Just back from surveying the streets. Put it this way – if you were looking down from a plane or satellite, you wouldn’t have been able to tell Earth Hour from any other hour. Sure, the Space Needle was dark (clip above shows a few seconds of that, shot from Don Armeni) and the Qwest Field roof ribs too, but not much else. The porch light was even on at Hizzoner’s house in North Admiral. Here at WSB HQ, we turned off everything but the computers.
We turned them all off-it was great. Candles everywhere and my kids reading to each other by candlelight and disovering the joys of hot melted wax as a modeling medium! Me discovering that I have way too many empty alchohol bottles lying around-but gosh they make pretty candlestick holders!
Good Night John Boy…….
We were sitting here watching a DVD and my husband said “so, what time was that thing where we turn out the lights?” and I looked at my watch and said “45 minutes ago.” Ooops! Looked out the window and it looked no different than any other time. Guess it didn’t go over too well here. I would’ve done it if I remembered.
i have no idea what you people are talking about….why was the power out?
How is burning a bunch of candles better for the environment than running a lightbulb? And remember that the vast majority of our electric power in the NW comes from hydro.
Official stats on Seattle’s “power fuel mix” here:
http://www.seattle.gov/light/FuelMix/
I believe Earth Hour organizers switched to framing this as a symbolic act rather than an actual hour of significant carbon-footprint-shrinking.
Everything went dark here but the folding machine (folding.stanford.edu), because that has a purpose beyond saving electricity. But even its monitor saves half a watt when it’s physically switched off.
Spent a while thinking of my parents, who as kids and teens lived before electricity and running water reached their their rural areas and farms. And my grandfather’s world of about 1880 where nearly everything moved by shoe leather and horsepower.
Reminded me that a fellow named Jack Finney once wrote a novel called Time and Again about traveling back to 1882, a good story.
by order of the mayor, who doesn’t even bother to turn off his porch light!!!!
i have to confess that i slept through most of earth hour… it was a long day yesterday…
now that i see the video i am glad i didn’t make the effort to get myself down to the beach to see the lights off..
but i still think it is a good thing to do.
maybe next year we can do a big earth day party somewhere…
Starbucks and Amazon headquarters had all of their lights on, and the Key logo was still on. I think of it as less of an energy saving event, and more of a chance to gaze at stars. Not much of a chance in the slush!
My family packed (we’re moving up the street) by candlelight. There was only one other house that turned off all their lights at 8 last night.
E – we reported on it twice in advance and it got publicity in all the citywide media too. 8-9 pm last night. I suspect it’ll get even more advance publicity next year …
I wonder if the mayor’s porch light will get as much publicity as Earth Hour?
I guess those 25 to 30 hours of power outage from the various wind storms didn’t qualify us as “enviro-friendly”?
Sorry, our family has contributed scores more hours of no power than this pitiful stunt!!
I turned up the heat, and enjoyed my computer.
As for shutting the lights off in large commercial buildings – those things are designed to be closed, energy management systems: the lights are part of the heating system! So shutting it down only distorts the energy management, causing undue consumption to warm them up again.
Moonbat environmentalism needs to “feel” good, rather than do what’s reasonable, so we get nonsense stuff like “Earth Hour” – what a lame joke.
I missed the notice in WSB, but got an email from KPTK early last week. I’m all for joining in anything world wide for the environment. But I never heard that Seattle was going dark (I guess I was in the dark about this!). However, we did turn all the lights out, and quickly the hour past, and it was very easy. I’d like to see more publicity about this next year. It may be lame, but maybe someone will think twice next time about wasting energy, and then it will be a good thing.
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