Earth Hour-A promising initiative but not good enough

Today, I received a mail from the “environment division” of my company to support and vote for the Earth Hour. Earth Hour is an initiative by the WWF which began in Sydney in 2007 when more than 2 million homes and businesses switched off their lights for one hour. In 2008, the tally of green people increased to almost 50 million. The target this year is to include more than 1 billion people into this campaign, which is slated for Saturday, Mar-28-2009, 8:30pm local time, so as to reduce the energy loads by more than 5% which will supposedly reduce the carbon emission and hence global warming.

I read some tips on their site (http://www.earthhour.org/) on how to spend the Earth hour and reduce our carbon footprint. Switching off all the lights, going for a night picnic, enjoying candle light dinner with your sweetheart (can’t help if you don’t have any!), etc were also among them.

I cogitated on it for sometime and I found out that though being a good initiative, it may achieve far less than what is expected out of it. One, suppose thousands of people in Delhi spend that hour in green restaurants for a candle-light dinner, imagine the amount of carbon-dioxide and black-carbon smoke particles that will pollute the air. Has anyone calculated the emissions from those thousands of candles that will lit across the country? Perhaps, no one.

Second, consider the various companies, factories, etc shutting down for one hour. It may take more than one hour worth of extra energy to restart their production lines and other facilities again.

Third (and the most apprehensive one), I am really concerned what may happen at the end of that hour when thousands of people will again switch on their lights, computers, A.C.s and other appliances simultaneously. Well, only the DISCOMs may know about this!

However, contrary to my own views on it, I shall still support this initiative for its awareness aspect. It has the potential of spreading the tremendous pubic awareness like never before. People are now talking about it. They have actually started thinking seriously about their un-intentional contribution to the global warming and the related effects on our helpless mother. I am also one of them.

I second the WWF’s opinion that no one else, only we can relieve the “doleful soul of our mother and allay its pain”. But this can not be done in just one hour. Lets all pledge to always switch off all the equipments whenever they are not in use. Lets all use the environment friendly products like CFLs in place of usual bulbs, Laptops in place of desktops, LCDs in place of CRT monitors. Here, I would like to point out one thing that no one bothers to shut down one’s desktop, esp. in an IT industry while leaving the office in the evening which leads to unimaginably huge energy losses. I was also one of them but only till yesterday. That’s for sure.

At the same time, I also believe that government has a much bigger role to play than people like creating public awareness, giving large amount of subsidies on environment friendly products so that people are encouraged to buy them. But that is far from being seen. Elections are just round the corner and no single party has included the "Green Earth" agenda in their manifestos. That is also perhaps one of the reasons why India fared poorly on latest the Human Development Index list. The only encouraging act is that Delhi and Mumbai are also taking part in the 371 cities initiative which is lead by Amir Khan in India. Satellite Earth Hours will also be observed in Bangalore, Pune, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad and Amritsar.

Anyways, let’s see how much success this initiative achieves…only time will tell this... and we have very little time left.