Today, April 22nd, marks the 40th official Earth Day. By the way, according to the “about” section of Earth Day’s website, more than 1 billion people participate in Earth Day activities, which makes it the largest secular civic event in the world!! Get out there and be green!
Aujourd’hui, c’est le
jour de la terre! D’après le site officiel du “jour de la terre”, plus d’un milliard de personne participe au jour de la terre, ce qui fait de cet événement le plus grand événement séculaire au monde!! Allez! Allez! Sortez et soyez vert!!!
Australian Fern, 2006.
According to Toronto newspaper The Star, Toronto observed an 8.7% dip on it’s energy curve. Here is a nice comparison of the Skyline before and during Earth Hour from their website.
Another fun source of images of Earth Hour across downtown Toronto is at blogTo.com, where you can see this interesting graph of energy consumption during the day of Earth Hour. Mind you, that graph is across Ontario and so the dip may not look as pronounced as Toronto’s experts have suggested. However, I think we do see a little bit of a change in consumption right later at night. I saw a very different graph earlier today, of Toronto’s energy, but I can’t seem to find it online. Too bad.
For the curious, here is the energy consumption of yesterday, according to ieso’s website. Keep in mind that yesterday was much warmer than on March 28th, and so the comparison isn’t ideal.
You can sort of see the effects of Earth Hour on the curve, but, to be fair, the real difference is in people’s head, which has always been the idea behind the Earth Hour’s movement. So, in that sense, I think that Torontonians really participated well and even if it didn’t have quite the effect on the energy consumed of March 28th 2008, I personally think it was a wonderful event and am glad we participated as much as we did. I sure hope we do better next year though! The challenge is on!
Published on
April 1, 2008 in
Toronto.
Tags: activism, earth, earthour, enviornment, Flickr, google, life, lights, photos, screenshot.
So I first planned on taking pictures of Toronto’s earth hour, and somehow I forgot to. Well, actually, I started by taking a video, which didn’t turn out very nicely, and kind of forgot to take a photo of the skyline in the end. It would have been cool to show the “before” and “after” shots, kind of like the ones I’ve seen on the blog of earthhour.org. I have to say that we didn’t notice a huge difference between the “on/off” states of the city. I mean, we could spot some building that had turned off their lights completely, for example Bank of Montreal was completely out, which is probably the second biggest/tallest building downtown Toronto! I would give Toronto’s Earth Hour a 6 out of 10 probably. Curious to know how well other cities have done.
As for us, I am happy to report that we did turn off all our lights and most of our electronics in the house for the whole hour. However, I must admit that at one point I did cheat and turn on my laptop (using the battery only!) to check something online (okay… my router was using electicity in I guess…), which made me discover just how cool and fun the people at Google are. Check out there version of the earth hour:
