a couple saturdays ago, sydney did something they called ‘earth hour‘ where they urged residents & businesses to turn off their lights for an hour (saturday 730pm to be exact). i was up that wknd for the v fest and didn’t notice any kind of difference – but then we couldn’t see all the big buildings from where we were. we could see some apartment buildings that definitely didn’t participate. supposedly more than 2 mil people turned off their lights (there’s 4 mil in sydney) providing a 10% drop in energy in the cbd.
it was all over the news up there but just looked totally daggy. like a few places (opera house) turned off lights but the city didn’t seem much different when they kept showing it on the news (yet talking about how dark it was!). i found it pretty amusing. thankfully, there’s now a 5 min video capturing all the excitement! fyi, you have to forward thru to about 1/2 way to see the lights going off.
if anything, it illustrates how much could be saved if companies turned off their building lights, including marketing signs & mcdonald’s arches…