I have just read on another blog – wattsupwiththat.com – that “Earth Hour” was “total bust” in California. The blog show the electricity consumtion for the state of California for the day in question, including the one hour period we all turned off our lights to help reduce electricity consumption, and therefore fossil fuel consumption and ultimately, remind ourselves that this behaviour affects global warming. The graphs show no change in electricity consumption between the hour the lights were all off and the same hour the next day.
I have a few considerations to add:
1) things like earth-hour, earth-day, etc. are important because they motivate public opinion and keep climate change, environmental and waste and performance issues in the news. That is already important.
2) Can we say that electricity usage on Saturday night would not have been significantly higher at that time without “Earth Hour” – that is, are the Saturday night and Sunday night timeslots otherwise comparable?
3) I understand that approximately 7% of US energy consumption is in data storage centers alone. If that is true, this type of consumption for IT states like California must be quite heavy, and these centres operate whether we turn off our computers or not – contributing to a volume of consumption that may be high enough to render houshold usage less significant in relation to the global level of consumption. The fact is that IT burns a huge amount of physical resources that are “hidden” among apparently “virtual” benefits. I.E., internet requires towers and power! Does anyone have any statistics on this for California?
Anyway, these are just some observations about Earth Hour. I turned off my lights, computer and everything – even the refigerator. I won’t tell you what we did in the dark – but I found Earth Day to have a very high marginal benefit!
We had Earth Day in Italy in 2005, when a tree in Switzerland knocked out power nationally for an entire day – heh heh.
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