Hundreds Of Cities Go Dark For ‘Earth Hour’
For one hour cities all across the world participated in ‘Earth Hour’. During this hour businesses and residents were going to turn off all of their lights and electrical instruments in order to conserve power and make a statement to show everyone the threat of the climate change.
The environmental group WWF urged governments, businesses and households to turn back to candle power for at least 60 minutes starting at 8 p.m. wherever they were.
The campaign began last year in Australia, and traveled this year from the South Pacific to Europe to North America in cadence with the setting of the sun. “What’s amazing is that it’s transcending political boundaries and happening in places like China, Vietnam, Papua New Guinea,” said Andy Ridley, executive director of Earth Hour. “It really seems to have resonated with anybody and everybody.”
Earth Hour officials hoped 100 million people would turn off their nonessential lights and electronic goods for the hour. Electricity plants produce greenhouse gases that fuel climate change. Landmarks such as San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge and Chicago’s Sears Tower went dark in the closing hours of Saturday’s round-the-world event. “It is not just about turning off the lights, it is about raising awareness,” San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom said. “Energy efficiency is low-hanging fruit. Energy efficiency is the easiest thing we can do” to reduce global warming.
In Chicago, lights on more than 200 downtown buildings were dimmed Saturday night, including the stripe of white light around the top of the John Hancock Center. The red-and-white marquee outside Wrigley Field also went dark. “There’s a widespread belief that somehow people in the United States don’t understand that this is a problem that we’re lazy and wedded to our lifestyles. (Earth Hour) demonstrates that that is wrong,” Richard Moss, a member of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the climate change vice president for WWF, said in Chicago on Saturday.
New Zealand and Fiji were first out of the starting blocks this year. And in Sydney, Australia — where an estimated 2.2 million observed the blackout last year — the city’s two architectural icons, the Opera House and Harbour Bridge, faded to black against a dramatic backdrop of a lightning storm. Lights also went out at the famed Wat Arun Buddhist temple in Bangkok, Thailand; shopping and cultural centers in Manila, Philippines; several castles in Sweden and Denmark; the parliament building in Budapest, Hungary; a string of landmarks in Warsaw, Poland; and both London City Hall and Canterbury Cathedral in England. Greece, an hour ahead of most of Europe, was the first on the continent to mark Earth Hour. On the isle of Aegina, near Athens, much of its population marched by candlelight to the port. Parts of Athens itself, including the floodlit city hall, also turned to black.