World Landmarks Go Dark For Earth Hour

Global "Lights Out" Campaign Hopes To Show Impact Of Energy Conservation

(CBS/AP)  From the Sydney Opera House to Rome's Colosseum to the Sears Tower's famous antennas in Chicago, floodlit icons of civilization went dark Saturday for Earth Hour, a worldwide campaign to highlight the threat of 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.

Several U.S. cities also plan symbolic blackouts or dimmings of monuments, including the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.

In Chicago, lights illuminating the Sears Tower's famous antennas flicked off. The red and white marquee outside Wrigley Field went dark. The stripe of white light around the top of the John Hancock Center disappeared.

Lights on more than 200 downtown Chicago buildings along with the state Capitol dome in Springfield were dimmed Saturday night.

"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.

Enthusiasm for Earth Hour was even higher north of the U.S. border with 100-thousand Canadians out of a total of 300-thousand people worldwide registered online for the event - putting the country among top participants anywhere.

Thousands jammed Nathan Phillips Square in downtown Toronto for a concert headlined by Nelly Furtado, who sang her hit song "Turn Out The Light," while lights on the city's C-N Tower were doused.

In Montreal, even the bulbs on the cross atop Mont Royal went out.

About 4,000 Canadian businesses, including hotels, stores and restaurants, signed on to take part.

The campaign began last year in Australia, and traveled this year from the South Pacific to Europe in cadence with the setting of the sun. Several U.S. cities also planned symbolic blackouts or dimmings of monuments, including at the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.

In Sydney, where an estimated 2.2 million observed the blackout last year, officials said it appeared at least as popular this time, involving untold candlelight dinners and beach-bonfire parties. The city's two architectural icons, the Opera House and Harbour Bridge, faded to black.

Last year's shutdown produced an estimated cut of 10.2 percent in Australia's carbon emissions for that hour.

More than two dozen cities and 300 towns across the globe planned their own smaller, largely symbolic switch-offs.

Lights 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.

In Ireland, where environmentalists are part of the coalition government, lights-out orders went out for scores of government buildings, bridges and monuments in more than a dozen cities and towns.

Activists gathered outside one of Dublin's most impressive floodlit buildings, the riverfront Custom House, and cheered as the lights went out. The building houses the Environment Department, run by a Green Party minister.

But next door, the international banks and brokerages of Dublin's financial district blazed away with light, illuminating floor after empty floor of desks and idling computers.

"The banks should have embraced this wholeheartedly and they didn't. But it's a start. Maybe next year," said Cathy Flanagan, an Earth Hour organizer in Dublin.

Ireland's more than 7,000 pubs elected not to take part - in part because of the risk that Saturday night revelers could end up smashing glasses, falling down stairs, or setting themselves on fire with candles.

Likewise, much of Europe - including France, Germany, Spain and European Union institutions - planned nothing to mark Earth Hour.

Internet search engine Google lent its support to Earth Hour by blackening its normally white home page and challenging visitors: "We've turned the lights out. Now it's your turn."

For more information, visit the organizers' Web site at http://www.earthhour.org/.

[rf35]

"Turn off your lights for an hour..." Baah "then plug in your computer and talk about it..."Baah
Posted by KaylaG04 at 01:32 PM

Too true. Earth hour probably produced a net increase in power consumption. I also have to agree with incog-nito that the mankind will only stop using fossil fuel when it runs out. Then we will switch to wood until not one tree remains. Then we will go extinct.
Unless the impossible happens and the majority of people limit family size to not more than two children per couple, better yet one, there is no hope. Reproductive responsibility is not something humans seem capable of. Therefore, the population will continue to grow. Even if it were to stabilize at the current level, it is unsustainable.
Children are not the future...they are the destruction of the future.

[cierrainpa]

This event is a good start, and it got us here. But, why do we have to wait for conservative Republicans pull their heads out of their a**es. spend our time There are good ideas here between the bashing of each others political parties.

[jcr103]

This event is a good start. But, things will only get better when conservative Republicans pull their heads out of their a**es.

[usbrit-2009]

I am keeping an open mind on man-made global warming at present. I''m definitely dubious about the coverage when it is all Global Warming this & that. If the Antarctic Peninsula, for example, is getting warmer and dropping off huge icebergs - how does that correlate to the fact the the other 95% of Antarctica is actually in a slight cooling trend? Seems like for every pro report, there''s an anti. As a scientist I take this as a subject unproven either way. What this board shows to me is an incredible level of "I''ve made up my mind and you''re an idiot." Either "The Libs" are full of it or the "Right is oned by industry so they lie" and are full of it. Can we not keep a civil discourse and let the science take it''s course. We need dual focus conferences where both sides are heard, not single focus sponsored by pro groups or anti groups. If man-made Global Warming is ever proven, disproven or prevented it''ll be science that does it NOT politicians of any stripe.

[cpaide]

"Earth Hour officials hoped 100 million people would turn off their nonessential lights and electronic goods for the hour."

ya, but what about the 10 to 20 million unplanned pregnancies this event will cause? better to keep the lights on as long as possible in 3rd world countries. and give all the catholics free candles to burn 24/7!

[termtex01]

"In Sydney, where an estimated 2.2 million observed the blackout last year, officials said it appeared at least as popular this time, involving untold candlelight dinners and beach-bonfire parties."

uh, doesn''t that contradict what they are claiming to try and do? So many candles and bonfires going at once has got to put a lot of ''greenhouse'' gasses into the air. Why not flashlights and light-sticks instead?

[incog-nito]

This is downright silly. It''s like giving a homeless person a turkey dinner at the shelter on Thanksgiving Day, then sending him out on the streets the next day. But it sure makes people feel good about themselves, doesn''t it? The ONLY way things MIGHT change is when the oil and the coal runs out. Cars get worse mileage now than a few decades ago. Instead of a paperless society helped by computers, more paper than ever gets wasted in the office. Junk mail clogs up my mailbox almost every day. My doorstep is cluttered with "newspapers" that I didn''t subscribe to. To date there has never been a conservation movement that worked. They come and go like a fad. People can driver Hummers if they want, and if global warming or pollution or wars kill a few millions every year, so be it. That''s the reality, and I won''t lose any sleep over it.

[incog-nito]

Xlib: It''s always interesting to see "cons" always bashing "libs" in their posts, even the ones that actually make sense. They just have to throw in a line or two about "if it weren''t for the libs...", etc. And then they turn around and say that libs blame everything on them.

[au_fait]

You have to be f#ing kidding me. What the hell did this really do in the grand scheme of things? Environmentalists and others who promote biofuels and carbon offsets do not understand how things work. climate is dynamic and not static, things change. It is good we are attempting to preservet things, but you cannot stop what nature and man to a small part will change. Can we control solar radiation, no. Let us burn the rains forest so that we can grown more soybeans to create biofuels. Let''s use a years worth of corn to create enough fuel to give us one tank of gas whose energy input is greater than the output.

[cierrainpa]

...sorry, I just wondered.