Blackout campaign gains momentum (starts in 35 minutes)

http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/montreal/story.html?id=82707ab7-580e-4302-91cc-d5415757898f

For five minutes beginning at 7:55 local time, people around the world will switch off lights, radios, computers, DVD players and other electrical gadgets that are usually left on standby.

Dubbed "Five Minutes of Respite for the Planet," the initiative was launched in France several weeks ago by the Alliance pour la planete, an umbrella organization of environmental and advocacy groups, including Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth.

The event is intended to coincide with this week's meeting in Paris of experts from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which ends today. Tomorrow, the panel is to make public its assessment of the Earth's climate since 2001.

Originally purely a French initiative, word of the lights-out campaign spread quickly to other parts of the world by email and on the Internet.

I searched but didn't find it leaking into DU ;)
so here it is.

I don't have the option of turning my computer off ... highly time-sensitive work ... but I'll hit the light switches. Of course the bulbs are all compact fluorescents anyhow.

as it is, the clothes washer is on spin and the dishwasher is still on wash. I know that sounds terribly immoral of me.

... from the work I'm supposed to be doing which is why I can't shut down the computer to comply ...

Let 'em run their course (you have til 7:55) and then do it as a johnny come lately.

I just thought -- 7:55 p.m. whose time?! It's Eastern Standard where I read it and where that report was published.


Local time, I guess --

But it's no joke. At 7:55 p.m. in Paris, the more than 10,000 bulbs that usually light up the Eiffel Tower will go dark, as French environmental groups, which plan to gather below, look on.

-- that one's already happened, so pretend you're in Hawaii!

Oh, and hang your clothes to dry. Believe me: I do, and they do. A pole over the bathtub works fine.

Just don't get me started on dishwashers.

Where we live, water is more scarce than electricity, and dishwashers use about a third the amount of water to wash than handwashing does. (We're on wind power, as well.)

But we will be blacking out.

dishes could be washed in cold water like my clothes ...

The co-vivant is in charge of dishwashing here. He operates like the mechanical ones: never do 'em until there's a full load. Of course, he probably uses a lot more electricity than a dishwasher, come to think of it, since dishwashers aren't prone to playing electric guitars or wanting a warm room to sleep in. A point to ponder, methinks.

Reminds me of an old friend who found herself, in her early 20s, lugging a kid to daycare in Montreal by subway in one direction, then going to university in the other direction, then repeating it all a few hours later. She says she used to wish she had a car, or a man ... preferably a car.

;)

http://www.canadaeast.com/ce2/docroot/article.php?articleID=98545



Eiffel Tower goes dark for 5 minutes to call attention to climate change


http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1103AP_Lights_Out.html



The Eiffel Tower is shown just before the 20,000 bulbs went out Thursday Feb. 1, 2007 at 7.55 p.m for five-minutes. The City of Light went dim when thousands of Parisians joined in a five-minutes "lights-out" campaign aimed at showing citizens concern over climate change. (AP Photo/Michel Euler)

we haven't had (actually choosing not to) an expensive vacation since. I fell in love w/ Paris, of course. :loveya: The hub couldn't get me outta the Louvre.

Ah, the memories.

P_P

k&r

http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/montreal/story.html?id=82707ab7-580e-4302-91cc-d5415757898f

Some experts frowned on the lights-out, saying it could consume more energy than it conserves because of a power spike when people turn the lights back on. They warned it could possibly cause brownouts or even blackouts, though no problems were immediately reported.

We don't all have to turn everything back on all at once. ;)

Four minutes to go.

i am such an electricity addict

:banghead:

Would they eventually consider it a crime or something?

Seriously.

...but I was not about to participate in a symbolic gesture that would put stress on the grid equipment if a large enough number of people did it. We need real action not gestures.

I'll go turn everything off now, save for the computer...b/c of work.

I didn't see a lot of news this morning (CBC, national morning news show), but I didn't hear anything. I have to follow proceedings in the House of Commons for work, and ran across it being announced as a member's speechy thing there just before I posted it.

The Montreal Gazette article says:

"On a viral marketing level, it's been extraordinary," said Amelie Ferland, spokesperson for the Montreal environmental group Equiterre.

"I received (the email) from at least 10 different people - friends, friends of friends. It really snowballed."

Are we ALL that far out of the environmental loop here??

Granted, it was undoubtedly a French-language email to start, but you'd think somebody would have thought to translate it and send it to us!

Phew, I can turn a light back on now. I just peed in the pitch dark. Couldn't wait. Fortunately, I'm a down-sitter.

For those in the western half of the continent, 7:55 has yet to come, so they still have a chance to participate. Pee first, is my recommendation.

they all knew.

I would have complied. I turned off the electricity (except for the refrigerator) for an hour once. A lot of people participated.

I always hang clothes to dry. I iron only when forced to. I'm trying to make wrinkles fashionable. :)

I do my best as it were. We shut off lights and anything taking juice in rooms we are not in (my daddy instilled that in me from early on). Don't have a big honkin' teevee, and don't have it running incessantly. No cable for 21 years. No newspaper delivery for 21 years. (Papers piled up and guess who got to take care of them?!) I get my news. I've been staging my own little protest. I hate those plastic produce and carry bags at the grocery stores. I use rubbing alcohol for sanitizing many surfaces. At 99 cents a bottle, it's cheap. Down here heat pumps are widely used for HVAC and they use less energy than gas or oil. I usually spin clothes 10', then hang right up on hangars and let air dry if I can't hang outside. Every home we have had in the 'burbs, one of the first things mandatory was to get up a reeled clothesline regardless of raised eyebrows from some neighbors. That's the way my Baba, Grandmother and Mommie did it. Never mind I was born an American kid, I got the old country in me. I do use the dishwasher for packed loads--it's been said that takes a lot less water and energy than doing by hand. (True?) The appliance that I feel takes a lot of power is the electric range, esp. when you have to use the oven. I had a countertop convection oven before and may get another one in the future. Esp. in the summer months when you must have the AC on, it isn't cancelling out the cooling. I would love to go solar in our next home and install that water heating device that only heats the H2O you use at the time as a back-up to solar. These environmentally friendly measures do cost $$$, and that, unfortunately, is a consideration. I am trying to be "less is more" and will keep striving to go greener.

:hi:

P_P :dem:

I clean with alcohol and ammonia, mostly alcohol. I also don't have cable, so don't watch television, except once a year or year and a half.

Any appliance that generates a lot of heat uses a lot of electricity. Irons, ovens, hair dryers, etc. You do save water using the dishwasher when it's full.

Keep conserving and recycling. :hi:

I started returning bags to the grocery store in 1971 (back when bags were paper, and they took them back for recycling, along with newspapers, as a public-minded gesture). Now I have a dozen giant Ikea blue tarpaulin-material bags that go grocery shopping with me (they cost a buck at the store, but all the grocery cashiers will think you stole them; the in-store ones are yellow).

The co-vivant (50+ hip white guy) will not join me in this, and that is a source of big resentment in our relationship. On my part. My household is suddenly producing twice the garbage it did before the advent of him. He finally said, a few weeks ago, in response to my on-going whine about how he'd come home from the 7-11 with two more useless plastic bags, that taking the cloth bags stripped away the last of his masculinity. Shortly after, the 75+ African guy I am surrogate daughter to said the same thing. I'm always quite amazed at how fast immigrants from less developed countries where stuff is scarce and precious adapt to the wasteful, planet-abusing lifestyle here. He gave me back the two cloth bags I'd given him because "I am not a woman". Given the cross-cultural and cross-generational thing I see here, I wonder whether this isn't something we should be thinking about more. Active conservation is girly, or at least dorky.

I bought two boxes of zipper food bags about three years ago, and they get washed and re-used over and over. Other than them, food gets stored in margarine/yogourt containers (which, fortunately, we can put in the municipal recycle here too, along with glass, tin, paper products, and the yard compost pick-up -- we haven't yet gone to kitchen compost pick-up like Toronto). No plastic wrap or tin foil in my kitchen.

We need food storage containers, because I do my big cooks on Saturday or Sunday morning and freeze. About 2/3 of the year I work evenings on real-time govt contracts, so when I get home at 10 or 11 we microwave whatever tasty delight I took out of the freezer. On the weekend, I use the oven for as much as possible, cooking 4 or 5 meals in a pot at once, after browning the meat and sautéing the veg on trays in the oven too when required.

Twenty years ago the gummint paid me to convert from oil to electric (baseboard) heat. Sounds bad -- but it allows us to spot heat, only the rooms we're in, and only as much as necessary. Curtains over the doorways to block drafts, blankies over us when we watch TV ... a lot. We live like poor folk; never go out, TV is our entertainment.

I gather that the thing with dishwashers is that they use less water/energy because they do big loads at once. Well, the solution is to do big loads at once by hand, I'd say! Dishwashers just create the illusion that one is not lazy and messy, by hiding all the dirty dishes out of sight until they're cleaned. A box would do the same thing. ;)

The environment is supposedly the big political issue up here in Canada where we anticipate an election at the drop of a hat, and the new Liberal leader is being touted as an environmental god. Everybody's concerned about the environment. Yeah. Sure. Have any of them stopped using pointless gadgets that eat up poisonous batteries? Do any of them dispose of those batteries the way they're supposed to -- as hazardous waste? Just those plastic grocery bags alone -- imagine what that would do for landfill. Of course, green garbage bags are my own bugaboo. I'm from the days before they were invented -- in Canada, by the way. I'd never used them -- cat food bags and the like held all the garbage I produced. No more ...

The CBC is starting a series on the news of "what I'm doing for to go green". I think they should do streeters instead -- accost people and ask them what they're doing to go green. Yeah. Right. Don't get me started on the young 'uns. This mess is all us oldies' fault ... they will complain, as they drive around buying armloads of overpackaged junk food and overpackaged everything else, and clothing they don't need, and all those batteries, all in bags they shed immediately and no longer have to give a thought to.

What a load of people here will do is vote Liberal. That's how it works -- a majority of people up here will vote Liberal if given the slightest excuse; just give 'em a hook to hang their vote on, and they're in. Look at me, I love the planet, I'm voting Liberal. No thought required, no memory of how no Liberal government in history has ever kept a promise on anything; and no need to take personal responsibility for anything.

Yeah, the 5 minutes was a gesture, although I think in Europe (where the conference that prompted it was being held) it may have been a bit more, a symbolic representation of how many people really do want action.

We have so many of them....they're great for my big weekly grocery load, & I tell the baggers to pack them full! One thing I hate is how they seem to put every item in a separate plastic bag. What a waste! And when I do get plastic bags, my local Publix recycles them. They also recycle styrofoam trays & egg cartons.

Our county recycling program takes any plastic with any number on it, too. We recycle everything we can. Every little bit helps.

I wish I had known. I wonder if we will see satellite pics of the blackout. That would be so cool.

that 'Bring our troops home now' magnetic sticker I have on my car . Unless this action is backed up with real and sustained action-it means diddle squat. "... Sound and fury, signifying nothing".

How many times have we laughed at those 'we support our troops' Bush backers. This action is just as impotent. Sorry if I sound bitter, but I just got a final eviction notice for my species and many other. This turning of the lights is so ironic it is downright snarky, but it don't impress me much.

But it might better be compared to an anti-war demonstration, I'd say. A bunch of people getting together to speak loudly. Yup, they have to follow up by doing something, like in the ballot box. Even taking personal responsibility for one's lifestyle, while it would be a good thing if we all did it, isn't the solution, and obviously it isn't something we're all going to do as long as the pressure to do otherwise is as strong as it is in Western economies.