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):

apartment lights earth hour

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?

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Dave Semeniuk spends hours locked up in his office, thinking about the role the oceans play in controlling global climate, and unique ways of studying it. He'd also like to shamelessly plug his art practice: davidsemeniuk.com