Earth Hour 2008 – How Did Vancouver Fare?
The world kicked off an hour of darkness this weekend to raise global awareness of humanity’s excess energy consumption. The event started off last year as over 2 million Sydney residents and the Sydney Opera house went lights out for one hour in hopes of answering the following question:
- How can we inspire people to take action on climate change?
Arguably, the strategy was a success since over 20 cities added themselves to the bill this year, including the city of Vancouver and BC Hydro. Apparently, “BC Hydro measured the drop of the collective electricity use during the event.”
I wanted to see whether I could notice the difference from my candle-lit apartment, so I set up my camera to take a still of the apartment building across my alley. Here’s the before (~7:45pm) and after (~8:45pm):
If anything, I think I count one or two additional suites’ lights on – too bad. However, the WWF’s flickr pool has some amazingly contrastive photo’s up, including Vancouver’s City Hall, and the north side of Downtown Vancouver:
Before
After
Downtown Toronto is pretty unreal too. What did you do?
5 Responses to “Earth Hour 2008 – How Did Vancouver Fare?”
Wow you’re right. Toronto is unreal! Sadly, very sadly, I did not get to participate 🙁 I live with my family and my parents kinda refuse to believe in the impact of Earth Hour.
my parents kinda refuse to believe in the impact of Earth Hour
At least they could appreciate saving money on their electricity bill – its like responding to, “Hey, wanna save money?” with, “Nnnno! I already spend every Sunday morning cutting out coupons from the weekend flyers. I don’t need to do any more.”
Touché. I like how you managed to pull two quintessential Chinese stereotypic characteristics in one line: the overly protracted “no” and cutting coupons on Sunday morning.
The beauty of this is, my father is the type of figure that will really take out the electricity bill between last month and this month, and given that we participated in Earth Hour, will proceed to calculate the difference in total cost. Then, even if proven that he saved a dollar or whatever, will still tell me to go cut coupons.
I look forward to moving out.
[…] If anything, I think I count one or two additional suites’ lights on – too bad. However, the WWF’s flickr pool has some amazingly contrastive photo’s up, including Vancouver’s City Hall, and the north side of Downtown Vancouver: (more…) […]
[…] This Saturday, March 28th, at 8:30pm you can join millions of people around the world by turning of your lights for one hour to call for a more sustainable future. Earth Hour is aiming to get 1 billion people to vote with their light switch and send a powerful message to global political leaders, who are meeting to discuss climate change in Copenhagen in December 2009. Earth hour started in Syndey in 2007 to inspire people to take action against climate change and since then it has become pretty big … last year, the lights were switched off at major monuments around the world, including the Roman Colosseum and the Coca Cola bilboard in Times Square. The change in downtown Vancouver was also pretty dramatic (you see some cool pictures in Dave Semeniuk’s post). […]