Blog of Kim Loon

I really do not understand the purpose of Earth Hour, and I wonder if Earth Hour really help in the awareness of Global Warming and Global Climate Change.

According to Wikipedia - “Earth Hour is an international event organised by the WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature/World Wildlife Fund), and held on the last Saturday of March each year, which asks households and businesses to turn off their non-essential lights and electrical appliances for one hour to raise awareness towards the need to take action on climate change.”

I just could not understand how does switching off the lights for one hour helps to in reducing the energy used. Countries reported the reduction in Megawatt and directly reducing tons of carbon dioxide released into the air.

My questions is, WHY do we have to do our part only during Earth Hour?

Earth Hour is only observed once a year. Imagine this, if country X reduce 100 tons of carbon dioxide into the air by observing the Earth Hour, that means that country X is actually releasing 100 x 24 x 365 or 876000 tons of carbon dioxide every year. The saving is peanuts compared to the released gas!

I believe that to really achieve the reduction of energy consumption, we need to have a regular, highly frequency and consistent effort. If we simply switch off non-essential light for half hour every day, this would means observing Earth Hour 182 times a year.

On top of that, there are also more effective means to cut energy consumption. Let me use my home country, Singapore, as an example. The average daily temperature is between 29 to 33 degree Celsius. Most office building have the air conditioning temperature set at 23 degree Celsius! Imagine the amount of energy used to cool the building. This is ionic that we are wet with sweat because of the heat in the open space, but we have to wear jacket in office to keep ourselves warm!

We just need to make these office building increase the air conditioning temperature by 1 degree Celsius and we can achieve a much more saving compared to Earth Hour.

The Earth Hour was observed a day ago. I do not know how much energy saved, how much reduction on the carbon dioxide released. I believe that, we just need to observe energy saving in our daily life. Simply reducing the non-essential light everyday and increasing air conditioning temperature are just 2 means to achieve much greater result.

Let us hope that, not only during Earth Hour, then we are doing something for the Earth. And we are doing something everyday to combat Global Warming and Global Climate Change.