The Earth Hour movement, which started in Sydney, has grown into the world’s largest voluntary action for the environment. From 2.2 million participants in 2007 to an event that reached an estimated 1.8 billion people in 2012, the organization has come a long way.
Sydney Harbour Bridge before and during Earth Hour in Sydney, Australia- Reuters
“We wanted a conservative, if you will, and credible company to back our idea,” Ridley told IBTimes in 2011. From there, the movement began to spiral exponentially. By 2008, 279 cities and towns in 35 countries participated. The next year it was 4,000 cities and towns in 88 countries.
This year, however, countries around the world turned off the lights to save energy, for the planet.
Light switch off at 8:30 pm
On the evening of 19 March the lights went out not just all over Europe, but throughout the world. Scores of millions of people in a record 178 countries switched off at 8.30pm last night, to mark this year’s Earth Hour, participating in the world’s biggest ever demonstration to stop climate change escalating out of control.
But for the first time in the event’s 10-year history, and despite new alarming evidence of warming last week, they were pushing at an opening door. For last December the world reached an unexpectedly ambitious agreement in Paris to address the problem.
Shanghai goes dark to mark this year’s Earth Hour AFP
Some 366 landmarks around the world – ranging from the Sydney Opera House to Big Ben, from the Gherkin in London to the Colosseum in Rome, from Salisbury Cathedral to the Empire State Building – went dark last night. And so did Buckingham Palace, home to a remarkably green activist royal family (even the Queen has quietly indicated her concern about climate change).
Restaurants laid on special candle-lit dinners, the Forestry Commission organised night-time explorations and WWF, the event’s organisers, issued a list of “60 things to do in the dark, including going stargazing, wearing fluorescent fancy dress and telling scary stories” – but not the activity that, perhaps, first springs to mind.
A picture shows St Peter’s basilica at night with the lights turned off during the WWF “Earth Hour” campaign for global climate change awareness on March 16, 2016 in Rome.
Lights went off in thousands of cities and towns across the world on today for the annual Earth Hour campaign, which is aiming to raise money via the Internet for local environmental projects. / AFP / VINCENZO PINTO (Photo credit should read VINCENZO PINTO/AFP/Getty Images)
One no-no, however, was to light candles – unless they were “100 per cent beeswax or soy”: normal ones, made of petroleum products, could release more carbon pollution than keeping the lights on.
A picture taken on March 19, 2016, in central London, shows The London Eye (L) after being submerged into darkness for the Earth Hour environmental campaign.
Millions are expected to take part around the world in the annual event organised by conservation group WWF, with hundreds of well-known sights set to plunge into darkness. / AFP / NIKLAS HALLE’N (Photo credit should read NIKLAS HALLE’N/AFP/Getty Images)
Studies have shown that past Earth Hours have reduced electricity consumption by four per cent. But it is designed to be symbolic action, rather than an exercise in energy reduction. This year there is more to demonstrate about than ever. Last month, it was revealed on 14 March, was not merely the warmest February ever, but witnessed the biggest month-on-month jump in temperatures ever recorded – and by a big margin. Normally cautious climate scientists called it “jawdropping” “terrifying”, and “a true shocker”.
Worse, the previous record rise occurred just the month before, in January. This has been the warmest winter ever worldwide, and February was the tenth successive record-breaking month.
Arctic sea ice – as exclusively predicted in The Independent on Sunday last month – is at its lowest ever winter maximum after what the blue-chip US National Snow and Ice Data Centre calls a season of “unrelenting heat”, while the extreme weather is also contributing to record droughts in Africa and Vietnam, and helped cause the biggest cyclone ever to hit Fiji, costing the country a tenth of its GDP.
A picture taken on March 19, 2016, in central London, shows Britain’s Houses of Parliament after being submerged into darkness for the Earth Hour environmental campaign.
Millions are expected to take part around the world in the annual event organised by conservation group WWF, with hundreds of well-known sights set to plunge into darkness. / AFP / NIKLAS HALLE’N (Photo credit should read NIKLAS HALLE’N/AFP/Getty Images)
Scientists are already predicting that 2016 will be the hottest on record, for the third year running, finally exploding sceptics’ claims that global warming has stopped. Professor Stefan Rahmstorf, of Germany’s Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact Research, says the world is in “a completely unprecedented climate emergency”, while Deke Arndt, of the US government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, describes it as moving to a “new and hotter neighbourhood”.
And yet, Earth Hour had something to celebrate. Last week it was revealed that, for the second successive year, carbon emissions failed to increase in 2015 , even though the world economy grew – something that had not happened, even once, in four decades. China’s emissions actually fell by 1.5 per cent, as the world’s biggest polluter cut its use of coal and increased renewables.
A picture shows the Eiffel Tower in Paris after it went dark for the Earth Hour environmental campaign on March 19, 2016. / AFP / LUDOVIC MARIN (Photo credit should read LUDOVIC MARIN/AFP/Getty Images)
For years the world has been investing more money in building power stations generating electricity from renewable sources than in ones fired by fossil fuels. Last year these provided a staggering 90 per cent of the world’s new power.
And in December in Paris the world’s governments unexpectedly agreed to phase out carbon emissions altogether by the second half of the century, committing themselves to meet every five years to set ever more ambitious intermediate targets, with the aim of holding the increase in the earth’s temperature since pre-industrial times to ”well below” the 2C since pre-industrial times long regarded as the threshold for dangerous climate change
Present reduction plans fall well short of this, but there is now at least a chance of averting disaster. And last week a paper by Michael Jacobs of the Institute for Public Policy Research – who was at the heart of both the Paris and failed Copenhagen summits – concluded that the agreement was “the outcome of an unprecedented show of political power by a broad and diverse coalition of forces from civil society”.
Earth Hour will have played a part and, with many other actions, may help ensure eventual success.
