March 29, 2009

Earth Hour


Did you participate in Earth Hour? Major cities and anyone that wanted to participate were urged to turn off the lights for 60 minutes between 8:30 and 9:30 local time.
We turned out the lights and took Jersey for a walk to see the effects and guess what - it didn't look any different from any other night.

A few other hopefuls were out with their children with flashlights in hand. Two teen-aged girls had candles in jars but disappointingly there was no difference. Three restaurants on my "top road" served dinner by candle-light. And our local repertory cinema delayed their second showing. Hats off to them. But the rest of the street was blazing away brightly. All shops had their marquees on AND interior lights. Needless to say that streetlights were on for safety.
According to City Hall the demand for electricity was down 15% for that time period but we didn't see any change in our neighbourhood.

I was a little perplexed as mine is a neighbourhood that had a 24-hour blackout in the middle of January. We know how to do DARK.

So hooray and thank you for those who did dim the lights. It wasn't that hard, was it?

3 comments:

Anna said...

Our local paper ran a bit about how our city consciously decided not to participate. The article drew a number of dismayed comments. We turned off all of our lights for a few hours when we went out last night. It was not too difficult. The once inconvenience of no porch light to come home to was so minor. I was hoping more people had participated. I think next year I'll be more pro-active in getting out the word.
I'm happy to hear that your city noticed a difference in power use in that time, and hooray that you participated, too!

Megan said...

Los Angeles was a participating city but I didn't notice anything different about the downtown view. We had a nice hour sitting in candlelight, reading aloud. Unfortunately the outside security lamps are on timers so that spoiled our effect a bit, but we are glad we did it!

Solid Frog said...

Yes we turned our lights out and had a really cosy saturday evening with candles.

Ps. It's not me in the picture on my blog but maybe we got the same smile ...