Earth Hour 2008

I stopped at the gas station to fill up on my way home this weekend and the label on the nozzle was for Earth Hour and said "Fill up and shut down." The message was to encourage everyone in Atlanta to get gas early on Saturday, March 29 and to also partake in Earth Hour, which is a great movement.

Earth Hour is a new social movement that was actually started by Australia last year. The country wanted to make a political statement to show the world that we can stop global warming and other environmental problems by simply cutting down on the amount of energy we use. The entire country of Australia, that is over 2 million people, took part in this movement last year by turning out all nonessential lights and appliances for one hour. The impact was seen from space, actually is wasn't because all of Australia went dark. But the impact was made.

This year the movement has gone global and over 2o cities around the world have endorsed the idea that everyone should turn off as much electricity as possible on Saturday, March 29 from 8 to 9 p.m. local time. The goal of this effort is to show the entire globe how wasteful we are being and to lower our emissions by five percent. America alone can do that by simply turning off all computers at night, only using one television per house to watch the same show, or just turning off the lights when they are not being used. All of these things will help to lower the emissions the U.S. emits (which is the most of any country in the world) and it will save on the energy bill.

So this Saturday night, we encourage everyone to turn off the lights for one hour and see how much you can do. It will save the planet one day. This Saturday, let's make the power of one be the power of the globe!