The World's Greatest Blog

Tonight, at 7:30pm Sydney will turn out the lights…

“Earth Hour” has been deemed to be 7:30 this evening. Everyone in Sydney (known as Sydneysiders) has been encouraged to turn out their lights for an hour between half past seven and half past eight this evening.

When we’ve had our dinner, we’re going to walk down to Darling Harbour – which is approximately on our doorstep, and has a great view of Sydney’s skyscraper themed monument to international commerce, which provides an excellent light-show during the hours of darkness. I’ll try to get some photographs of what is being talked up as the world’s first full city ‘lights out’. I’ll also post up a full report later!

The idea behind the “Earth Hour” is that people will think about their energy consumption and attempt to be more thoughtful when considering this.

This Sydney “Eath Hour” brings a few questions to my mind, which I’ll hopefully be able to answer later:

Will it work? Will all the lights go out? What about the street lights? What of the traffic lights? Will there be mass looting and/or a crime wave? Watch this space…

The Results – Updated After “Earth Hour!”

Soooooooooooooooooo, what of this “earth hour”? Ok, well I’ll start with what was so great about it:

On the way to Darling Harbour from our base in Pyrmont, we went past a neon sign I’ve seen a few times, and, as I’d taken the camera to get some pictures of the earth hour, I thought I’d share it with you all…

What a great sign, and such a coincidence, I’m sure you’ll all agree. I might even use it as my new image for the blog! I really don’t know.

Anyhow, back to the earth hour chat.

For the record, this is what the view normally looks like:

I’ll start with the questions I had beforehand, and see if any of them were answered:

Will it work?

Earth hour, that is. Did it work? Not really, is the honest answer, as few, if any, of the towers had all of their lights out.

Will all the lights go out?

Not all of them, but the office buildings were better than most – due mainly to the fact that it is Saturday night, and there is no-one in them! In reality, the main difference was that most the massive company logo’s in glorious neon were all turned off.

Perhaps the worst offenders were the hotels (the front 2 in the above shot), which is to be expected really, as the guests may not have heard of the event, or were out of their rooms and had left their lights on. Actually, this reminds me of a cheapo hotel we stayed at in Egypt where as soon as you took your keys out of the room, all the lights and electricity went out – because, I suspect, they didn’t want to waste money on energy bills in the middle of the Sinai peninsula… Perhaps a little hardship goes a long way? Do we waste because we can afford to? In all probability, yes, we do.

What of the street lights and traffic lights?

Still all on as normal, except for the pair in the centre of the pyrmont bridge, which are never on for some reason…

Will there be mass looting and/or a crime wave?

Doubtful really, since it was still pretty bright, due to all of the above… and the fact the moon was bright too…

Success or failure?

In honesty, probably somewhere in between. These guys were the big winners:

They were almost at a total blackout. Almost. It’s a good job its not The Blitz, or we’d all be picking up the pieces. Actually, I’ve raised quite an important point! Sydneysiders have been congratulating themselves all week about how this is the first time in history a city has managed to turn off all it’s lights (although not quite, as we’ve seen)… Well… At least since 1978 or something when they did it in Sydney last time. I’d like to draw attention to the British war-time effort, when people routinely had blackouts. I’d like to. But I won’t. Oh, I just did.