Make “Earth Hour” Every Minute

“There. It’s 8:30 p.m. Turn out the lights and settle down.”

This might sound like you’re trying to get the kids to bed. Be assured; on March 27th you won’t want them to go to sleep quite yet! Not, that is, if you are among the millions of people around the globe who will be celebrating Earth Hour.

The idea for Earth Hour began in Sydney, Australia in 2007. Community groups and businesses agreed to shut off their lights for an hour, as a symbolic sign that people from all walks of life could take action to address climate change. The municipal government and thousands of businesses agreed to shut off non-essential lighting across the city, and groups organized events by candlelight in churches and community centres. The brilliance of the idea lay in the fact that turning out the lights is a simple action that anyone can do – and the results are immediately evident. Participants simply looked out their window to see large swathes of their neigbourhoods enveloped in darkness. Since lighting uses about 5 to 15 per cent of electricity in the residential sector and over one-third (approximately 37 per cent) of electricity in offices, hydro companies were able to report substantial demand decreases for that hour. And so a movement was born.

A year later, Earth Hour events were staged across 6 continents. The World Wildlife Fund reported that over a billion people in more than 80 countries participated in some way or another in 2009. Here, over 10 million adult Canadians participated in more than 275 cities and municipalities across the country.

Saturday, March 27th will be the third year that Earth Hour will be celebrated in our home. Friends will gather, and at 8:30 we’ll turn out the lights. By candlelight, my teenaged daughter and her friends will play some guitar music, as we gather for reflection, conversation and then silence. Faith-based groups like KAIROS have prepared prayer services that are available on-line and can be easily adapted for our use.

In our celebration of Earth Hour we always link work for social justice to the task of ecological justice, for there is no difference. Those who will suffer most from climate change are the poor, those who cannot afford to move from dangerous places, those already living on the margins of our societies.

We will also recall an event that is celebrated every year on March 24th throughout Latin America – the anniversary of the assassination of El Salvador’s Archbishop Oscar Romero. In 2010 we will honour the 30th anniversary of the death of this inspiring martyr and defender of the poor, who once said: “Know that you are God’s lamp: light taken from the glowing face of Christ to enlighten human faces, the lives of peoples, the complications and problems that humans create in their history. Feel obliged to speak, to enlighten like the lamp in the night. Feel compelled to light up the darkness.”

Earth Hour is one symbolic way to bring the darkness of climate change to light.

Like all symbolic actions, dimming lights for an hour a year will not create the level of change that is needed to adequately address the crisis of global warming. The challenge lies in taking ecological justice to heart – and then embracing a different, greener lifestyle while also effectively advocating for more substantial greenhouse gas reductions from government and industry.

At the United Nation’s climate summit in Copenhagen in December 2009, an Accord was reached to hold the increase in global temperature below 2 degrees Celsius – but no targets or strategies for emissions reductions were reached. In January, Canada signed on to the Accord and laid out a new target: to reduce emissions to 17% below 2005 levels by 2020. Unfortunately, this new target is designed to be in harmony with the levels decided in the White House rather than reach the reduction levels creation actually needs. By shifting the base year of our new target to 2005, Canada can actually do less to address global warming than we were prepared to do when we went into the Copenhagen negotiations!

As well, the Copenhagen Accord made provision for $30 billion in “new and additional” funding for adaptation and mitigation spending. This would allow developed countries to face the changes global warming is starting to impose upon them. Among donor countries, Canada’s share of this new funding would be $300 - $400 million in each of the next three years. Yet, in the March 4th federal budget there was not a single word about spending for this purpose. What the budget did announce however, was that starting in 2011, development assistance funding will be frozen for the next three years. Clearly, Canada’s stated commitment to play a meaningful role in international climate negotiations and action is little more than hot air.

Participants in Earth Hour must face the fact that our lifestyles, and Canada’s environmental policies, both need major changes. In 2012, the Kyoto Accord (which Canada signed, and then ignored) will expire. The G-8 and G-20 meetings, to be held in Ontario this summer with Canada in the chair, will demand leadership on global warming and other environmental issues. As well, in Cancun, Mexico, from November 29 – December 10, 2010, the nations of the world will return to negotiating the global warming action commitments that eluded them in Copenhagen.

Earth Hour can be a start to bring the darkness of climate change to light when we determine to make the commitment to ecological and public justice a feature of every minute of every hour.