Lights Out for One Hour Saturday Night Bringing Awareness to Climate Change

More than 4,000 cities around the world turned out their lights last night to participate in a global awareness program aimed at bringing attention to climate change. The ‘lights out’ for one hour was billed as Earth Hour in order to give Mother Earth a break from too much energy consumption. Places like the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Australian Opera House, Big Ben in London, the Colosseum i n Rome, the Times Square Tower in New York City and hundreds of smaller venues around the United States and other countries were dimming their lights or tuning them off completely.

One of the biggest and brightest places on the planet even participated in this years Earth Hour, drawing attention to their extreme use of electricity, Las Vegas, Nevada. The Strip dimmed their lights on nearly all the hotels and casinos for the designated hour to help bring awareness to the energy consumption that is depleting the earth’s resources.

Other United States participants in Earth Hour included the capital and several Washington, D.C. monuments, Mount Rushmore and the Space Needle in Seattle. Canada also participated again this year with its tallest free-standing building in the world, the CN Tower dimming its lights. As a symbolic gesture to the Canadian-United States partnership in all things neighborly, one of the largest boarder crossings, a bridge between the two countries was partially dimmed, in addition to portions of Niagara Falls which also bridges the two countries.

Millions of people around the world celebrated this year’s Earth Hour with candlelight vigils, circles of praying people, people eating by candle light, street fairs and concerts or simply walking the streets with candles in hand to show their support for their planet.

Beginning in Sidney Australia, Earth Hour started with approximately 2.1 million businesses and homes in 2007. The following year participation in the Climate Awareness Program rose to include over 50 million people from 35 countries. In 2009, nearly 88 countries and 4000 cities pledged their support by turning off their lights to make Earth Hour 2009 the world’s largest global climate change project ever undertaken.

The 2010 Earth Hour sponsor was WWF – World Wide Fund for Nature (formerly World Wildlife Fund) and according to their information, a new economic model points toward the world having about five more years to begin a low carbon industrialized upheaval before fugitive environmental change becomes unavoidable.

Samoa was the last country to turn off the lights on 2010’s Earth Hour and officials were already calling it a resounding success.