“We invite everyone throughout North America and around the world to turn off the lights for an hour starting at 8 p.m. (your own local time)–whether at home or at work, with friends and family or solo, in a big city or a small town.” From the
Earth Hour website.
There may be some value in efforts such as this to sensitize society to the problems of global warming. That being said, spectacles like this often (if not usually) serve no purpose other than to make people feel good by showing, and mentioning to others, that they too were politically correct.
Scarecrow and PantyFanatic have identified the root cause of the problem – overpopulation. If you take as given that the passion to reproduce is a reality which has yet to be successfully managed, then the only alternative is to manage the resources consumed. We must either consume more wisely or we must consume less.
With roughly 10 times the population of Kenya, Americans consume more than 300 times more resources than Kenyans do. Think about that this summer when you pay $3.30 (or more) for each gallon of gas you pump into your $15,000 car to drive from your air conditioned home to your air conditioned work. You will also, if the statistics are accurate and you are normal, likely be participating in the obesity epidemic which has missed a few billion people in the “less developed” countries.
To actually do enough to cause useful change, a rather small fraction of the world population – primarily North Americans and Western Europeans – need to change an awful lot.
Turning off the lights for an hour is not an awful lot.