Practise what teach us in kindergarten for a better world to live in - Severn Suzuki
(A big thank you to Starfishjoejoe for highlighting this video to me from his blog!)
Lights Out San Francisco!
Fight Climate Change with the Flip of a Switch!
Lights Out San Francisco is a citywide energy conservation event on Oct. 20, 2007. On this night, San Francisco is inviting the entire city of San Francisco to install one compact fluorescent light bulb (CFL) and turn off all non-essential lighting for one hour. Visit their office at 2548 Mission St. or give them a call at 1-415-643-LOSF for more information.
Background:
Lights Out San Francisco is a citywide energy conservation event on October 20, 2007. On this night, we invite the entire city of San Francisco to turn off all non-essential lighting for one hour. To promote long-lasting energy saving, we plan to distribute free compact fluorescent light bulbs throughout the city.
You may ask: what good does one hour and one light bulb do? What do we hope to accomplish?
Our city’s growing appetite for energy must be controlled to protect our planet from the effects of the climate crisis. We estimate that turning lights out in San Francisco for even one hour could save as much as 15 percent of the energy consumed on an average Saturday night. The ongoing benefits of installing CFLs in your house are also significant.
This savings will reduce carbon emissions into our air, preserve the natural resources used to produce this energy, set a positive precedent for the rest of the nation (as San Francisco so often does!), and result in ongoing reduced costs for the city, taxpayers, and businesses.
We’re asking San Franciscans to join together that night throughout the city to watch the lights go out. We’ll publish the energy-saving results on this website. We plan to make Lights Out San Francisco a recurring event and part of a wider effort to promote energy-saving consciousness for our wonderful city.
We were inspired by a similar event recently held in Sydney, Australia, called Earth Hour. In Sydney, 2.2 million people participated. Their one hour of lights out meant that 24.86 tons of carbon dioxide were not released into the air - the equivalent of taking 48,613 cars off the road for one hour.
Of course, we’d hope for the same or better here.
Thus far, LOSF has received a tremendous amount of support and very positive responses to our efforts. Currently our growing list of supporters includes Esruance, Gap Inc., Integrated Archive Systems, PG&E, Safeway, Tides Center, and Yahoo!. People in cities across the country, and even around the world, have contacted us in hopes of organizing Lights Out events in their own towns. Our hope is that the October 20th event will lay the groundwork necessary to implement an annual national lights out effort beginning in March of 2008. Lights Out America is a countrywide energy conservation event proposed for Saturday, March 29, 2008. If you’re interested in facilitating participation in your city, please email info@lightsoutsf.org.
How can you get involved? We’re glad you asked. Your support is critical to making Lights Out San Francisco a success.
