Celebrating Earth Hour

Around 130 countries all over the world celebrate the earth hour. Households and commercial establishments who join the annual event turn off their lights for one hour to express global solidarity in creating the awareness about global warming and climate change.

I believe the event has massive impact in terms of creating awareness. It involves not only ordinary people but also big business entities. It has been an effective campaign.

Through this effort by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), we can realize how much we can lower energy consumption just for a one-hour cut on non-essential electricity use.

For example, Melbourne, Australia reduced demand by 10.1%. Sydney, being the city that participated in both the 2007 and 2008 Earth Hours, cut electricity consumption by 8.4%. (source: wikipedia)

Presently, consumable energy relies much on the use of fossil fuel. Inadvertently, the use of fossil fuel contributes largely on global warming because it emits toxic gases into the atmosphere and global warming leads to climate change.

While creating awareness is an essential effort to curb climate change, it’s not enough to participate merely in this annual event. We may have reduced greatly our energy consumption for one lightless hour but if on the next day we will go back to our normal energy consumption, it seems that we have not achieved the real goal of the hour.

Let us fix our efforts throughout the year and not just for one hour in the whole year. Let us plant trees because trees are the best fighters of toxic gases in the air.  

Image Above Courtesy of:

http://www.earthhour.org/Homepage.aspx