Earth Hour began in Sydney in 2007. That year, 2.2 million homes in Australia’s largest city shut off their lights for one hour. Two years later one city’s statement on climate change has grown to hundreds of millions of people and thousands of cities worldwide. Organized by the World Wildlife Fund, Earth Hour 2009 has been turned into a global election.

The idea behind VOTE EARTH is to garner 1 billion “votes for Earth” before the Global Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December 2009. Earth Hour’s amazing ability to expand is a testament to public recognition of pollution and climate change as a serious problem.

On a more local level, over 100 U.S. cities participated, including such landmarks as the Getty Center in Los Angeles, Empire State Building in New York, Sears Tower in Chicago, and the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. Add to that such global architectural icons as the Great Pyramids and the Acropolis, and you get a sense of how significant Earth Hour has become.

Still it is more about awareness than making any sizable dent in greenhouse gas emissions. The power lies more in visibility — i.e., the emotional power of seeing city skylines go black — than substance. The hope is that Earth Hour will spark a year-long commitment to curbing at least individual pollution and excess.

Turning off lights can be a powerful statement, to be sure, but what about turning off our cars? As one blogger proposed after Earth Hour ‘08, rather than pointing out that turning off this many lights is equivalent to taking that many cars off the road, why not actually take that many cars off the road? With full awareness that Earth Hour is meant to be a catalyst for change rather than the change itself, it is still difficult to ignore the negligible impact of millions of cars on the road even as millions of lights are turned off.

So a potentially powerful symbol for next year would be a campaign to stop driving as well. Perhaps even a second earth hour, during the day and on a weekend. Then new, gripping videos broadcast in its aftermath would show empty freeways and lonely street lights.

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Posted on April 7th in Solar News by Dan.