What did you do for Earth Hour?
March 29, 2010 at 9:55 pm 3 comments
This Earth Hour we got together over a pot luck dinner and played Trivial pursuits by candle light. What more could you want? Good food, good wine, and good company.
And we were in good company. The number of people turning off their lights and appliances for Earth Hour has grown from 2.2 million in Sydney in 2007 to a planned million people in 126 countries in 2010. According to Stuff one million people turned off their lights in New Zealand alone.
There are some people who think Earth Hour is just tokenism, or green washing. While it may be purely symbolic, that doesn’t mean its pointless. According to the organisers WWF (World Wide Fund For Nature), “Earth Hour is not about saving electricity, it is instead a highly “visible” symbolic global action, that millions of people can easily join in with.
It is an action that allows our voices to be joined together in sending out a serious message to our leaders, politicians and governments, saying: “We care about our planet!””
Most councils in New Zealand seem to be listening. 47 signed up for Earth Hour.
While Hutt City council was noticeably absent, there is still support in Lower Hutt. Were you in Lower Hutt for Earth Hour? How did you celebrate it? What companies deserve brick bats or bouquets?
You can also tweet what you did using #earthhour
Or add a photo on Flickr
Entry filed under: Electricity. Tags: 2010, Conservation, Earthhour, Electricity, Lower Hutt, New Zealand, Sustainability.
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Hutt Chick 
1.
David | April 7, 2010 at 1:30 pm
Not trying to be negative here, more constructive, but Earth hour seems to be an event to give people warm fuzzies more than anything else. I whole-heartedly agree that more awareness around climate change is a good thing, but earth hour goes about creating awareness in a completely inappropriate way.
burning candles is not an appropriate way to create awareness of increasing carbon emissions, just like punching people isn’t an appropriate way to create awareness of an increase in domestic abuse.
Yes, we need more awareness, and especially more action on this issue, but, in its current form, earth hour creates more damage than good as it lets people believe they are saving the planet by emitting carbon into the atmosphere.
quite illogical.
2.
Lisa Bridson | April 8, 2010 at 5:14 pm
David, thank you for your comments. You are not alone in your views that Earth Hour is ineffective, and I am always happy to debate things.
You have raised an interesting point about the carbon emitted from a candle. I have done a bit of research (thank you wikipedia), and this is what I found. “It has also been claimed that natural waxes have a neutral carbon footprint as carbon dioxide was recently taken from the air to produce the natural wax, which upon burning would not result in a net increase in carbon dioxide.” So there are benefits of using natural candles instead of electricity.
But as I said in my blog, I don’t see the benefit of this as saving electricity, or reducing carbon for that particular hour. It is a symbolic gesture, to show you care. It also raises awareness, educates and makes people question their daily behaviour. Once people have taken a step and switched off the lights, maybe next year they will take another step and choose natural candles, or take another step and walk around the house switching off at the wall all those “vampire power” sucking appliances, or change their behaviour during the year. They may only be little steps, but they are steps in the right direction.
3.
David | April 9, 2010 at 8:59 pm
I agree that awareness is key (i think we’re fighting for the same cause), but in NZ, 70% of our total electricity generation is from hydro power alone. then we have geothermal and wind power. Yes, we have power generated from unsustainable measures, but the vast majority of our power is already green.
What I would like to see is earth hour become more of an event that focuses on raising awareness (and possibly money) to help develop new technologies to help NZ generate 100% of its electricity from sustainable sources.
I agree that switching off power in other countries is a good way of creating awareness (preferably without burning fossil fuels in the process), but in NZ its less of an issue and there are more productive ways of creating awareness, and maybe even creating cures for the problem