Google Does Earth Hour
Starting early Saturday morning, Google users logged on an found the above screen at the Google homepage.
I’m sure most people were confused until they clicked on the link that read:
We’ve turned the lights out. Now it’s your turn - Earth Hour.
As I posted earlier, Earth Hour is/was Saturday, March 29, 2008. People around the world were invited to turn off their lights for one hour – from 8:00pm to 9:00pm in their local time zone.
Additionally, at the Google Earth Hour page, they have the following information:
Google users in the United States will notice today that we “turned the lights out” on the Google.com homepage as a gesture to raise awareness of a worldwide energy conservation effort called Earth Hour. As to why we don’t do this permanently - it saves no energy; modern displays use the same amount of power regardless of what they display. However, you can do something to reduce the energy consumption of your home PC by joining the Climate Savers Computing Initiative.
This is huge. Major cities from Sydney to Dubai to San Francisco signed on for the voluntary light-free hour. But when a major web destination like Google makes this type of statement, we’ve hit the big time.
We dutifully turned off our lights, and played with our boys by candlelight (and one flashlight). From our front window, I will guess that somewhere around 10-25% of our neighbors were also taking part.
We had a great time, felt good about doing something positive and sort of reconnected with enjoying candles as a light source.
More Earth Hour event news and recaps tomorrow.
