmentalist group and the Sydney Morning Herald. It was first held in 2007 and reduced the electricity consumption of Sydney by up to 10% for that hour. This year, over 300,000 people pledged support online and a number of cities agreed to partner up with the campaign. Partners in the US include Atlanta, Chicago, San Francisco, Phoenix, and Studio City, California, but a number of other cities agreed to support the effort. Looking at the list on Wikipedia, I can see more cities in North America than anywhere else got behind the effort, but Canada really carried the team because all 13 Canadian provinces and territories pledged support. I wonder what the provincial governments actually did though? What do they have the power to do? Do they call the mayors in the major cities and ask for support or can they turn the lights off themselves?

If Canada loves Mother Earth so much, maybe it should just marry her.

So, like I said, I only found out about Earth Hour yesterday while at work. I mentioned to Max and Daniela at lunch that we should save the Earth. There was some hostility right off the bat. We agreed to take a vote, as we never do in these situations, and the Earth squeaked out a victory, 2-1. The arguments were compelling on both sides, but in the end democracy lead us to the responsible decision.

It turns out that actually turning the lights out was hard. Max bought this house less than a year ago and he wasn't sure how to turn off the lights on the front of the building. There is a little piece of plastic out front, with the number of the house on it (otherwise you would never be able to tell these houses apart) and it contains a light bulb that comes on automatically at night. There are also two lamps that keep the driveway lit up. We had no idea how to turn any of these things off. There aren't any light switches. Max had an idea and it required something to stand on and a screwdriver. Inside the garage there is a metal plate with two wires that make up a circuit to SOMETHING in the house. Max took it apart and we lost one of the three external lights along with the doorbell.

The two lamps that keep the driveway bright proved too difficult to turn off. I guess that would make Earth Hour a failure for us, but we're ignoring that for now. The two lamps probably run on sensors (we didn't see them) and to turn them off we needed to unscrew them and take the bulbs out. It looked hard and we were already 3 minutes away from Earth Hour so we gave up and went back inside.

So with almost all the lights off, we played Clue by candlelight. Keeping the lights off is easy when you have boardgames and plenty of beer. Max brought out a candle he had that said "Africa" on one side of it. We all thought it was appropriate. It put out a powerful smell though and because Max was sitting next to it all night, he kept complaining that the house smelled like Africa.

I thought that maybe I could take some pictures of us with the candles and then send them into Google. Just to let Google know that it made a difference because they were the reason we were sitting in the dark in the first place. Then, this morning, when I checked online to see if Earth Hour was a success, I saw that San Francisco turned off the lights on the Golden Gate Bridge, Chicago turned off the lights inside of the Sears Tower, and Sydney turned off the juice to the Opera House and the Harbor Bridge. I doubt that we can compete with that for Google's attention. But since I already had the photos, I figured I could just blog about it. Viola.