What does decided whether or not to turn off your lights have to do with Global warming. Whether global warming is real or not don't you think burning coal and oil at an incredibly fast rate is bad for the environment anyway?

Lets try "Turn off everything your not using 2009". Or maybe "Use renewable energy as opposed to things that take millions of years to create 2010".

Damn you make this big of a deal over turning off the lights in your house for an hour I wonder how long it takes for you to decided whether or not to turn on the shower in the morning.

People who make big deals over things like that indirectly tell the rest of us that they dont care about there children's future. If we did find out that global warming was fake 100 years from now don't you think that generation would thank you for trying to clean up the earth even if it had nothing to do with it.

Yea so lets say it turns out that there is no global warming, what are you going to say. "Damn I cleaned up all those landfills and made places for other people to live. Shit, now what am I gonna do.", Or "CRAP! now my air is clean."

Cant people just do things because they're better in the long run?

while it is true that fossil-fueled and atomic power plants can't simply be shut down for some minutes, saving energy does indeed reduce pollution. The little percentage of energy that earth hour saves will have no impact on the base load power plants (coal, gas, uranium) but on the much more flexible peak-power plants. Each cubic metre of water that a pumped-storage power station does *not* have to pump upwards to the reservoir means that a bit less coal needs to be burnt.

Sure, Earth Hour won't be noticable on the grand scale of energy consumption. But please try to keep the discussion rational and your arguments correct and precise.

Important? Yes – we all need to be more aware and show intent.

Difficulty is turning this goodwill in a one-off 'show', into tangible everyday practical steps to reduce our emissions and fight climate change.

http://searchgreener.com is a green search engine using less energy and putting ALL money made back into buying carbonoffsets – something we can all do on a daily basis to search greener.

EA

If the goal is to use less energy, the goal is not achieved by having the planet turn off a light for an hour. What that does is postpone the energy use and reduce some very badly needed productivity.

Try coming up with useful ideas instead–ideas that make sense. Consider:

1. Eliminating the income tax in the US will take approximately half of the traffic off the roads, because in two-income households, one income does nothing but pay the income tax on the two incomes.

2. Sell the public schools to the highest bidders; return the proceeds to the rightful owners; and discontinue all taxation and government involvement in education. Net result: Twice the education for half the cost. The long-term benefit of that is spectacular.

3. Get complete control of your private property (income, real estate, savings). If you don't control your property, you control nothing.

4. The law specifies that "victimless crimes" cannot exist. Therefore, half of our 2 million inmates can be released with clean records so they can return to productive work.

5. Since you own yourself, you can put whatever drugs you like into your body. The consequences will improve the decisions very quickly.

6. Hemp is considered to be the greatest economic engine in the history of mankind. Therefore, it should not be illegal to grow it anywhere, no matter whose pet ox (forest industry, petro industry, pharmaceutical industry) is gored.

That's a start. There are many other things that we can do. Turning out a light bulb is not the best idea our human brains can produce.

so on the march 29 2008 turn your lights and fans ect.
off from 8:00pm to 9:00pm

Besides, if your city decides to participate community-wide, as has also been mentioned, you'll haev a totally *awesome* view of the stars as well even while you're showing support for the Earth. Nothing wrong with that! I'm all for it.

This is a simple, symbolic event to try and get people working together about something. Why do you have to put it down and call people names. Aren't you out of elementary school yet? Aren't you an adult with more important things to do?

I can only be hopeful that my own young children, who are more kind and open-minded than some of the adults on here, will not become small-minded cowards who sit behind a keyboard, putting others down for their beliefs.

Whie at it, let me suggest that instead of writing – GLOBAL WARMING-Climate Change" all the time in print media millions of time per day, we can make a significant dent by using abbreviations like GW and CC. We can save paper and ink to the tune of large forests – every month/year etc. The IDEA is that idea is important and we should do whatever possible to save the Planet!
Thanks